board77

I posted this on another website, but I figured it needed a rehash, since halplm and Iavas seems unable to start up a debate...

Put me in the Hitchcock Method category of how to adapt a book. Read the book once, then put it away. Figure out what about the book wants to be a movie. Anything that doesn't stick in your head a day later, shouldn't be in the outline. Don't go back to the book for specific dialog or scenes until you've written an outline that works as a movie.

I love the LOTR book with a passion, but I think/hope I can be adult and realistic enough to realize than a translation to the big screen will involve changes - and big ones at that. It’s not my own private property that’s being changed. I think many posters here have lost that perspective.

Helen Fielding generated some controversy because some critics felt that the movie version of Bridget Jones’s Diary dumbed-down the lead character. In the novel she was intelligent and something of a feminist, and, for instance, knew where Bosnia was, but her movie version was lighter, fluffier and stupider. Her answer was:

In a novel, you have more space to be complex. It was a challenge to adapt a book that was so firmly set in one character’s head, as a diary. Of necessity, it had to be simplified. I think they stayed very true to the essence - particularly her cheerfulness and ability to bounce back from romantic disasters.

A book is easier to write than a film, because you can get away with murder. You can write around all kinds of situations and characters, whereas in a film you have to be much more concise. Every line has to work very hard. Writing for film is much more exposing. It has to move forward at a much more driven pace. Writing a book is a great luxury, because all you do is write it and hand it in. It doesn’t matter how much anything costs. You can write any location you want. You don’t have to worry about casting. You have the luxury of producing the finished product whole. But making a film is like making a cake. There are so many different factors involved, like recipes, temperature, ingredients and utensils. You don’t know, until it comes out of the oven, what kind of cake you’ve got. A screenplay is more like a map of the film, whereas a book is the end product itself.

One area of criticism most popular to the critics is in the melding of two different media, specifically in movie adaptations of books. Many movie adaptations have been attempted, and many have failed. Tom Clancy has stated his beliefs in the book-to-movie process stating that he will never sell the rights to any of his books ever again. Other authors such as Stephen King have embraced the process, making books specifically for the small screen. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that the key to adapting a book to a film is to stand at the Hollywood border and toss it over the border to the filmmakers; in return they’ll throw back some money and then one should return and try to forget about the film.

The only comparison I can find between LOTR and any other book in terms of its own internal language, world-creation and devotees is Dune. Here is the story behind the process of Dune’s conversion. There are many parallels and lessons in it.

The arc from conception to realization, was a wide one, including several false - but extraordinary - starts. Optioned in the early ‘70s, Dune’s visionaries faced two monolithic challenges: first, distilling almost 500 pages of text into a working screenplay; second, making the resulting script economically possible.

Chilean-born director Alexandro Jodorowsky launched a 1975 version from his own screenplay, with financing by Michael Seydoux, scion of a wealthy Parisian family. Attracted to the epic’s sacramental quality, Jodorowsky intended to shoot in sequence, virtually re-enacting the passage of Paul Atreides as a spiritual exercise. Jodorowsky’s cult classics, El Topo and The Holy Mountain,, are paradigms to this filmmaking approach. In both, the land figures prominently. “The desert,” the director said, “is the well-spring of all religious thought,” A concept mirrored by Herbert in Dune.

The project was visualized by several of Europe’s most renowned artists and designers, including H.R. Giger, Moebius and Salvador Dali. Within four months, they produced thousands of illustrations spotlighting costumes, characters, sets, weapons and vehicles, including a complete continuity storyboard. Special fx were in development, with a sharp emphasis on the sandworms. Stop-motion animation was considered and shelved, replaced by hydraulic constructions. The problems of creating creatures which would rear up out of the sand, turn and plunge back beneath it were staggering.

Jodorowsky began to select his cast. He slated Charlotte Rampling to portray Lady Jessica, with Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, David Carradine was penciled to play the planetary ecologist Kynes. The director opted to take the role of Duke Leto Atreides himself.

Jodorowsky had, as expected, translated the script with his own unique vision. He was drawn to the novel by Herbert’s extrapolation of several major archetypal themes, and proceeded to explore and expand them in a metaphysical direction, adding new meanings, many of which were aimed directly at the audience’s subconscious level. After $2 million had been spent on pre-production with costumes, props and sets under construction, a final budget for the picture was established: $9.5 million. The figure was a disaster. Money simply ran out.

At that time, the tidal wave of science fiction, special fx and fantasy films was about to crest. Jodorowsky’s Dune might have inaugurated the trend. Instead, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars, with its allusions to birthrights, spiritual energies, the jihad, and a youthful hero—all themes and concepts prominent in Dune—were released first. Others followed, never quite matching what Dune had promised.

Herbert’s masterwork might have been shelved indefinitely had not Dino DeLaurentiis, who knew the author socially, taken an interest in the epic in Spring, 1978. The producer, who was then developing Conan and Flash Gordon, had the foresight and the resources to resurrect the aborted project.

The first script that DeLaurentiis commissioned was written by Frank Herbert at the end of 1978. Neither was satisfied with the result. Apparently, the author was too close to the novel, too attached to material he could not dispense with and streamline into a workable screenplay.

Like many great novels, Dune evokes much of its power through original and innovative use of language. The book is textured with symbols, puns and allusions that defy pictorial translation. Herbert created many of the book’s crucial passages as poetry—sonnets, haikus, lyrics and rhymes—and concealed them in prose.

Nonetheless, Dune is not without cinematic devices. Viewpoints of its characters often resemble subjective camera shots. Colors are used to evoke emotional conditions (yellow usually connotes threat or danger). Above all, Herbert tends to describe scenes from the general view to the specific—or master shot to close-up, a basic filmic technique, “I treat the reader’s eye as a camera,” he confirmed.

The biggest challenge, however, to Herbert and other writers, was in condensing Dune’s labyrinthine plot into an acceptable filmic design.

The story introduces plotlines and directions whose precise interrelation is not revealed until very late in the book. Movies tend to be linear and straightforward, the reason why novels with simple plots are usually considered the best candidates for adaptation. Herbert’s script ran more than 175 pages; the average is 110.

DeLaurentiis was not discouraged. As an independent film producer for 35 years, snags and set-backs were no more traumatic to him than losing a button off a vest. After reading Dune at least three times, he took a different approach: he started with a director, a filmmaker who could interpret the test’s imagery with solid celluloid sensibility.

In January, 1980, DeLaurentiis contacted Ridley Scott, fresh from his Alien triumph. The director immediately established a shop at London’s Pinewood Studios, and began to create drawings, storyboards and special fx models. H.R. Giger, who worked with Scott on Alien (and with Jodorowsky on the previous Dune incarnation) was called in as production designer. Scott then selected novelist and screenwriter Rudy (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) Wurlitzer as the screenwriter.

“The Dune adaptation was one of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever done,” Wurlitzer admitted. “It took more time to break it down into a working outline than to write the final script. I did two or three drafts before I was at all satisfied with the structure.”

Encouraged by Scott, Wurlitzer rooted Dune’s story in more contemporary, less archetypal, political analogies. The oppressed Fremen, for example, suggest the urban ghetto community. The desert dweller's sense of moral defeat, economic deprivation and treatment as cheap laborers alluded to the plight of the modern American Indian as well as many Third World populations. Fremen uprisings, led by Paul Atreides as the redeemer Muad’Dib, also have a correlation to modern urban revolt. The Scott production team carefully studied Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers for a realistic point of reference.

Deliberately, the filmmakers did not neglect the mystical and phantasmagorical aspects of Dune. "I believe we kept to the spirit of the book," Wurlitzer said, "but, in a sense, we rarefied it. We interjected a somewhat different sensibility."

The overall tone of his script was much more austere than the novel's. Where Herbert was emotional and effusive, Wurlitzer was direct and controlled. With Scott's approval (if Alien and Blade Runner are a barometer), Wurlitzer tended to emphasize the taboo rather than the totem, the dark over the light, the Apocalyptic instead of the Deliverance. The hero is depicted as an individual of mood and temper, chastising the Fremen for their weaknesses, strongly willing his destiny forward, instead of simply following it through.

"In one draft," Wurlitzer recalled, "I introduced some erotic scenes between Paul and his mother, Jessica. I felt there was always a latent, but very strong, Oedipal attraction between them, and I took it one note further. It went right in the middle of the film, as a supreme defiance of certain boundaries, perhaps making Paul even more heroic for having broken a forbidden code." Additionally, Alia, Paul's sister in the novel, became his incestuous child by his mother in the script.

Wurlitzer also developed ambiguous responses to Paul Atreides. "A true leader is never a clear model of Christian goodness," Wurlitzer contended. Many times, he is ruthless, very determined, and willing to make sacrifices to serve certain ends. That doesn't mean he has to be a consummate Machiavellian, only that certain shadings in his character make him a little dangerous, a bit abrupt. Even Christ drove the merchants out of the temple."

In short, the moral scheme of Herbert's novel was humanized at the expense of righteous purity. "We wanted the Baron Harkonnen, for instance, to be less a caricature of evil," Wurlitzer added.

It was three drafts and eight months before his script was completed. “It was refined as it progressed. When adapting a book, one can get locked into a kind of weird internal dialogue with the author, which can be a strange process. One hopes not to commit sacrilege to the book, but still have enough courage to make changes which are redeemingly cinematic. I never met Herbert, who was probably at his home in Washington state while I was in London, but I was curious to know what he thought of my efforts.”

Wurlitzer's script is compelling and evocative, replete with major structural changes and conversational, rather than epic, dialogue. Under Scott's direction - whom Wurlitzer considered a “fearless, very daring" talent - Dune would have had considerable, perhaps extraordinary, merit.

Universal Studios, however, were divided. Ned Tannen, then company president, approved it. Other executives did not. DeLaurentiis, according to Wurlitzer, was caught in the middle. What turned the tide was the production's projected cost - $50 million, heavy money for a project that continuously had the ominous spectre of doubt hovering above it. September, 1980 signaled the close of Scott and Wurlitzer's involvement with Dune.

In Spring, 1981, David (Eraserhead) Lynch shifted from his esteemed niche as an avant-garde filmmaker to one of the Hollywood establishment when The Elephant Man garnered several Oscar nominations and awards. Although commercial, the film was also a dazzling artistic triumph, with director Lynch trading away neither his experimental daring nor his taste for the grotesque. Written with Eric Bergman and Christian Devore, the film could be summarized as the story of a deformed being who symbolically is the loveless angel of affliction in a brutally impersonal industrial age. Exquisite, compassionate, at times surreal, the production remains one of the most worthwhile American films of the last decade or so.

As a result, Lynch was solicited for other major projects. Lucasfilm made Lynch their first choice as director for Return of the Jedi, but DeLaurentiis wanted him for another attempt at Dune. Lynch rejected Jedi because it was a sequel, and chose Dune because it was without artistic precedent.

In May, Lynch took an office on the Universal lot, and recalled Bergman and Devore as his writing partners. Their research began with a visit to Washington's Olympic Peninsula and a week-long retreat with Frank Herbert on his six-acre farm. It's an ecological haven," Bergman recalled, "a very functional place." (Herbert's acreage is famous for its demonstrations of alternative energy mechanisms--a solar collector, wind plant, methane fuel generator).

"Our conversations centered on the topography and ethnography of Dune, but just as much to get into a general mode of orientation. More than anything, it was fun and enlightening. We learned a hell of a lot about Herbert's world. He's a fantastic man, a great human being to spend afternoons with. He has great integrity, warmth, compassion, vision and innate wisdom, which he exudes naturally and effortlessly. And, his wife makes great chowder, too!"

In June, the writing of the new screenplay began. Raffaella DeLaurentiis, until then producing Conan in Spain, arrived in Los Angeles to assume the same responsibilities for Dune.

"We were given a free hand," said Devore. "but our biggest problem was length. We did four outlines before we started to flesh it out. Certain scenes in the novel were very hard to abbreviate or exclude because they were so wonderful and powerful. Additionally, there would be many touches that readers would remember and want to see again. For instance, the scene where Jessica undergoes the rite to become the Reverend Mother could never be eliminated. But, that's a complex scene, with a myriad of elements that culminate and begin again. It must be cut down to an essence, or 20 to 30 pages could be used up right there."

The essence, as such, may not have outwardly resembled a given scene. "One learns to combine elements," said Bergman, "to fuse them, rearrange them, always keeping the intention where you can't keep the letter. Overall, we really tried to maintain the attitude of the book, its feel and its values. That was less of a challenge, though, than creating the structure."

Another challenge was Herbert's special terminology, an aspect complex enough to warrant an 18-page glossary in the novel, a page of "Cartographic Notes," and four lengthy appendices. "A viewer uninitiated in the language might have a very hard time," said Devore. "Yet, many of the special words invented for Dune lend a mysterious or descriptive dimension to it. We tried to introduce some of these terms in the most natural way possible, without calling attention to them. We wanted the term to be unfamiliar, but associated with some kind of behavior or action that would define it. When it was used again later, an audience would know what it was."

The vocabulary invented by Herbert reflects his broad, almost encyclopedic knowledge of language. "Bene Gesserit," for example, is derived from the Latin, meaning "to be well born." The Fremen language is adapted from vernacular Arabic. Many of the characters' names are also meaningful. Paul's younger sister, Alia, was named for a member of the Prophet Muhammad's family. The word "Atreides" was selected as a corollary to the tragic family of rulers in ancient Greece, among them King Agamemnon.

The original Bergman, Devore and Lynch script exceeded 200 pages. That length partially contributed to a number of creative differences that led to another version written exclusively by David Lynch.
It is that script, however, which eventually went into pre-production in November 1982. The cover page denotes it as the Sixth Draft, and the last page is numbered 135.

Lynch's Dune was extremely faithful to Herbert, although the screenplay seemed to manifest many aspects most appealing to the Lynch cinematic sensibility. Mechanisms, droll sounds, insects, mutant-like creatures, and visual textures are carefully integrated into the whole. Lynch additionally took advantage of the interior monologues which Herbert uses so frequently, enabling characters in the film to parallel their speeches with thoughts that reveal their feelings or viewpoints.

The original director’s cut of the Dune movie is five hours long, but the studio savegly cut that in half, ending up with a mish mash.

Personally, I am relieved LOTR did not follow these 'diversions' and remained relatively true to the themes of the book.

I'm not up for a fight with you, because I'm up for a fight with Tuor - he's really annoying me.

Briefly - it's easy to point to a lousy adaptation and say: good job PJ didn't do that hey???!!! Arpharazon used to do this all the time. Thusly:

LOTR is soooooo much better than Van Helsing.

Right.

No-one ever disputed it.

So in discussing LOTR as an epic film, I invariably ask myself and others: how does it compare with other epic films? My answer is: loads better than pedestrian stuff like Troy and the execrable Braveheart, but not up to the classic adventure/epic films.

Your mileage may be different. Sure. Everyone's mileage is different.

As an adaptation it's a tougher question because most books adapted for film are modern novels written by people who do character development. I have posted on this at probably wearisome length. I recognise the difficulty of the material.

And now I'm going to recycle this bloody thing for the umpteenth time:

The great screenplays are astonishingly spare and lean and often disappointing to read. It is only when one actually watches the film and sees what the director and his team have added to the words that one realizes that the script is only the base on which the structure is built.

Anyway, rather than talk dry theory, I will discuss a well-regarded film adaptation of a well-regarded book.

Sense and Sensibility

I adore Jane Austen but S&S is not a flawless novel. It is rather cold and didactic and the heroes … er, the guys the heroines marry… are dry as dust. Ang Lee (director) and Emma Thompson (screenplay) tackle these problems with imagination. Let’s look at some of the decisions made.

• The death of the girls’ father, which takes place off-stage in the book, is shown in the film. In this scene the context in which the action will take place is set out: Mr. Dashwood’s female children are left destitute because… they are female! The phoney bonnets-and-carriages sentimentality which surrounds Austen in the popular imagination is swept away in one stroke and we are shown the unfair workings of a society in which the pressure is on to marry for money as an alternative to a lifetime of poverty.

• Marvellous use is made of the child Margaret, a mere cipher in the book. In the film she is used to add warmth and humour and to develop the characters of her sisters’ suitors.

• Elinor’s storyline is ruthlessly cut down to allow space for the more glamorous and romantic Marianne storyline to breathe and develop.

• Minor characters are chopped completely and, sad but necessary, interesting secondary characters are cut down to make more time for the leads.

• In the book the villainous Willoughby turns up near the end and EXPLAINS at great length why he broke Marianne’s heart. The film cuts this: it simply is not needed. Lee shows us that Willoughby loves Marianne and shows us at the same time that Willoughby needs money to function in this world. We can work the rest out.

• Attractive casting helps, with our own Alan Rickman in particular giving life to a dull character.


In conclusion, S&S is a good adaptation because the main story and themes come through, despite changes to the narrative, and Austen-world is beautifully evoked, without the usual sentimentality.

S&S is a good film, as a film, entertaining and intelligent, well crafted, fluidly directed, and engagingly acted. It is not over-stuffed and rushed (as it would be had the film-makers tried to keep everything). The flaws of the book are shrewdly tackled.

All in all – a good balance between fidelity to Austen and the demands of cinema is achieved. Incidentally, I have a “faithful” 4 hour BBC TV version on tape somewhere – which is little better than a filmed play. It plods along, chapter by chapter, dull and unimaginative. It’s just the book on screen.

[/quote]

I wandered in here to escape from reading somebody's words and stumbled into this.

<Runs away to contemplate>

<Returns>

A good friend taught me a lesson today. He said to stop being a hypocrite.

So, being perfectly honest:

<Runs away in terror>

TLE,

PJ's LOTR is an industrial and commercial success. There is no doubt about that and everyone involved in the production should be credited for that.

However, as a film, and not an end product from an industry, it raises several issues.

How do you adapt a book? Answer: by finding in the book what appeals to you and what corresponds to your goal in making a film. When you have identified what this is, you can then write a script that is the result of a consistent artistic vision and that can be filmed. Hitchcock said that he never adapted a great book because he had too much respect for great literature: what interested him in a story was too often different from what interested the novelist and Hitchcock wanted to remain free to change the book as much as he wanted to. The best adaptations are those where the director shares with the writer a common understanding of men and society. Because the director understands the writer's points, he will be able to make the changes required in order to film the story (I think that we all agree here that an adaptation implies some changes; the issue is to choose them wisely) without substantially altering the themes of the book. Also, very often, in such case where the director and writer are artistic brothers, the style of the director turns out to be uncannily well suited to faithfully translating in film language the style of the book. This shows a deep connection between themes and style, substance and form.

The most significant themes of LOTR, which are the temptation of good and the mercy theme (in this order: it is because we are flawed and can yield to the temptation of good that we must be merciful) never really interested PJ, IMO - how could you be interested in the mercy theme and not include the fundamental line of Frodo saying that we should forgive Gollum? It is also possible that PJ did not really see why these themes are important (ie, not realizing why in the 40's and 50's they were deemed important), since according to his own interviews, where he says that Tolkien's themes are pretty straightforward and simple, PJ thinks that LOTR is only about good vs evil, friendship, sacrifice, etc.... and that its complexity lies in its narrative while it is the other way around. PJ was interested in the emotional aspect of the story, in the monsters and the big fights, for which PJ's style is well suited (It is clear to me that PJ's heavy handed style and conception of cinema were not well suited to the contemplative and philosophical aspects of LOTR). It was also an opportunity for WETA, his SFX company, to showcase its ability to create great production values. In the POTD sequence, PJ explores WETA's skills in producing cranes; he does not explore the theme of death, which he on the contrary mocks. In many respects, PJ's films are an example of a cinema where production values are so good that they have the ability to make us forget that the fundamental direction skills of the concerned director are neither great nor innovative. However, I acknowledge that the technical constraints of the shooting (heigh difference, composite shots, pick ups) were as many obstacles preventing PJ, assuming he had the ability to, from developping a sophisticated and consistent film language

Tolkien's LOTR is very different from Star Wars (SW is a teenager dream; LOTR is the novel of an old man, fascinated by myths and torn between death and hope). Tolkien's LOTR is very different from Dune (Dune is a great political novel disguised as a sci-fi novel). I thus do not think that comparisons between LOTR, Dune and SW are that meaningful, at least from an artistic point of view. Lynch's Dune is a flawed film. But as an adaptation, PJ's LOTR is not a better film. At least, Lynch has an elegant style whereas PJ has the artistic grace of an elephant (Lynch unfortunately indulges in his love of the disgusting and the grotesque in his scenes involving the Harkonnen; he did not get at all the Baron). And from a thematical POV, although Lynch's Dune is not completely satisfactory, at least it does not go against the themes of the novel, which is sometimes the case of PJ's LOTR, which is manichean while the novel is not, which insists on fight scenes looking like a video game when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are involved while the novel insists on mercy and dedicates very little of its pages to actual fight scenes.

PS: Btw, I did not know that Ridley Scott had been involved in the Dune production. Thanks for the information! And too bad it did not happen.