A Few Thoughts on Turning Books into Scripts

     A couple months ago, I was sitting in physics when I noticed a nearly-dictionary-sized book resting on the binder of the girl sitting across from me.

     "Watcha reading?" I asked the book's owner.

     "Les Mis," she said, "I want to read it before the movie comes out."

     Sound the sirens, everyone, books have invaded Hollywood. Or, rather, screenwriters have invaded libraries and bookstores, stealing ideas from paper instead of using that thing called "originality" to come up with interesting movie plots.

     In truth, though, it's been happening for as long as movies have been made. Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, Schindler's List, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Google "Best Movies of All Time" and you'll find that quite a few of them were based on books. Even the recent zombie-apocolypse-romance movie, Warm Bodies, is based off of a book by the same title.

     For as long as I can remember, I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of making books into movies. I have always felt that doing so shows a lack of originality on the part of the screenwriter and laziness on the part of those who would rather watch the movie than read the book.

     I think the only reason the laziness aspect annoys me is because the movie is never as good as the book. Never. Ever. Never ever ever. (Well, never except for one book series, but I'll get to that later.)

     Why is it that the book is always better?

     I used to blame the defects on the obvious things. This character wasn't included, they took out my favorite part, or so-and-so is supposed to be blonde but they made her a brunette (yes, I am directly referring to how Annabeth in the movie version of The Lightening Thief was not blonde, a detail honestly ruined the movie for me, even though there were a lot of other serious faults. But I digress.)

     Yet I have come to realize that it is not always the parts that the screenwriters leave out, or the characters they tweak that makes the movies inferior. Some of those changes can even be forgiven, if one considers time and casting limitations. (But only some changes; Annabeth's hair can never be forgiven.)

     Rather, the reason (at least for me) that books are always better, is that the beauty of the language is lost. There are just things that can be done with the written word that cannot be done on the big screen.

     I think the best way for me to explain myself is to give you an example. Here is an excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird:

  

      Just look at that. That lovely syntactic jump from one paragraph to another, where Mrs. Merriweather unknowingly completes Scout's unfinished thought while simultaneously displaying her hypocrisy. The irony and genius of it all makes me embarrassingly happy. I could go on for awhile about this passage, but I'll save that for another post.

     For now, back to my point. And the point is that you cannot have ingenious syntactic paragraph  jumps in a movie.

     They made a movie out of To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a fantastic movie and it won many awards and it changed many lives. But there is one thing missing in that movie, and that one thing is Harper Lee's writing.

     I guess, in the grand scheme of things, Harper Lee's writing is not the most important part of the book. The most important part of the book is the story itself and that story's themes. But, when you read the book and then watch the movie (like I did), it just seems like something is missing in the movie.

     And that something is the prose.

     Is it unfair for me to judge movies like this? Perhaps. If I had seen To Kill a Mockingbird the movie before reading the book, then I no doubt would have found it more impressive. As I watched the movie, I acknowledged that it was a great representation of the book, was well-written and well-acted, but I still found myself preferring the book.

      Maybe this is just The Curse of the Lit Nerd. Maybe I'm just crazy and word-obsessed. But the prose will always beat out the cinematography.

     After seeing Les Miserables with my parents, I was talking to my mom about how much I enjoyed the movie.

     "That was one of the best movies I've ever seen," I said, wiping my eyes (for the rest of the day, I could barely even think about that movie without tearing up), "I can't imagine how good the book is. I really want to read it now."

     Maybe, just maybe, it isn't so bad that Hollywood is making books into movies. I used to always hate when people would say, "Why should I read Harry Potter? I've seen all the movies." 

      BECAUSE THE BOOKS ARE BETTER!

     Ahem. Excuse me.

     I still hate it when people say that sort of thing. But let's be honest, with that attitude, would they have ever really read the book? Movie or no?

      The cynical (and therefore more likely) answer is no. But at least that person was still exposed to the story of Harry Potter and the themes of friendship and courage.

     The people who often get overlooked are those like myself and my friend in physics. The people who heard about or seen the movie, and want to read the book because of it. Would I or my classmate have wanted to read Les Mis if it had never been made into a movie?

     Maybe, maybe not. The point is, the movie encouraged us to read the book.

     For whatever reason (perhaps out of sheer stubbornness) I'm still not quite one-hundred percent okay with books being made into movies. But I'm getting there. In fact, as mentioned before, there is one exception to the rule; one book series that I prefer to see on screen rather than on paper (but just slightly, I do like the books).

     But, I've wasted enough of your time with my rambling, so The Exception will have to wait until tomorrow. Stay tuned for my next post!