I clearly remember thinking, ‘How could they have left out the part where Malfoy’s nose droops to his chin after he gets hit with the swelling potion?’ while watching the second Harry Potter movie. I was a serious fan, and I was extremely upset that this—very minor— detail was left out of the movie.
As a serious reader, I always have mixed feelings about my favorite books being made into movies. On the one hand, a movie exposes a wider audience to the story that I so enjoyed reading, but my inner hipster gets pretty annoyed at all of the newfound fans popping up screaming about how they love the movie. Overall, though, this is a positive event: a few more people read the book to get to know the original, the story is spread, and the author gets a little more attention. The biggest problem in these situations often turns out to be the book fans.
I can fully understand where they are coming from as they appear out of the woodwork during a movie’s production. Loyal readers want the movie to “do the book justice,” but this ends up detracting from the movie’s experience for them and for everyone else.
In recent years, book lovers and studio executives have come together in a way that makes them very happy and the rest distinctly unhappy: the several-part movie. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Breaking Dawn, and The Hobbit are some of the most recent examples. Bookworms get more of the story stuffed into the movie and studio execs get millions more in profits. Though some fans are happy with this new arrangement (and I will freely admit that I did not exactly complain about Harry Potter 7 having two parts to fit more content), many others complain about the stretching out of a highly anticipated finish and about the blatant money-making scheme behind it. The average cost of a movie ticket in the Bay Area hovers around $12, and that’s not including IMAX or 3D.
Those whose beloved books are being turned into movies, myself included, need to calm down and accept that film is a different art form than a book. Many of the things that can make a novel great, like long internal monologues, do not tend to come across well in a movie. There has to be change in structure and content in order for the story to be successful in theaters and entertaining to watch.
One of my favorite books ever, Cloud Atlas, was recently turned into a movie by the Wachowski siblings, makers of “The Matrix” series. One of the most innovative aspects of that book was its mirror structure, in which each story was interrupted halfway through by the next story. That would have been absolutely interminable for a movie. No viewing audience would stand for six stories stopping and going in that manner—so the Wachowskis changed it. Pulling out linked aspects of the stories (escape from captivity, compassion, eventual acceptance), they layered these pieces rather than the abrupt cutoffs of the book, and I loved them for it. The film version of Cloud Atlas ended up opening my eyes to new connections and refreshed the stories in my mind without having it be an exact replica of a book I’d already read.
Difficult as it can be to let go of a beloved story from a book and let someone else control turning it into a movie, us book lovers have no other choice unless we want to ruin theater by leading to the creation of ten-part films. A little adaptability is required of us here.
Contact is Lizzy Kelleher at ekelleher@tphnews.com
