Missives from the 6th Floor

Along the lines of good adaptations: Fight Club is a pretty good book, although I think it might be slightly better as a movie. I was surprised.

My two fave scenes in the book are when the main character has gone to the movies with his parents and spots another man out to the movies with his parents. They give each other this look of shared misery.

The other is when he and his girlfriend have gotten back together and are arriving at the home of another couple for dinner. He's explaining how he has this nervous habit of fiddling with the button on his pants. He then describes himself as a creepy man scrabbling at his fly.

The basic problem with adapting book->film or film->book or any media->any media is that you have to decipher what the core of the property is, capture it, and figure out a way to translate that to the other medium. In order to do it successfully, you have to be good in both the originally medium and the transfer medium. Too few writers are. Novelists make terrible screenwriters and screenwriters don't always embrace the depth of theme of a book, too used to tossing off bits of scenes and calling it done.

Imagine the most incredible oil painting you've ever seen being translated into water color. Or a scupture that is now represented 2 dimensionally. Or trying to capture a live version of a painting in a photograph. That's sort of what happens when you take a book and make it a film.

I'm actually in the process of doing that now and it's maddening and liberating at the same time. It's hard, ass-sweating work making a wonderful book into a film and usually you end up changing a lot of what made the book wonderful. When it works, it's magical. Most times, though, unless the writer is skilled enough, you end up with crap.

I keep remembering how different Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is. But Hampton Fancher and David Web Peoples looked beyond the words into the heart of the story and pulled out what was important to the film story (which, in case you've never read the book, has little to do with the film). It's really a few and far between sort of thing though.

Mark