joe_haldeman @ 2015-08-09T16:15:00
(responding to a question in sff.net)
I think a title change would be a disastrous mistake, but my opinion is worth very little. It will probably wind up THE BIG SPACE WAR or something.
Martin, I won't have any formal control. I didn't even ask. The producer has never contacted me, and I understand why he wouldn't want to. He would consider me an amateur (and be right), and you don't want an amateur screwing around with a seven-figure enterprise.
Of course I would like to be involved, and I'm not a total virgin, having written one commercial movie and a number of marginal things, mostly teevee. Even so, a producer would have to be insane to give a novelist any control over an adaptation.
Novels and movie scripts are about as far removed from one another as novels and narrative poetry. In all three cases you probably will have characters, a plot, a definite setting, and a time interval. But within that huge box there are almost infinite possible variations. Throw in time dilation and almost anything might happen!
It would be an interesting tour de force to write a screenplay that was "the same" as the novel from which it was adapted. I saw a version of The Red Badge of Courage that might qualify, but several adaptations of The Great Gatsby seem to demonstrate that the translation is between one medium and the other is doomed. Especially if "style" is a consideration. A movie that tries to ape the literary style of a novel is usually an excruciating cartoon.
When this question has come up before, I suggest The African Queen as a rare example of a really good novel that became a really good movie. Or Hawks's translation of John Campbell's "Who Goes There" into the iconic "The Thing From Outer Space" – a classic turned into another classic. On the other extreme, Islands in the Stream was a bad novel that became an even worse movie.
Hemingway is sort of the icon for the incompatibility of the two forms – people might think of him as a "cinematic" novelist because of his love of drama and action and his often kinetic literary style, but almost every attempt to put his work on the screen has been an embarrassment. I could write a book about why, but that's been done several times.
Better get off this horse before I ride it into the sunset.
Joe
I think a title change would be a disastrous mistake, but my opinion is worth very little. It will probably wind up THE BIG SPACE WAR or something.
Martin, I won't have any formal control. I didn't even ask. The producer has never contacted me, and I understand why he wouldn't want to. He would consider me an amateur (and be right), and you don't want an amateur screwing around with a seven-figure enterprise.
Of course I would like to be involved, and I'm not a total virgin, having written one commercial movie and a number of marginal things, mostly teevee. Even so, a producer would have to be insane to give a novelist any control over an adaptation.
Novels and movie scripts are about as far removed from one another as novels and narrative poetry. In all three cases you probably will have characters, a plot, a definite setting, and a time interval. But within that huge box there are almost infinite possible variations. Throw in time dilation and almost anything might happen!
It would be an interesting tour de force to write a screenplay that was "the same" as the novel from which it was adapted. I saw a version of The Red Badge of Courage that might qualify, but several adaptations of The Great Gatsby seem to demonstrate that the translation is between one medium and the other is doomed. Especially if "style" is a consideration. A movie that tries to ape the literary style of a novel is usually an excruciating cartoon.
When this question has come up before, I suggest The African Queen as a rare example of a really good novel that became a really good movie. Or Hawks's translation of John Campbell's "Who Goes There" into the iconic "The Thing From Outer Space" – a classic turned into another classic. On the other extreme, Islands in the Stream was a bad novel that became an even worse movie.
Hemingway is sort of the icon for the incompatibility of the two forms – people might think of him as a "cinematic" novelist because of his love of drama and action and his often kinetic literary style, but almost every attempt to put his work on the screen has been an embarrassment. I could write a book about why, but that's been done several times.
Better get off this horse before I ride it into the sunset.
Joe
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