stories. In the first two instances, the choices struck me as strange. “The Music School” is a monologue whose principal action lies in the leaps of the narrator’s voice, and “The Christian Roommates” attempts to render the nuances of relationship within a group of Harvard dormitory-mates in the early 1950s. Both adaptations appeared, as I watched them on television, lugubrious. My hero in “The Music School” is troubled by guilt but on film he is positively sodden with it; on film the roommates’ jittery antipathy turns downright pathological. As I watched, my attention gratefully flew to bits that weren’t in the story, or were a matter of a word or two: in
The Music School
, a science-fiction episode eerily emerges through a violet filter, and we witness the lively industrial process, staffed by nuns in full habit, of the baking and cutting of communion wafers; in
The Roommates
(my “Christian” was dropped, as perhaps too provocative), the hero’s sketchy home-town romance iselaborated with a delightful wealth of period make-out music and exposed underwear. Many details, indeed, in “The Roommates,” which was spun out to two hours, were admirably full and careful. The college students glowed with health and beauty, and Northwestern’s buildings (not Harvard’s) posed handsomely. But of my short story the point itself—that one of the Christian roommates was so distressed by the other that he lost his faith—was serenely omitted.
In fairness, can any film adaptation fail to seem, to the author of the original, heavy on detail and light on coherence? Would any representation of the troubled married couple in
Too Far to Go
have failed to embarrass me? Perhaps inevitably, the suburbia became a movie suburbia, free of peeling paint and crabgrass, and the adulteries movie adulteries, skinny plot-turns as predictable as, in other cinematic contexts, pratfalls and shootouts. Footage problems arose when a car accident that I had located in a snowstorm was implausibly transferred (because of seasonal filming, or a studio shortage of soap flakes) to a rainstorm; not even a monsoon could have sloshed so many buckets of water across the windshield behind the entangled couple.
Words have a merciful vagueness wherein readers can—nay,
must—
use their imaginations. Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view. Written images perforce draw upon imagery our memory has stored; no one reads the same book, and each reader is drawn into an individual exchange with the author’s voice. A seductive relationship is in progress, which the reader can terminate more easily than involvements in real life. Film, instead, breaks upon us like a natural phenomenon—ungainsayable, immediate, stark, marvellous, and rather bullying. My exposures to adaptation, it should be said, were the work of talented people who were fond of my writing; my impulse was all the stronger, then, to break the glass box and let them out, to do their own things, while my text, safe between covers, did its.
Books into Film
M OVIEMAKERS , like creative spirits everywhere, must be free; they owe nothing to the authors of books they adapt except the money they have agreed to pay them. In the case of the first book to be made into a film,
Ben Hur
, not even a financial indebtedness was acknowledged; the movie would be good publicity for the book, it was argued, and General Wallace should be acquiescently grateful. He and his lawyers disagreed, establishing a happy precedent for those of us who, as the saying goes, take the money and run. And hide, ideally. For the author owes, at least, his Hollywood benefactors a tactful silence.
A film adaptation of a novel of mine † is about to be released. It bears the book’s title, and my own name will presumably scurry by in the credits. One would have to have an ego of steel not to be pleasantly dented, or dimpled, by such attentions. Otherwise, the movie will bear, indications
The Music School
, a science-fiction episode eerily emerges through a violet filter, and we witness the lively industrial process, staffed by nuns in full habit, of the baking and cutting of communion wafers; in
The Roommates
(my “Christian” was dropped, as perhaps too provocative), the hero’s sketchy home-town romance iselaborated with a delightful wealth of period make-out music and exposed underwear. Many details, indeed, in “The Roommates,” which was spun out to two hours, were admirably full and careful. The college students glowed with health and beauty, and Northwestern’s buildings (not Harvard’s) posed handsomely. But of my short story the point itself—that one of the Christian roommates was so distressed by the other that he lost his faith—was serenely omitted.
In fairness, can any film adaptation fail to seem, to the author of the original, heavy on detail and light on coherence? Would any representation of the troubled married couple in
Too Far to Go
have failed to embarrass me? Perhaps inevitably, the suburbia became a movie suburbia, free of peeling paint and crabgrass, and the adulteries movie adulteries, skinny plot-turns as predictable as, in other cinematic contexts, pratfalls and shootouts. Footage problems arose when a car accident that I had located in a snowstorm was implausibly transferred (because of seasonal filming, or a studio shortage of soap flakes) to a rainstorm; not even a monsoon could have sloshed so many buckets of water across the windshield behind the entangled couple.
Words have a merciful vagueness wherein readers can—nay,
must—
use their imaginations. Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view. Written images perforce draw upon imagery our memory has stored; no one reads the same book, and each reader is drawn into an individual exchange with the author’s voice. A seductive relationship is in progress, which the reader can terminate more easily than involvements in real life. Film, instead, breaks upon us like a natural phenomenon—ungainsayable, immediate, stark, marvellous, and rather bullying. My exposures to adaptation, it should be said, were the work of talented people who were fond of my writing; my impulse was all the stronger, then, to break the glass box and let them out, to do their own things, while my text, safe between covers, did its.
Books into Film
M OVIEMAKERS , like creative spirits everywhere, must be free; they owe nothing to the authors of books they adapt except the money they have agreed to pay them. In the case of the first book to be made into a film,
Ben Hur
, not even a financial indebtedness was acknowledged; the movie would be good publicity for the book, it was argued, and General Wallace should be acquiescently grateful. He and his lawyers disagreed, establishing a happy precedent for those of us who, as the saying goes, take the money and run. And hide, ideally. For the author owes, at least, his Hollywood benefactors a tactful silence.
A film adaptation of a novel of mine † is about to be released. It bears the book’s title, and my own name will presumably scurry by in the credits. One would have to have an ego of steel not to be pleasantly dented, or dimpled, by such attentions. Otherwise, the movie will bear, indications
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