When an artist takes a painting in one medium and creates a version of it in another medium…we wouldn’t expect the second to be identical to the first.
It only makes sense for differences to surface, right?
So why do people raise such a fuss over book-turned-movie?
Here’s a really great article from The Curator…read the following excerpt – if you like it, check out the full article: An Open Letter on Adaptations.
”
Okay, look — you’ve told me a few times that the book is better than the movie.
Did you know that I read the book, too? Honestly, I also like it better than the movie. I guess the folks that adapted it for the screen really left out a lot. Two of my favorite subplots, for instance. Yeah, the one with the unsigned letters? That was so scary in the book. Oh, and the scriptwriters added a bunch of stuff that wasn’t in the book, and, well, I sort of wish that all of the internal monologues made it to the screen, too. They added a sense of humor that just wasn’t in the movie. And I can’t believe that they changed the protagonist’s hair color.
But you know what? The movie was actually pretty good. Maybe really good.
Stop laughing! Think about this: no matter how good a book-to-film adaptation is, fans will have a one-up on whatever the filmmakers can put on the screen – their imagination. Your imagination does a lot of heavy lifting; regardless of what faults a novel has, the imagination fills in the blanks, splashes on the perfect atmosphere, gives all of the characters the best possible traits to tell the story. At least, all of the best things for the reader.
So in a way, movie adaptations are really sketchings of written stories, not photographs. And besides, film and literature are two very different ways to tell a story, with both strengths and weaknesses that don’t overlap as much as we wish they did. Trying to transfer one to the other without any changes just doesn’t work — it’s almost like trying to adapt an epic poem into a short folk song. As storytelling forms, the few similarities are crowded out by the differences that have to be taken into account. Otherwise, you’d have day-long songs that no one would want to listen to, let alone make…
…Here’s something to try: go watch a movie based on a book you love, but try to take a step back and just watch it as a movie. Pretend that you’ve never opened the book, even.”
Link to this page
