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Film adaptations rarely go by the book
Tuesday, February 16, 1999 By Bob Hoover, Book Editor, Post-Gazette
Ever since the "Von Stroheim" experience, Hollywood producers have looked at books as screenplay material in a different light.
Born Eric Stroheim in Germany, the onetime assistant to D.W. Griffith was briefly the hottest director in Tinseltown with a series of sexy silents, starting with "Blind Husbands" in 1919. His career crashed when he filmed Frank Norris' rather straightforward novel, "McTeague," a two-year project begun in 1923.
Renamed "Greed," the film was nearly a page-by-page re-creation of the novel. In its original 42-reel form, the picture ran seven hours. MGM executives were horrified and eventually cut the film to just more than 90 minutes, the version we see today.
Since then, a book has been merely plastic material, cut or stretched or ignored during the vagaries of filmmaking.
According to one famous story, Orson Welles, who cut and pasted stories from Shakespeare to Jules Verne with abandon, was pitching a film project starring his then-wife, Rita Hayworth, to a stubborn Harry Cohn, head of Columbia, to whom he owed $25,000.
Calling from a phone booth on a Manhattan street corner, Welles spotted a window display in a nearby bookstore that included a novel called "The Lady From Shanghai."
"It's called 'The Lady From Shanghai,' Harry," lied Welles. The title intrigued Cohn enough to approve the project, which was really inspired by another novel, "If I Die Before I Wake."
But, the screenplay was all Welles.
There are exceptions, like "Gone With the Wind," filmed in approximate faithfulness to the Margaret Mitchell novel, or pallid imitations, including the two versions of "Lolita," a book that is probably beyond the abilities of commercial movie-makers.
The manipulations of Hollywood have convinced most novelists to take the check for the rights to their work but to never participate in the translation of it to the silver screen.
"I would never consider it. It's just too painful," says novelist Scott Turow, who became a millionaire overnight from "Presumed Innocent" but left the money to be paid from the movie for others to collect.
When other authors such as Faulkner or Chandler sold their services to the film studios, they never worked on their own books, producing instead credible scripts from others' work.
Books are simply too "large" to fit the limited boundaries of the camera frame. Something has to go, from characters to even plot, or in the case of Stroheim, his career.
The truly successful translations from print to image - I'm thinking of several fine film versions of Dickens or Elmore Leonard - at best give us a taste of what we enjoyed as readers.
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