The recent publication of volume 2 of Kevin Johnson's excellent The Dark Page: Books that Inspired American Film Noir, reminds us of just how difficult it often is for filmmakers to really do justice to books:
The Internet Movie Database lists 28,550 "based on novels" films. Those two words--"based on"--are the crux of the matter. For a huge number of reasons--cinematic conventions, run-time limitations, special-effects budgets, nervous studio types afraid of deviating from formula, and film making teams eager to put their own imprints on a project--filmmakers, many book collectors will argue, wind up butchering the book on which a movie is based.
Consider the case of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 1993 novel of book collecting gone seriously awry, The Club Dumas. With its numerous references to a wide range of literary classics, such as The Three Musketeers and A Study In Scarlet, many book collectors looked forward to the film adaptation of this novel--Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate--with great anticipation. To say that most of these book collectors were...underwhelmed... would be a considerable overstatement....
Filmmakers, of course, will argue their films often are better than the books on which such films are based. A case in point is Francis Ford Coppola's critically acclaimed The Godfather, which even the most ardent book collector generally acknowledges is far superior to Mario Puzo's overwrought novel on which the film is based:
There are, in fact, any number of books which both book collectors and filmmakers likely would agree would be difficult to translate to film under the best of circumstances. John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic Confederacy of Dunces--with its evocations of a New Orleans long since washed away by Hurricane Katrina (not to mention the lack of a John Belushi or Chris Farley to play the role of Ignatius)--is arguably one such book. Another might be Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, with its missing cat, missing wife, transporting well and a damn spot that just won't go away:
Perhaps because all book-to-film adaptations are a moving target (some 30 or so new movies are adapted from books every year), few writers have attempted to address the subject exhaustively:
For this reason many book collectors who build a private library around book-to-film adaptations often prefer to utilize one of the many available online lists of such adaptations (such as here and here)....
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