Adaptations

Did you realize that It's a Wonderful Life, the favorite holiday movie of millions, was adapted from a Christmas card? Or that two classic American films, Stagecoach and Bringing Up Baby, were both adapted from short stories that appeared in the same issue of Collier's magazine (April 10, 1937)? Or that the Oscar-winning movie The Best Years of Our Lives sprang from an article in Time magazine?

There's a lot about movie adaptations in the July/August 2007 issue of Fine Books & Collections magazine. Perhaps most interesting of all is a reprint of something written by Ernest A. Dench in 1916 about movies adapted from books. Adaptations, like movies themselves, were still new in 1916, so Dench's thoughts about turning novels into silent movies are fascinating.

We may think of movie tie-ins as a relatively new development in the publishing industry, but we find that they were already common in 1916, although Dench faulted publishers because they were not more common. Booksellers, he believed, could sell a lot more books if they paid more attention to what was popular at movie theaters. The movie business may only be a few years old at this point in history, yet already Dench saw film producers as the top dog and publishers as the tail.

He argued that publishers should focus on books that could easily be adapted to the screen. "The motion picture has created a demand for clean-cut stories, without a particle of padding," Dench wrote. "Yet there are publishers who have continued to turn out fiction of all kinds with frightfully slim plots." He seemed to think publishers shouldn't even bother with novels that could not easily be turned into films.

Surprisingly Dench wrote that the longest novel can be converted into a two-hour movie, with most of them running just an "hour or so." Yet today we know that making a two-hour movie out of a novel, even one of moderate length, requires cutting out significant portions of the plot. The entire story may require a six- or eight-part miniseries on television.

Another surprise, at least to me, is Dench's assertion that people "prefer to see it on film first, because it is the quickest and easiest way to arrive at a decision. It is also the truest test." The truest test of what? The worth of the story? Yet great novels are routinely turned into mediocre movies. Sometimes great movies are adapted from mediocre novels. Personally I prefer reading the book before seeing the movie, for the movie, whether good or not, usually makes me less eager to read the book. I have had the DVD of The Sisters Brothers for more than a year without watching it because I want to read Patrick DeWitt's novel first. A movie can spoil the book more than the book can spoil the movie.

Ernest Dench had some curious ideas about movie adaptations, but that's what makes his article so interesting to read.