Once upon a time, when I thought I wanted to be an English literature teacher, I would wake up in the middle of the night with ideas about my lesson plans. Wouldn’t it be cool, for instance, to have the students compare a book with its screen adaptation?

High school students are notorious for watching the movie to avoid having to read the book. And people who read a lot are often disgusted with Hollywood’s version of their favorite novels. Why not bring these two worlds together, so everyone can be disappointed?

The more I watch movies based on books I’ve read, the more I can appreciate the choices made in the adaptation. Here are some things you might consider:

1) Distilling the essence - They say a picture paints a thousand words, but when you’re converting words to images, you have to make sure it’s the exact right image. These are artists at work. One conversation, one look, can speak volumes. Or not.

2) Working with animals - You may notice that scenes that involved animals in books may be removed completely or changed to something that captures the spirit of the scene in some other ways. It’s OK. Dealing with trained animals is no simple thing. For instance Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, replaced an elephant (camel?) ride with an airplane (balloon?) ride. It was about the relationship with the mother and the daughter, not about the elephant.

3) Budget - Some choices in adaptation come because of low budget limitations or high budget expectations. That’s just business. I might like to assign The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and challenge the student to watch the no-budget BBC Program and the high-budget Hollywood movie version to compare.

4) Editing - Good editing is something you take for granted, unless you watch the deleted scenes. But you can really tell when an adaptation fails because of bad editing. House of the Spirits, for instance, had whole chunks chopped out because the movie was getting too long for anyone to sit through. There’s no way somebody could follow that movie if they’d never read the book. Of course, if the writers had distilled the essence in the first place, they wouldn’t have needed to make such bad editorial decisions.

5) Target audience - Remember, a grown-up book can be cut to pieces to reach a wider audience. (And openly gay characters become ambiguously gay or not gay at all.) Several years ago, I tried to watch a made-for-TV movie adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. It was in no way the same story when crammed into The Wonderful World of Disney, I’ll tell you that.

So I share this lesson with you. Enjoy the show.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 8:03 pm and is filed under meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.