I've been meaning to write about adaptations for awhile, because I've noticed a lot of misconceptions about them in my life. After all, these days one sees adaptations springing up every weekend. In the past twelve months there have been a few big ones: Watchmen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and The Time Traveler's Wife, just to name a few.
In any case, there's something important I think everyone should know:
Adaptations are usually not direct translations between different forms of media.
Instead, I prefer to think of them as spiritual cousins, in a way. For example, one of my favorite adaptations is the movie Thank You For Smoking, which springs from Christopher Buckley's novel of the same name. I read the book (normally a sure sign that will make someone immediately scorn the movie) and thought the movie was superb. I think the secret to its success was that it didn't attempt to follow Buckley's novel verbatim. Instead it focused on the main character's constantly evolving relationship with his son. If I remember correctly, they only had one quick interaction in the novel.
In this way, it didn't degrade the spirit of the novel by trying to recreate the exact same ideas on film (how could that compare to what readers already constructed in their imaginations?), but instead took a new and interesting route in the world the novel created. Novels are typically hundreds of pages long. It's not a good idea to try and "condense" one down into 80-120 pages of script.
I think the filmmakers behind the Lord of the Rings movies were smart about this as well. Fantasy fans can be pretty harsh critics, and the Rings epics are classics, so it would have been insane to recreate the novels word-for-word on the screen. Instead, the films are different enough to be exciting and surprising to fans of the novels, but familiar enough to appease die-hards.
So, here are two rules I think every adaptation should follow:
1. Don't try to make the movie an exact replica of the source material. Instead, they should be separate, but definitely related, ideas.
2. More importantly, the original creator or author absolutely has to be on board with the adaptation.
For example, Watchmen was an intriguing adaptation, but author Alan Moore was very much against the idea of it being adapted into a movie. As much as I admire some of the talent behind the film version, I never like to hear about instances like this where the author's requests were ignored.
I've never really been keen on the idea of adapting, but two stories in particular prove to be the exception:
****Neuromancer, by William Gibson -- Filmmakers have been trying to adapt this for years. I think Gibson himself even penned a script at some point. The story, set in the future, follows a hacker who is trying to recapture the glory of what he used to be... at an extreme cost. Basically, I'd love the chance to adapt this, because frankly, it'd be really damn difficult. The novel's brilliant imagery would be tough to capture in a script, the characters are morally compromised in a way that would be difficult to make them sympathetic in a shorter media form, and the plot is complex to such a degree that it's near impossible to weave into a 90 page script. So yes, my desire to adapt is partly due to the sheer sense of awe I feel at Gibson's story, and partly due to artistic masochism.
****World War Hulk, by Greg Pak, Peter David, John Romita Jr., and Gary Frank -- Okay, don't knock it, please. A lot of people scoff at me when I tell them that the Hulk is one of my favorite characters in any form of media. "Where's your sense of good taste?" they inquire. "Didn't you have a concentration in Literature in college?" When questioned about this, I usually ask them if they have ever actually read any Hulk comics, to which the answer is begrudgingly in the negative.
When written well, Bruce Banner and his green alter ego can be very, very compelling. Try reading some of author Bruce Jones' arc in The Incredible Hulk series if you don't believe me. Whenever I let a cynic borrow some issues of this arc, they never, ever fail to get sucked right in despite themselves. Anyway, the World War Hulk story line ensnared me because none of the characters are really good guys. It's akin to watching an episode of "The Shield" for me, because I wasn't sure who to root for, but was glued to my seat nonetheless.
I always pictured it becoming a direct-to-video animated release (I wouldn't kid myself of trying to go theatrical), with the amazing voice-actor Keith David (Gargoyles, Spawn the Animated Series, Coraline, Platoon, Crash, etc) voicing the cunning, intelligent Hulk of the story line. Many people associate the Hulk with the feeble-minded ogre depicted in the movies who has a penchant for speaking in the third person, but in the stories I've read he is anything but.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that my dream of adapting this comic will ever come to pass, because the prequel, Planet Hulk, has already been made. And if you watch the trailer, I'd bet you a drink that that amazingly badass voice of the Hulk is voiced by none other than Keith David himself. Isn't funny how things develop, sometimes?
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Is there anything you want to see adapted, or would want to try to adapt?
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