Word: novelizations
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...season when Hollywood gets literate. Since the Oscar deadline coincides with New Year's Eve and a bookish pedigree is a sure way to get Academy members' attention, studios turn to acclaimed novels for their holiday fodder. But there's a risk involved. Ask any reader who has seen the movie version of a favorite novel, and the answer will usually be, "The book was better...
That's because readers of a novel have already made their own perfect movie version. They have visualized it, fleshed out the locations and set the pace as they either zipped through the book or scrupulously savored every word. Often they have even cast it. In the late 1930s, by the thousands, readers of Gone With the Wind demanded that Southern rogue Rhett Butler be played by that damn yankee Clark Gable. Readers are a very possessive bunch. So in taking a novel from page to screen, movie adapters must tread carefully, like a new visitor at Lourdes...
Carefully but critically, for it's simply not an option to be totally faithful to a fat novel. The movie version of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha takes 2 hr. 24 min.; reading his text could take weeks. Almost any novel's plot must be compressed into a black hole of incident and image. Then there's the challenge any movie faces of putting thoughts into words, emotions into gestures, descriptions into actions. And always the adapters must worry not just about satisfying those persnickety readers but also about pleasing the audience ignorant of the book...
...collaborators are librettist Michael Korie and composer Stuart Wallace, whose 1995 opera Harvey Milk, about the assassination of San Francisco's first gay city supervisor, won wide acclaim. They are aiming for a 2008 debut in the U.S. or China. Meanwhile, Tan is starting to think about her next novel. "I'm not sure what it will be about, but it will incorporate music, because that's my obsession right now. One of the things I do in thinking about a novel is find a fascinating place to set it, and then go from there. I think I've found...
...born in 1712 when Geneva—now Switzerland’s second-largest city—was still a stand-alone republic. After an eventful but unpromising early life, he gravitated toward the Parisian philosophe culture and wrote a string of highly celebrated essays and books staking out novel positions on education, politics, society, religion and the Enlightenment itself. He quickly became estranged from many former friends, and soon after persecuted by the authorities. After his 1762 critique of religion in “Emile” he fled first to Switzerland, then to Britain, and then, after...