Book v Film

[rinue]

I'm sure I'm going to have to put up with this forever, but I find all discussions of "is the book or movie better" tedious. They're different animals. They could both be good, they could both be bad, one could be good and the other one could be bad. One could be good, and so you think you'll also like the other one, since they have some things in common, and then it turns out you don't like the other one and you're disappointed. But we don't need to rank them all the time.

"Did you like the music or the dance better in the ballet" is not as common a question. "Did you prefer the music video or the song as it exists in the context of the album" is a possible discussion to have, but not a knee-jerk one. Books and movies: they are wildly different. One has images. One can describe internal monologues at length. One has very many more words; the other one can use music or show you a facial expression - multiple facial expressions simultaneously. In a book it is easy for a character to turn out to have been someone else in disguise the whole time who we would definitely have recognized in the movie.

Is the Wizard of Oz better as a book or as a movie? It seems to me one of them is very good at being a book and one of them is very good at being a movie, and they are wildly dissimilar. What is the point.

This always feels like some stupid war between book people and movie people, or more specifically book people grinding an axe of resentment against movie people who did what. Who did what? I am a book person and also a filmmaker and you try to adapt something sometime, see how it goes.

Incidentally because I am a filmmaker, every time I come up with a short story somebody's like "ooooh you should make a movie of this," and usually I shouldn't, which is why I wrote it as a short story.

I'm adapting one of my short stories right now, and it is a story that is literally entirely dialog. And turning it into a screenplay is stupidly difficult. Radio play? Sure. But what the hell are we looking at during any of this?

"Which one will be better, the short story or the movie" is not a question I am prepared to be kind about with anyone.

Comments

[rinue]

P.S. Whole lot of people out there who are very snooty about having read children's books, and would it really be so hard to be able to name even one screenwriter, or know who directed the movie?

[sabotabby]

Haha. This.

People don't appreciate filmmaking, I think, because they don't ever see the process. When I watch student films, I am always struck by how few even make sense. I'm not talking about good or bad, I'm talking about you can't follow the narrative at all.

[rinue]

I have experienced this to a lesser extent even at grad school, and from talking to the filmmakers it's usually one of two things:

1. I'm a cinematographer, and I really wanted to get this one cool shot. The rest is padding. I'd rather leave the writing and directing to other people. But nobody else wanted to prioritize my cool shot, so I had to do it like this.

2. There was a technical problem and we lost a ton of the footage (or didn't have the budget to shoot a pivotal section), so I'm cutting around it and salvaging what I can. But I also left in a lot of stuff that doesn't connect to the new narrative because we worked hard on that stuff and you should see it.

I suspect these are the origin of the "kill your darlings" advice, which I generally don't think is good advice. I'm fairly sympathetic to student films from the standpoint that what's fun for an audience isn't necessarily what you think you need for your portfolio, or what you need to practice. I wouldn't put the non-working films in a festival, but I appreciate them. Unless they're films where an anonymous man walks into a motel room or warehouse with a bag of money, and then there's an anonymous shootout, and then a woman who is a whore and possibly also a maid walks off with the money (she is the only female character). I have seen that enough times and it has no value.

[sovay]

I'm adapting one of my short stories right now, and it is a story that is literally entirely dialog. And turning it into a screenplay is stupidly difficult. Radio play? Sure. But what the hell are we looking at during any of this?

So why are you making it as a film rather than a radio play?

[rinue]

Because I know film producers who will give me money for it as a film, and I do not know radio producers who will give me money for it as a radio play. I would also presumably be willing to adapt it for radio if someone paid me to do that.

[sovay]

Because I know film producers who will give me money for it as a film, and I do not know radio producers who will give me money for it as a radio play.

Fair enough. Good luck and I look forward to seeing it!