A Wizard of a Different Color

This past weekend, I was on a panel at Philcon in which the question was raised as to why authors sell rights to their books to be made into frequently lousy movies that often either miss the point of the book or simply fail to capture its essence in what is, after all, a vastly different medium. (The original subject of the comment was the news that Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is being made into a film that will omit all mention of God or the church. If you've read those books, you're right now saying, "Huh? How is that possible, given that the church of the story is the main driver of the plot?" If you've not read them, you must right this minute get hold of The Golden Compass--the first book in the three-book series--and get started. Don't worry, we'll be here when you get back.) Potter fans have been dismayed by the liberties necessary to squeeze multi-hundred-page books into two-hour films. The Lemony Snicket movie's trailer appears to have the right look, and the girl playing Violet seems a good fit, but if you've read those (and yes, I'll wait while you digress to grab the first Series of Unfortunate Events book, too), you'll perhaps be thinking, as I was, that much of the joy of those books is the way the author plays with words. To wit:

"Lately," Count Olaf said, "I have been very nervous about my performances with the theater troupe, and I'm afraid I may have acted a bit standoffish."

The word "standoffish" is a wonderful one, but it does not describe Count Olaf's behavior toward the children. It means "reluctant to associate with others" and it might describe somebody who, during a party, would stand in a corner and not talk to anyone. It would not describe somebody who provides one bed for three people to sleep in, forces them to do horrible chores, and strikes them across the face. There are many words for people like that, but "standoffish" is not one of them.

Okay, so why does an author permit his or her work to be made into a substandard film? Well, one supposes J. K. Rowling didn't need the money, but some other authors do: if your book's not a best-seller, then the movie rights money may be what makes it possible for you to pay the rent, write your next book, or send your kids to college, or retire, or buy health insurance.

Of course the books I've cited here have all been some degree of pretty popular, enough that the motivation for someone to want to make a movie was that the property was already known, with a built-in core audience of fans of the books, and people who've been meaning to read the books but haven't yet and will settle for seeing the movie. Maybe the authors figured the movie would bring more readers to the books (this often happens; that's why publishers find it profitable to do a movie tie-in cover with an image from the film on it). Maybe the authors really thought the movie would be a faithful (if different: again, movies and books are different media--apples and oranges, people) representation of their ideas. Or maybe, as in the case of the Lord of the Rings films, the author was dead. (However, by most accounts the films are a pretty satisfactory adaptation of the vision of the books in that case.)

That last was what motivated Ursula K. Le Guin to sell rights to her Earthsea novels. She had worked herself to adapt them, and when she sold the rights, the screenwriter of the LOTR films was attached. Alas, the dramatis personae changed, and so did the end result. Le Guin kept quiet about such travesties as changing her nonwhite characters to nice, vanilla white people, and laughable errors in plot, until the filmmakers decided to put (wrong) words in her mouth about what she intended with the books.

One thing you don't want to do is put words in the mouth of someone whose business is words. Le Guin responded to the original remarks on her web page on November 13, 2004:

So, for the record: there is no statement in the books, nor did I ever intend to make a statement, about "the union of two belief systems." There's nothing at all about the "duality of spirituality and paganism," whatever that means, either.

Earlier in the article, Robert Halmi is quoted as saying that Earthsea "has people who believe and people who do not believe." I can only admire Mr Halmi's imagination, but I wish he'd left mine alone.

More recently, she's said more about the SciFi Channel film's whitewash of her characters, and the process that let it happen here and here.(Thanks to The Dark Lady for the tip.)

That's the beauty of sf and fantasy -- freedom of invention.

But with all freedom comes responsibility. . .

. . .which is something these film-makers seem not to understand.

The books are about two young people finding what their power, their freedom, and their responsibility is. I don't know what the film is about. It's full of scenes from the story, but in this different plot, they make no sense. Its hero goes through lots of Ged's experiences, but learns nothing from them. How could he? He isn't Ged. Ged isn't a petulant white kid.

It's like casting Eminem as Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

Be warned if you are an author, that unless you have a great deal of clout (and I've read somewhere that even Stephen King hasn't always been happy with liberties taken in the transition from page to screen, and if Stephen King isn't an author with clout, I don't know who is), your lovely shiny apple of a book may well come out of the filmmaking process as watered-down applesauce in the school cafeteria. Or worse.

More important, be aware if you are a film-goer that seeing the movie is most certainly not the same as having read the book.

Addendum: This evening on NPR's All Things Considered, Michele Norris interviewed Daniel Handler a.k.a. Lemony Snicket. Forget the article on the page (although the excerpt from The Bad Beginning at the bottom may pique your interest); just click the "Listen" button at the top of the article. I was especially amused to hear Norris quote back an interview she'd done with Handler a couple years ago, in which the author expressed trepidation that if Hollywood got hold of his books, they would probably do something awful like cast Jim Carrey . . . in response to which Handler seeks to back-pedal without quite taking back his original comments.