When is an Historical Novel Like a Movie Adaptation?

Writing an historical novel is much like making a book into a movie. There are three ways to make a book-length piece of fiction into a film.

First way, you can replicate the book as closely as possible, sometimes scene for scene. The Harry Potter films come to mind. Gone With the Wind. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, although even those movies left out large chunks of narrative. The books these movies were made from had a huge and demanding fan base. Watching the movie had better be pretty much like reading the book, or else.

The most spectacular failure in an effort of this kind, to my eye, was Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film, Greed. Von Stroheim followed the book it was made from, Frank Norris's McTeague, not only scene for scene but line for line, often putting a paragraph of Norris's text up on the screen to accompany his visual expression of it. No wonder the studio bosses took it away from him and chopped it to pieces. Setting aside the cost overruns, it was just too long for anyone to sit and watch. It's true that there are respected critics out there who believe Greed to be the greatest movie ever made. I don't think it's even a movie.

A book-length work of fiction is a different art form from a movie. The second way to approach making a book into a movie is to be respectful of that difference and also be respectful of the book, of the spirit of the book, that is, not the words, and to express that spirit cinematically. A good short story, like Brokeback Mountain, makes a better movie than a whole book, because there's less stuff in it. Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage was a huge book. The Hollywood movie that was made from it took just a segment of it and made a thumping good movie. Same with East of Eden.

The third approach is to take the book title and write whatever you feel like. You hardly even have to read the book to do this. Just make stuff up. Sometimes it's fine. Depends on what you're working with. Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex is a good example.

The problems of writing a historical novel are similar. The material you're working with may be bigger than what you're trying to do.

The first way to approach your historical novel is to put in everything you can find out about the place and time you're working with. All the famous characters, all the historical events, hardly anything truly fictional, like those terrific books from the English writers about the Tudors and the Elizabethans. Or you can write about a big handful of fictional characters experiencing different aspects of the reality of your historical period, like John Dos Passos in USA. You can get lost in this sort of thing, like von Stroheim in Frank Norris's work, and find yourself tracking down the buttons on the underwear your people would have worn when you should be blocking out swaths of dramatic action. But maybe that's okay, if you have what it takes to pull off a huge saga. (Like a loyal fan base, a supportive publisher, and thirty more years of productive life.)

The second way to do it is to respect the period, express the spirit of the period as you understand it, but put your own characters in your book, with their own drama. Get the details right, but find a segment of the universe that you can work with. Then go ahead and shamelessly write fiction.

Or you might use the third approach, which is not respectable but might be fun. Pick a period, pick a historical figure, put her in all the wrong clothes and tell bald-faced lies about her. Only make sure her heirs aren't going to sue you.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Heresy: Movies Better Than the Book

I am jumping on the CWC movie-talk bandwagon, and I am about to blaspheme.  You can yell at me in the comments section.

There are few movies that can touch the book on which they are based for sheer story pleasure.  No movie will ever really capture David Copperfield or The French Lieutenant’s Woman on film, though some have tried.

There are some exceptions, however. When embroiled in such dinner-table discussion, I have from time to time pointed to a few (very few, I admit), where the movie made from the book is really better than the book.  Here are three that I think fit that description:

Gone With the Wind

I am starting with the most controversial example, hoping you will calm down before you get to the comments section.   When I was contemplating writing my first historical novel, I had in mind a war-torn romance in the late nineteenth century.  (The book turned out to be a mystery and my second published novel Invisible Country.)  I figured I could learn a lot by going back to the grandmother of all such stories, Margaret Mitchell’s ever-popular American Civil War epic.  After all, “my war” began just as hers ended.  I had loved her book when I read it as a twelve year old.  So I bought a copy.

Of course, by then, I had seen the motion picture many times, and truth to tell, the movie too, in some ways, had lost its gloss for me.  My problems with the movie, though, had to do with the story, not with the production.  I just did NOT get Scarlett’s infatuation with Ashley Wilkes.  As a grown up, I had a hard time believing that a woman whose innards were anything like mine would hang on to her teenage infatuation with the pale Ashley when Rhett was hers.  Oh, I know she came to her senses eventually, but REALLY?  I was not sure whether that problem had to do with the casting or with what was in the book.

Anyway, I cracked the book expecting to find it better than the movie and also to be able to study it as a great example of how I should write my story.  Instead,  I found great disappointment.  For one thing, the whole Ashley vs. Rhett issue was just as jejune in the book.  Worse then that, I could draw lines across the pages to demarcate the fiction from the history.  Two and half pages of story, a page and half of history, four pages of story, three pages of history.   It was choppy.  That and the character of Scarlett as she appears on the page were enough send me running back to the movie.  On top of which, the book is MUCH more racist than the movie—the brave men who founded the Ku Klux Klan, the nasty descriptions of uppity blacks, the lovely blacks who had the decency to continue to act like slaves.  OY! as we say in New York.  It is only the wonderful actors in the movie who make any of the characters more than stick figures.  And you get a chance to see Clark Gable and Hattie Mcdaniel.

Marjorie Morningstar

It is also the acting that makes the difference in this flick of Herman Wouk’s novel about a girl who wants to be an actress.  I read the book before the movie came out.  For me, the actors so enhanced their characters and added to so much depth to the experience that the movie trumped the book.  Wouk is a wonderful writer.  In fact, his WWII novel, The Winds of War is the polar opposite of Gone With the Wind when it comes to how history should be woven into fiction.  Anyone who aspires to write a historical novel should read it with a screwdriver and wrench to try to figure out how he did it.  It is masterful.

Margery Morningstar is, on the other hand, a good but not a great book.  It’s a better movie, thanks to Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly, and the totally brilliant Ed Winn.

Jaws

The book is certainly a page turner.   But it reads like a screenplay, completely bare bones.  I admit that I could not put it down until I finished it, but then I would have forgotten all about it if it hadn’t been for Steven Spielberg’s terrifying film and especially the nuanced performance by Roy Scheider—one of the most underrated actors in history.

I promise to listen respectfully to your rejections of my opinions.

 Annamaria Alfieri