Hollywood Follows the Reader

· "Memoirs of a Geisha": You've already read the book.

· "Pride and Prejudice." If you've already read the book, so much the better. If you haven't and you're smart and young, you probably should read Miss Austen (and if your high school hasn't required it, find a new high school). If you're old and you haven't read the book, it's probably too late for you, as it is for me.

· "Everything Is Illuminated." I have no comment, but others do: "Inspired though uneven first novel." -- Publishers Weekly. "*** 1/2 " -- Amazon.com.

· "Harry Potter and the Flagon of Iced Vodka": Everyone else has read the book, Rowling doesn't need your 7 cents, so you can skip this one.

At least three others are also scheduled, movie versions of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" and, more obscure, Mark Spragg's "An Unfinished Life."

Now to another query: Does it matter if they change the book? The answer is, it doesn't matter if it matters, because, regardless, they're going to change it. They have to. Storytelling movie-style is different than storytelling prose-style. The primary issue in prose is motive: You have to understand why the people do what they do, or else the whole shebang falls apart as illusion. The minds of the characters have to be consistent to be believable; action has to flow from character. Fiction writing is about what happens internally, even if lots of guns come out and stuff blows up.

Movies don't have time for all that internal crap. They can't go inside, so what's the point? They can show only from a distance, and if people do things -- silly things, random things, violent things -- we still accept it because, well, we're seeing it. It's there, it's reality, we go with it. Then there are pressing commercial obligations: They have seven minutes to catch the attention of a 17-year-old boy whose brain has been fried by video games and who, when he's not lost in cyberspace, primarily wants to get high or laid, in no particular order. He is the key to their riches; he must be pandered to.

Therefore the movies usually have the freedom to pass on motive, or presuppose it. For people who learned story from fiction or old movies (à la moi ), this is insanely irritating. But it doesn't matter what we think because there aren't enough of us anymore. What matters is spiking that boy's brain. Kick him in the head and you open No. 1 with over $50 million domestic BO. The action may be -- indeed almost certainly will be, by fiction standards -- arbitrary, unrooted, completely disingenuous, but that's not important; it has to grab hard and fast. So books have their longueurs taken out, their motives truncated, their characterizations reduced to primary colors (or black and white) and their action sequences ginned up, multiplied, amplified and made incandescent, movie-ized. Then everything is made tidy.

There are about a million cases in point, but let's just look at one of them. At the end of Charles Frazier's wonderful novel, "Cold Mountain," there's a furious shootout between hero Inman and Capt. Teague and his vigilantes. (Note: Spoiler Alert.) Inman kills all but one, then turns to face a punk kid who happens to be a mite faster. He kills Inman and rides off whooping to celebrate his victory.

I hated that. Sorry, Frazier, but I really hated that. Kill that damn kid! Shoot him in the guts! But I'm a melodramatist, Frazier a dramatist. Frazier had too much integrity for that and his view of the universe was tragic; he knew that the tidiness of melodrama had no equivalent in the real world. Messy is real, tidy is phony. Messy is literature, tidy is thriller. But not director Anthony Minghella in the movie version. He knew that for the unwashed, that damned kid had to die. Blammo! Inman blows him out of the saddle, the horse gallops off dragging his pitiful corpse behind. Even in an upscale product like "Cold Mountain," with its big-name cast and classy mounting, a note of barbaric ignorance triumphed. It's better Frazier's way, but it's cooler Minghella's way.

And that, finally, is the deepest truth of the book into the movie. That explains why, for lovers of the book, the movie almost never satisfies. Movies made from books aren't made for readers of the book -- even with a mega-success like "Cold Mountain," the prose-buying audience isn't big enough. Movies, then, are made for all the people who haven't read the book. Don't think of the movie as the book, it's more like an advertising flier from the book. It'll contain snatches, whispers, hints of what was, but in all other regards it'll be so much less complex, so much more turned toward anime. It's for a different part of the brain of a different kind of human being than the kind who likes to read books! That's not bad or good, it just is!

Thus the jiggering of "Cold Mountain" makes perfect sense. It's like Barry Levinson letting "The Natural" pound a boomer out of the park when, of course, the great American novelist Bernard Malamud, another with a tragic view of the universe, had struck him out in the original to the tune of "Say it ain't so, Roy." It's pointless to whine: Roy hits the boomer and Inman plugs the kid -- that is what movies do, that is what they are, that is how they work.

Finally, does reading the book first spoil the movie? The answer for the filmgoer is yes, the answer for the book reader is no. The filmgoer wants plot -- that is, outcome. If he knows what happens, the fun is gone; the book becomes just a collection of spoilers. Other than that, it's meaningless; it's just a part of the process by which that bright thing got up there on the screen.

For others (me, and at least seven or nine more) the movie is ephemeral, the book is real. Literature -- even simple craftsmanship -- is a higher art than filmmaking. The movie exists only when it's in the act of being projected; the book has the capacity to be savored. You cannot savor a movie. Ever stop a DVD at a particular moment that you love because you want to sustain the pleasure, at which point you realize that the single frame is nothing and has no magic? It's just a meaningless blur. It's not the movie. The book, however, may be reread and re-experienced almost infinitely; sentences, phrases, images can haunt you. I remember in John le Carre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," spymaster George Smiley realizing something at "a speed which has no place in time." What a great evocation of the workings of the subconscious -- simple, elegant, precise. That phrase has never left me and I help myself to it at least three times a year, and get a little jolt of pleasure from my larceny. That's the sort of abiding pleasure books can give that movies can't, won't and never will.