Making Books
The wild, unpredictable and neverending business of turning books into movies.

By Louis Bayard
Sunday, March 5, 2006

"Have you sold the movie rights yet?"

That's the question my old friend Harris asks every time he sees me. Harris doesn't read books, mine or anyone's, for the same reason that he doesn't wait on line in restaurants. He doesn't approve of inefficient delivery systems. If Harris wants a meal, he calls for reservations. If he wants a story, he takes concentrated doses from Turner Classic Movies or the north Jersey cinema palaces. Why spend hours, days, wading through prose when he can get the same end product in two hours?

So when Harris asks me in that musically hectoring way if I've sold the movie rights, he's really asking if I've given up my ridiculous infatuation with the written word. Well, no, I haven't. And the only consolation I can find is that the movies haven't, either.

Of the five films nominated for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards, three -- "Capote," "Munich" and the prohibitive favorite "Brokeback Mountain" -- have literary forebears. Stroll through nearly every other category, and you'll stub your toe on an adapted work: "The Constant Gardener," "A History of Violence," "Cinderella Man," "Memoirs of a Geisha," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," "The Chronicles of Narnia," "War of the Worlds" and a plucky little up-and-comer named "Pride & Prejudice," which received its first screen adaptation (sans ampersand) in 1938 for a British television broadcast. Was anyone watching?

In the weeks ahead, filmgoers hungry for lit-flick can take their pick of "Thank You for Smoking" (Christopher Buckley), "Ask the Dust" (John Fante), "Freedomland" (Richard Price), a teen-market spin on "Twelfth Night" called "She's the Man" and Laurence Sterne's baggy monster, "Tristram Shandy," which, I am told, has been read in its entirety by three people. (Sterne was not necessarily one of them.)

But who knows? Movies can churn out new readers for the oldest of source materials, and Tristram could become, some 250 years after the fact, a bestseller again. Surely more people have read Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" in the past six months than read it in the nine years prior, and kids (like mine) who didn't know Aslan from Sam-I-am are now getting a rudimentary course in C.S. Lewis appreciation from their local multiplex.

"People are looking back to the good material," says Michelle Kung, the Hollywood Reader columnist for Publishers Weekly. "You see that on Broadway, too. They're going back to tried-and-true properties."

That means properties that, in many cases, can deliver both a ready-made audience and a market-tested plotline. "The success of the movie industry comes from the story," says Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America. "And the story comes from somebody putting something down on paper."

Story, yes. That's what movies needed before they knew they needed it. In 1895, when the Lumière brothers dazzled Parisian audiences with the filmed spectacle of a train pulling into a station, they created a moment of pure sensation, but they also kicked into life a narrative engine that required for its future survival a steady supply of plots to fuel it. Where better to find them than in the crowded depot of literature?

Before the 20th century was even five years old, moviegoers had been treated to adaptations of Cinderella (1900), Robinson Crusoe (1902), Gulliver's Travels (1902), Alice in Wonderland (1903), Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903) and The Damnation of Faust (1904). In his very first year of directing (1908), D.W. Griffith cut his teeth on Jack London, Charles Reade and Leo Tolstoy. And when Biograph executives complained that Griffith's use of montage was too baffling for audiences, the director's reply showed just how squarely he was in the camp of literature: "Doesn't Dickens write that way?"

Indeed, Sergei Eisenstein contended that Griffith's entire magic bag -- from the close-up to the pan to the dissolve -- could be traced, more or less directly, to Dickens. We will never know, of course, who exactly was whispering in Griffith's ear, but there's little doubt that, in seeking to liberate the camera from its stationary vigils, Griffith turned less and less to the theater (where he had eked out a scratchy living as an actor) and more and more to the novel.

One such novel -- Thomas Dixon's The Clansman -- became "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) and was reportedly rewarded by Woodrow Wilson with a blurb from the Flackery Hall of Fame: "It is like writing history with lightning." Wilson was wrong on his history, but he was right on his lightning. Movies, as shaped by Griffith and his peers, were an electric new way of telling stories, as Dixon himself realized when he became "The Birth of a Nation" 's most ardent (and least repentant) publicist.

To be sure, the rest of the literary community was slow with the welcome wagon. Henry James, after taking his niece to a program of Lumière and Edison, was stricken with remorse: "I hope that some of the rather horrid figures and sounds that passed before us at the theatre didn't haunt your dreams. There were too many ugly ones. The next time I shall take you to something prettier." Joseph Conrad, commissioned by Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) to adapt one of his short stories in 1920, wailed the news to a friend: "I am ashamed to tell you this, but one must live!" Imagine his shame when the studio rejected his scenario.

We can safely say that, until Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne arrived in the late 1960s, famous writers had a statutory duty to thumb their nose at Hollywood, even as they fed at its trough. "A hideous town," said Fitzgerald, "full of the human spirit at a new level of debasement." And still the literary lions came rolling in: William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Thornton Wilder, Aldous Huxley, James Agee. And a not-so-funny thing happened. The books began to change the movies. (André Bazin argued that the Italian neorealist school was really "the cinema of American literature.") And the movies began to change the books.

There was an element of mercy to this. Authors no longer had to lard their chapters with physical description in the manner of a Balzac or a Trollope; the fund of common visual reference bequeathed to us by movies (and later television) meant that we were all, writers and readers, on the same page. Except that the page itself was changing: Text was losing ground to image.

This is something fiction lovers have never quite gotten over. I have a friend who makes a point of never seeing a film adaptation until she's read the novel in question. It comes down to principle with her, and I have to admit I've passed on "The Wings of the Dove" and "Angels and Insects" and even "Memoirs of a Geisha" for much the same reason. I want to experience a good book -- or a bad one -- straight up, without a mediator.

Ultimately, this qualifies as an act of self-defense, because a movie adaptation, if it's at all decent, will forever alter the way we see a literary work. The gourd-headed, prepubescent girl who gazes out from W.W. Denslow's original drawings in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz bears no relation to Judy Garland, but which Dorothy will follow the yellow brick road down through the ages? The Norman Bates of Robert Bloch's imagination was pudgy and bespectacled with thinning sandy hair -- until he was colonized by Anthony Perkins. And Sam Spade, if we're to trust the testimony of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon , has yellow-grey irises and a hooked nose and looks "rather pleasantly like a blond satan." Wrong! He's dark and dour with a scarred lip and an air of tragedy. Not to put too fine a point on it, he's Humphrey Bogart, just as Casper Gutman is Sidney Greenstreet and that deadly colleen Brigid O'Shaughnessy is Mary Astor. Nothing can persuade us otherwise.

Bibliophiles fall back on the assurance that books alone can draw us into the human soul. Or, as theorist George Bluestone puts it, a film "can show us characters thinking, feeling, and speaking, but it cannot show us their thoughts and feelings." By this logic, movies can never do proper justice to the greatest literary works because the power of these texts flows from the sensibilities of their creators and characters. No director will ever get a handle on Moby-Dick ; no celluloid transcription of Anna Karenina can move us as profoundly as Tolstoy's words; no actor, even one as great as Vanessa Redgrave, can make Mrs. Dalloway live on screen as she lives on the page.

But exceptions quickly crowd to the fore. Dickens, not surprisingly, shines beautifully on the screen; so do Fielding and Hugo and Dumas père and fils; so, for that matter, do Chandler and Tolkien and Highsmith. Even the most cinematically unpromising writers can be enhanced by translation. The turning point of Joyce's great story "The Dead" comes when Gretta Conroy pauses to listen to a tenor singing "The Lass of Aughrim." In John Huston's excellent adaptation, we hear that exquisite air, we see Anjelica Huston standing on the stair, and Gretta's epiphany becomes ours.

No movie studio, of course, is clamoring to bring Ulysses or Finnegans Wake to the screen. But an impressive number of books (bestsellers, mostly) are now being optioned for movies, from Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian to such unlikely vehicles as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink . "There's more Hollywood interest in books than there's been in a long time," says Variety reporter Steven Zeitchik. But he quickly cautions that "for every 10 options that get bought, maybe one or two get made, and that's very generous. . . . There are too many books out there, too many options. The cost of making movies has gotten so high."

Economics aside, movies and literature still have a very good reason to carry on their complicated romance; one might even call it a duty. As the television medium continues to chase down a factitious version of "reality," books and films can insist, against all evidence to the contrary, on the primacy of imagination.

Think of those awed Parisians who watched the Lumière brothers' train coming at them 111 years ago. Legend tells us they panicked, thinking the train was real; in fact, according to film historian David Thomson, they understood perfectly well they were watching an illusion. And I'm guessing that, as the shock faded, they began to wonder about this train, to ask the kinds of questions that create narratives. Where is it coming from? Who's on board? Who's waiting on the platform? ·

Louis Bayard, a novelist and reviewer, is the author of the upcoming "The Pale Blue Eye."