Why aren't all great books movies?

As you know, I've been "reading" (i.e. listening to) audio books on my commute since I started having this 25-mile commute back in June. I told you previously that I'd read around a dozen books since then, but I guess I was exaggerating -- Dean Koontz' False Memory, the last of whose 17 discs I finished on Tuesday (just in time for it to be due back to the library on Thursday), was my tenth.

Naturally, since I watch a lot more movies than I read books, my instinct is to imagine everything I read being adapted into a movie.

My next instinct is to wonder why more of them are not.

I know that it takes a substantial financial commitment by a studio to adapt a book into a movie, and it's not a venture to be taken lightly. But with all the crap scripts that get made into movies, you'd think that more of the work of someone like Koontz would have found its way to the big screen by now.

Until False Memory, I was completely unfamiliar with Koontz' work, though I've been aware of the man for at least 20 years. Back when I was reading Stephen King all the time, I think I got the impression that Koontz was in a similar category of fiction. But as I started to grow weary of King, the prospect of a lesser King seemed pretty hacky to me. Turns out that's not really what Koontz is, but the impression stuck with me for a couple decades.

But during my current audio book era, I decided it was time to give Koontz a shot. When the experience of reading is more passive, as it is with audio books, it's a lot easier to take a gamble on something that you might not like (especially when you are borrowing them from the library rather than buying them). Instead of forcing yourself to move forward page by page, you just listen until the point where you either get into it, or it's not worth continuing. (However, since I'm a completist by nature, I do try to finish what I start.)

I knew I better like False Memory, because I was going to have to listen to it at an aggressive pace if I was going to get through 17 hour-long discs before it was due back three weeks after the day of rental.

And it turned out that I loved it. (I'll also give some credit here to the reader, Stephen Lang, who played the villainous colonel in Avatar. The guy's got some serious chops.)

This post is not about recommending False Memory to you per se, so I won't bother with a synopsis. Just know that not only was Koontz' language exquisite (this was the biggest surprise), but his plotting was masterful. I loved how and when he chose to reveal certain information, and I genuinely could not predict where the story would go.

So ... why isn't False Memory a movie?

It came out in 1999, so it's had plenty of time to get there.

In order for you to better judge whether it should be, I'll give you a couple of the elements it deals with: agoraphobia, mind control, a mystery to resolve, violence and threats of violence, a twisted villain, psychological torture, family dysfunction and creepy dreams that would make darn good trippy asides in a film. There's even an adorable dog.

And then there's the fact that it already exists out there, lying around as an untapped property. No one even needs to think it up.

My guess? You have to pay Koontz a pretty penny to get the rights to his work. It's not as simple as saying "This is a really good read. Let's make a movie out of it." It's going to cost you, probably a lot more than it would cost you to commission some green writer to come up with a Koontz ripoff.

Or maybe Koontz' writing just isn't as superior as I'm making it out to be. Maybe there are a hundred Dean Koontzes out there writing stuff like this, all of which is good enough to be made into movies. The experience of listening to these ten audio books has taught me that I'm not as discriminating a reader as maybe I thought I was. I've liked each of the ten books to varying degrees -- none of them were merely passable. Granted, you're talking about some literary classics in there, such as The Age of Innocence and Brave New World. But even one of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch detective novels, Echo Park, left me completely satisfied and wondering about a possible film adaptation.

At least I was glad to see that some Koontz work has made it to either television or the big screen. Wikipeda shows 19 of his books adapted into movies, though almost none of them are movies I've heard of. The Ben Affleck bomb Phantoms was a Koontz adaptation, I see. Ha. (A bomb in more ways than one. In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jason Mewes yells to Affleck, "You da bomb in Phantoms, yo!") Stephen Sommers is directing an adaptation of his book Odd Thomas, starring Anton Yelchin, that's due out next year.

Maybe it's just that Koontz' astounding output makes it difficult to figure out which of his books to actually adapt. Wikipedia also tells me that the guy has written 106 full-length novels since 1968, not to mention another fifty-some essays and short fiction.

Whoa.

Maybe False Memory is just an average Dean Koontz novel. Which means that even if I don't have a False Memory movie coming out any time soon, I've got plenty of potential listening goodness, in the form of other Koontz novels, still ahead of me.

Guess I never ended up reading Hunger Games

I'm pretty disappointed in myself this morning.

Months ago, I vowed to read The Hunger Games before the movie hit theaters. Today, it's hitting theaters. And I haven't read it.

Yet more proof that I have become a hopeless reader. And maybe that's what disappoints me more than anything.

I have always been a slow reader, but at least in the past, I used to make my way through a couple books a year. At a minimum. But lately, I don't seem to make my way through anything.

It would be tempting to say that I don't find the time, because for the past 19 months I've been a father, and that kind of thing leaves you less time overall. But there has been no discernible drop in the number of movies I've seen -- those, I fit in. It's the reading that has really suffered.

Which, I try to tell myself, is okay. Fact is, movies are my "reading" -- they're the texts I'm consuming, because they're my passion. So while my friends may read more books than I do, I certainly see more movies than they do. Your value judgments on which practice is more objectively useful are yours -- but since this is a film blog and you're reading it, I'm guessing you're at least sympathetic to my position.

And I do this not only because of a personal love, but for professional reasons. If I wanted to be a book critic -- which I think would be a terrible job for me, because I read so slowly -- I'd probably read more books. But I'm a film critic, so films are my books.

But back to The Hunger Games. While I don't generally think it's necessary or even desirable to have read a particular book before you see the movie, I do think there can be a certain thrill to seeing something you read come to life on the big screen. From time to time, I think it's useful to create this situation for myself.

And The Hunger Games seemed like a good choice. I know it's sort of aimed at teens, but not to the same extent as Twilight, and a number of friends whose tastes I respect have spoken highly of it. Not to mention that it seemed like just the kind of quick, accessible reading to renew my interest in the joys of getting lost in a good book.

If not for a little twist of fate, I might have actually read it. A friend of mine was planning to loan me the book, but I didn't pick it up from him soon enough and he ended up loaning it to somebody else. With the pressure of having to read it and return it to the person who loaned it to me (even though he certainly wasn't planning to read it again himself), I certainly would have prioritized it. But without that pressure, it was left to me to either borrow it from someone else or buy it. With the ball in my court, I dropped it.

Yeah, there were a couple times I flirted with buying it. I had (still have) an Amazon gift card that would have been perfect for it. I also picked it up off the shelf a couple times in book stores, weighing the possibility of a purchase. But in each case, something stopped me -- like the fact that I'm still reading a book of Raymond Carver short stories my wife got me for my birthday in October, and have made almost no progress on it in the last three months. She actually bought me that book with the hope that the shorter stories would encourage faster reading, since she knows I aspire to read more. (When in fact, the opposite could be true -- you power quickly through a book because you become invested in its characters.) If I bought The Hunger Games before I finished the Carver stories, it would signal a certain defeat to both my wife and to me.

I guess I could still read the book before I see the movie. I am not by any means committed to seeing this movie in the theater, even though its 68 Metascore indicates that director Gary Ross seems to have brought it to the big screen successfully.

But now I'm also wondering if it wouldn't just be better to see the movie without reading the book. Sometimes, already knowing what will happen in a movie is a drawback to enjoying it as much as you might otherwise.

Let's take the example of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, arguably the most popular book in recent years other than The Hunger Games. (More popular, I'm sure.) I didn't read Stieg Larsson's novel, but I did see its Swedish film adaptation prior to seeing David Fincher's in December. I'd say that knowing how the novel ends, from seeing the first adaptation, did in fact affect my enjoyment of Fincher's movie. Then again, this may be a bad example, because in the end I just don't find the mystery itself in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo all that satisfying. It's also not a great example for this particular post because I didn't read the book. Reasons already discussed.

We can also look at the flip side -- enjoying a movie more because I hadn't read the book. I think one of the reasons I responded so positively to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II was because I watched it in suspense, not knowing what would happen -- whether one of our heroes would not survive the final chapter of this tale. If I'd read the Harry Potter series, I would have been watching the movie primarily to see how successfully they translated it to the screen, not getting caught up in a story whose twists and turns were, blissfully, still a mystery to me.

The nice thing about The Hunger Games, as it is now, is that I don't know what happens. Yeah, I know that the characters played by Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are pretty likely to survive the first movie. But I don't know what happens with a lot of the other characters -- in fact, I don't yet even know those characters. Since this is a story about life and death, there are definitely going to be a number of people who die. Maybe I'm better off not knowing. Maybe I'll enjoy the movie even more.

Fortunately, I don't have to make up my mind too quickly. This movie will be in theaters at least until May, and I wouldn't be going in the first couple weekends regardless. And I don't have to worry about anyone spoiling the movie for me, I wouldn't think -- the benefit of it already existing as a book is that if people intended to spoil it for me, they probably would have done it already.

If you plan to see The Hunger Games weekend, good luck fighting the lines, and I hope it's at least better than the Twilight movies.

The questionable necessity of reading

"Okay, Vance. In your last post you questioned the value of music, and now you're taking on literature??"

Eh, not quite. Read on.

On Thursday, I finished a 215-page book I had been reading since November. In fact, I made a special point of finishing it before the end of January, just so it wouldn't carry on into a fourth month. I am a slow reader, but this was slow even for me.

The book was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. It's not that I didn't like it -- I'm quite fond of Vonnegut's twisted world view, and this one was pretty twisted. I think part of the problem was that the book jumps around in time almost constantly -- which is the point -- and that makes it hard to get one's bearings, especially with his short, staccato sentence bursts. Plus, between Thanksgiving and New Year's is a famously bad time to accomplish much reading in the first place.

Why am I telling you about reading Slaughterhouse-Five? Because this was actually my second attempt. A year ago or longer, I read the first 15 pages and decided I wasn't in the mood for it right then. And so why am I telling you about that? Because my failure to read Slaughterhouse-Five has meant a failure to review Slaughterhouse-Five, the movie, directed by George Roy Hill and released in 1972.

Let me take you back a bit. In July of 2002, I watched Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five. It had no review on the website I write for, but for some reason, I forgot to put in for it right away. In fact, I didn't officially request it until a couple years later, at which point, the details were seriously fuzzy. Yeah, I can review (and have reviewed) a movie I haven't seen for many years, but it's not ideal, especially when the details did not really stick with me. So Slaughterhouse-Five essentially fell into the other category of movies I review -- the ones I get approved on before watching them, and then can write the review the moment I finish.

But then I got another idea. I had a copy of the book Slaughterhouse-Five. Why not read that first, and then have my review be yet that much better informed? When I finished reading, I'd closely follow that with my second viewing, and then I'd be able to write the definitive Slaughterhouse-Five review. (Never mind that this is a lot of work for a mere $20).

We're finally at that phase, and the movie should be coming to me sometime next week.

So why am I telling you about any of this? Because it brings up one of the great questions I struggle with as a film critic. Namely:

If you are reviewing an adaptation of a popular novel, how important is it to have read that novel?

This question interests me terribly. It's been a long time since I asked another critic this question, mostly because I don't run into many other film critics on the street. I think I asked a couple of the guys at my website, but it was so long ago that I forget what their responses were.

If a fellow critic is being honest, he/she will probably say, "It depends on what book it is." If they're being dishonest, they will probably say that they do read the book in question. But really, how can they? With their busy viewing schedules, and the other unglamarous things that fill out their 40-hour work week that don't involve writing actual reviews, do they really have the time?

When I read other critics' reviews of films adapted from novels, I usually catch at least some reference to how the film differed from the book. It's as though they -- we -- think it's obligatory. But I'm willing to bet that they've borrowed the Cliff's Notes, pow-wowed with someone who actually did read the book, or even just leafed through a couple pages to determine the author's style of presentation. Either that or they are much, much faster readers than I am.

But then there's another question. Does it even matter how a film differs from its source material?

I am a big proponent of the idea that a film is its own entity. When watching a film, you shouldn't need to have seen or read anything else in order to enjoy it, with the exception of sequels, where it is usually useful to see the other films in the series first. When I saw (and hated) Joss Whedon's Serenity a couple years ago, people told me that I would have gotten it if I had watched Whedon's short-lived TV show, Firefly. I call bullshit on that. A movie needs to start when it starts and finish when it finishes, and even a bushman from Africa should be able to sit down and enjoy it, assuming he's seen a movie or two and derives enjoyment from such an experience, and it's been given bushman subtitles.

The same logic sort of holds for adaptations. The movie has to live and die on its own strengths. It shouldn't matter if Character B is left out from the book. All that should matter is whether the characters they do concentrate on make us care about them, and whether it works within the context of the story they choose to present.

Of course, like any argument I offer you, there are shades of gray, and few absolutes. It's very possible that a book was good only or primarily because of certain decisions the author made, and that if a film were adapted from that book, they'd have to keep those decisions intact, or else it's not worthwhile source material. As critics, we have to maintain some periphery awareness of when conditions like this are in place ... don't we? And how do we know when, other than the general cues we get from the zeitgeist?

Even though there are plenty of real-world examples of this, let's take an extreme example from fiction, mostly because I'm living in this fictitious world right now. I am currently watching the first season of Californication on DVD, and in it, Hank Moody (David Duchovny) has just had his book God Hates Us All made into a romantic comedy called A Crazy Little Thing Called Love. If I were a film critic in Hank's californicating world, and were reviewing A Crazy Little Thing Called Love, wouldn't it be my duty to read God Hates Us All? Or could I just use the titles to get the gist of the fact that the producers betrayed the spirit of the book? Or would it even matter? Even in this extreme case, should the film still be taken only on its own terms?

Clearly the source material does matter in this whole thing. They do give out an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Why would they give this out at all, if not to honor the skill -- and presumably, the accuracy -- with which a screenwriter has translated an author's vision?

I don't have the answers to these questions. I will say that I already have reviewed hundreds of films where I did not read the book, and my work has been accepted with a smile. It's not a make-or-break thing, it's more of a philosophical debate. I've only reviewed one film where the guys at my website chose me for it because they knew I'd read the book: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. And yes, because I'd read it, and because I knew they probably wanted to see some proof that I'd read it, I mentioned some of the changes from the book to the screen. But they were perfunctory references. Did they really make my review any stronger, any better informed?

Slaughterhouse-Five notwithstanding, it would seem I'll have to stick to my personal status quo, until someone either starts paying me a heckuva lot more for my work, or I'm able to multiply my reading speed. Until then, I'll keep making oblique references to source material, hoping I've gotten the gist of it, and made the correct judgment about the relevance of the potential differences.

Oh, and in case you're still wondering what I think about reading ... I've just embarked on David Foster Wallace's 1,079-page Infinite Jest. Wish me luck, and I'll see you sometime in November.