The Trouble With Adaptations, or Why I'm Sick of Hearing That The Book Was Better

We've all been in this kind of situation before. You've picked up a book, you read it, you loved it, you've read it front to back, fell in love with the characters, scoured its pages for little nuances, references, or clever details you may not have picked up on the first, second, or seventeenth time. Then you get the news: that book that you love so very very much is getting its own movie. You're super excited to see this story brought to life on the big screen. You count down the days til the premiere, you show up first in line for the very first screening, you're in a room with dozens or hundreds of people who adore this work just as much as you do. The lights dim, the film begins, and two hours later... you find yourself underwhelmed. Or disappointed. Or even angry. Something didn't go right. Maybe they left something out. Or several things. Or  they changed things. Maybe the director's vision didn't exactly match yours. Maybe the adaptation was in name only. It's a conundrum that cinephile and bibliophile alike have suffered through. Either way, there's no more disappointing feeling than walking out of the theater and thinking to yourself, “The book was so much better.” And there's no more infuriating feeling than discussing it with someone else and hearing them flippantly say “Of course the book was better. The book is always better.”

If there's a phrase that I'd be happy to never hear again, “The book is always better” would be somewhere on the list between “squad” and “libtard”. Not only is it a lazy and blatantly untrue statement of dismissal, it shows a lack of understanding about the process of making books into films. Adaptations have been around for as long as film itself, and stories making the transition from one medium to another have existed as long as stories themselves. For every movie based on a pre-existing book, play, TV show, video game or whatever, there is some kind of problem that comes with bringing it to another medium. Sometimes the director deviates so far from the source material that it becomes its own separate entity, other times it tries too hard to be loyal to the original work that it carries everything over much to its own detriment. There are literally thousands of examples that I could draw from, both good and bad, but for clarity's sake, I'm going to focus on three in particular: Les Miserables, Game of Thrones, and A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The journey from page to screen is a long, arduous and often thankless one. Thousands upon thousands of new books are published every year, while only a small fraction of screenplays sold to Hollywood studios per year actually make it to the screen. There are hundreds of publishers with as many different niches who all want to publish something different and market it to a specific group. There are only seven major film studios who all want one thing and are trying to sell their product to as broad an audience as possible. But if you manage to write a bestselling novel, there is a very good chance of some Hollywood executive knocking on your door to secure the film rights. And while you may have some insight on the filmmaking process (if you're lucky), you're basically putting your hard work into the studio's hands. Even though  a movie based on a popular book has a built in audience, that audience is going to be watching like a hawk and be a lot more scrupulous with its criticism. A book is largely the creation of its author(s) with some insight from the editor and maybe the publisher. Books also have no budgetary restrictions regarding what the book is about. The cost of printing a book is the same no matter what's on the page, so publishing a pulpy sci-fi novel costs no more or less than a historical drama. Movies aren't that simple. While the director always usually gets top credit, movies and TV shows are a collaborative medium that is the product of the collective talents of the director, actors, writers, cinematographers, editors and a hundred others, and the outcome is completely at the mercy of strict schedules, budget restrictions, and the demands of a studio that is usually more concerned with turning a profit than creating a work of art. This is why some books are deemed “unadaptable”: it's not that they can't be made into a movie, it's that it's either too long or involved to be condensed into a two hour film, it's set in a fantastical setting that would cost a fortune to bring to life, is filled with too much explicit content to get a suitable rating without gutting the story, or is structured in a way that uniquely fits within the medium of books.

Another problem with adapting books to movies is how monumentally different they are. Yes, they're both means of telling stories, but they have different rhythms, different sets of pacing, different ways of structuring plot, developing characters, building tension and  atmosphere and setting up action. But the biggest difference between the two hands down is the core material they're made of. Books are made of words, movies are made out of images. It's the difference between a house made of wood and a house made of bricks. Since books are made of words, they have more cart blanche to fill in as much superfluous and meticulous detail as they need. This includes fleshing out lore for the world, tidbits of history, or heavy descriptions of something as simple as walking from one end of the room to the other. A screenplay, however, has to be air tight. Everything has to fit within a certain time frame and page count, everything has to be well paced, and there's no room for digressions or filler. As Denzel Washington put it, “If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage.” There's also a golden rule that every aspiring filmmaker learns in their first year of film school: show, don't tell. You can't explain how a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment, it has to be conveyed by the acting, dialogue, camera work, lighting, music, and a myriad of other elements. What takes two pages of description in a book can be conveyed in a movie in five seconds. When you read a book, you read it at your own pace, but when you're watching a movie, you're watching it at the pace the movie is going. This is why a 700 page book is much more acceptable than a five hour long movie. When fans complain that stuff from the book was cut out from the movie, more often than not this is the reason why.

A perfect example of this is Les Miserables. The original novel, written by Victor Hugo in 1862, is a dense, sprawling, intricate narrative following multiple characters over a seventeen year period clocking in at around 1,200 pages. It's worth noting that the novel was written in a time when authors were paid per page written, hence why there's pages upon pages of digressions about French history and Victor Hugo's own political ramblings which seemingly add little to nothing of importance to the plot. While the book would still be pretty chunky even without all the fat, most of that filler was basically just Hugo writing himself a paycheck. When the book was adapted into a widely successful and critically acclaimed stage musical in 1983, it made the emotional core of the plot of the book much more inviting and engaging by cutting away all the minutia and tweaking characters and plot points to fit more snugly into a stage production. Although the play is basically an abridged version of the book, it brings out the emotional core of the story much better than the book can. That's not a knock against the book, it's a classic for a reason, but there's no working around the fact that it reads better as political minutia than as a moving narrative.

The 2012 film adaptation with Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway had the opposite problem. It had a slavish, dogmatic devotion not to the book, but to the musical. This sounds like a no-brainer on paper since the musical is one the most beloved plays of all time, but ends up working against itself. While plays have a lot more in common with movies than books do, it also has its own set of rules and things that work within its own confines but don't translate well to film. Both the play and the movie have a run-time of about three hours, both go at about the same pace, and yet the movie feels both more rushed and more sluggish than the play. This highlights the fact that both productions are just cliff notes versions of the book, with character arcs so condensed that they feel flat and one dimensional, exacerbated by a lack of small moments to serve as connecting tissue in favor of one big epic moment after another without a chance for them to settle in and mean anything. Another thing that gets really annoying is the constant singing. The play is basically an opera, which works fine on stage, but gets old fast on screen, especially when coupled with the run-time and pacing, and especially when compared to how realistic it's trying to be. The film isn't very good and has a ton of problems, from hit or miss performances to the director not having the stylistic chops to pull off something as big and grandiose as the novel or the play, but the script reeks of narrative adherence to its own detriment. Now adapting this particular work would be a herculian task for even the most seasoned of screenwriters, and doing a straight cover seems like they the most logical choice, but sadly this was not the case.

Other times taking this approach works in the adaptation's favor, like with A Series of Unfortunate Events. Based on a series of kid's books about a group of brilliant orphans whose parents died in a fire and are escaping the clutches of an evil distant relative who wants to steal their inheritance, this story has been adapted twice: first as a movie in 2004 with Jim Carrey, and more recently as a Netflix series with Neil Patrick Harris. Both have their problems (although the Netflix series is far and away the better product, but more on that later.) but those problems stem from adapting a series that was clearly meant to be read. Lemony Snickett (the narrator who is investigating the what happened to the Baudelaire orphans as well as the pen name of author Daniel Handler) has a very particular writing style. He constantly tries to dissuade the reader from continuing to read the story, and he has a habit of stopping the narrative dead in its tracks to explain the meaning of certain words. These things may read well and add to their overall charm, but they're pretty difficult to do in film without it seeming clunky and disruptive.

The movie is kind of a mixed bag. On one hand it captures the anachronistic gothic setting of the books, kept true to the overarching themes of the children's frustration of not having a say in their own future despite most of the adults in this universe being complete morons, and they did a pretty good job with casting the orphans. But where the film truly falls apart is in how they structured the plot. Basically what they did was combine the first three books (which makes sense on paper since the they're fairly short), but they're all stand-alone stories that don't flow into each other, so they surgically removed the ending of the first second and third book, moved the ending of the first book to the end, threw in some foreshadowing that wasn't supposed to happen until a few books later and rewriting the end of the villain's story arc for no apparent reason. It's like they were so sure that they weren't going to get any sequels that they did everything in their power to make sure they wouldn't get any. Oh, and Jim Carrey was a terrible choice for the villain, Count Olaf. Carrey's a great actor, but he's best when he's in his own element, and he is so not the right guy for this role. Count Olaf was a loathesome, vile, irredeemable bastard whose presence was a constant threat to the orphans' well-being. Yes, he was a bit eccentric, what with him being an actor and all, but they cranked that element up way too high, making him seem like much less of a threat. I'm not sure if this was a choice of the writers or an attempt to make the most use out of their A-list celebrity, but either way it just doesn't work. Honestly, I think the problem is that this series just isn't well suited to be a movie. With the books' short page count, long, involved, overarching storyline and episodic nature, this seems like a much better fit for television than film. Thankfully, the higher-ups at Paramount realized this, too.

The Netflix series had the advantage of not just from working with a more appropriate medium, but learning from its previous incarnation's mistakes. But it becomes apparent upon watching it that the movie has a bigger influence than one would initially think. Sure, they make a few well deserved jabs at it, but its fingerprints are still all over it, but they're more selective about what's carried over. The showrunner, Barry Sonnenfeld, was an executive producer on the movie, the set design bares a striking resemblence to the movie as well (with some noticable influence from Tim Burton and Wes Anderson), and while Neil Patrick Harris does a much a much better job of making Count Olaf a menacing character than Jim Carry did, he's still played as more of a goofy villain than he is in the book. Aside from that, the series stays true to the book's melancholic tone and its literary quirks are carried over much more naturally. The biggest instance is the narrator. In the book, Lemony Snickett's narration is its own parallel story about him investigating the orphans that dovetails with it later on. I don't know if having Patrick Warburton walk onto set and interject Rod Serling style would've been my number one choice, but it works a lot better than the movie, where he just hides in a shadowy clock tower the whole time. His habit of randomly explaining the meaning of certain words is something that was something that was going to be difficult to carry over no matter what. It reads a lot better and its a pretty amusing way for the author to expand the young readers' vocabulary and its apart of the series' charm, but some things read better than they are performed. There's also a big difference in the kinds of liberties they make. While the changes in the movie were mostly the result of screwing around with the timeline, the show seems to be messing with the viewer's expectations. There is one story arc that I won't spoil here that I think was specifically designed to make viewers of the fans go into a rage and then feel stupid when it's revealed what's really going on. It does ultimately become kind of pointless considering what happens in the end, but I will give them points for creativity. Of course the big problem is that so far both the show and the movie have only covered what are considered the least popular parts of the series. It's pretty much the consensus that the series didn't really hit its stride until around Book 5. The show will get there next season and the movie never even got that far.

So we've seen what happens when a story shifts mediums or when past adaptations begin to have an unexpected influence, but what about when an adaptation starts to take on a life of its own?

Game of Thrones is a tricky one because its evolution as an adaptation is pretty strange. Like Les Miserables, the Song of Ice and Fire series is so dense, complex and racy that bringing it to life would seem like an impossible task without mangling it beyond recognition and bankrupting whatever network decided to greenlight it, but somehow they managed to not only stay true to the source material (for the most part), but turn it into a pillar of the 21^st century cultural zeitgeist. A medieval fantasy with a heavy focus on political intrigue, it's a series praised for its complexity. Alliances are constantly shifting, opinions on characters can change at a moment's notice, and there are so many characters, plots, events, locations and motives that it's hard for even the most devoted fan to keep track of it all without covering their wall with pictures connected by yarn and thumb tacks. And somehow, they pulled it off... at for a little while. For the first three seasons, Game of Thrones was probably the best adaptation that one could possibly ask for. Every character was perfectly cast, George RR Martin's vision was vividly brought to life, very few details were changed or left out, and the few that were were either insignificant, such as getting rid of unimportant minor characters (which the book had in spades) or necessary to make the transition from page to screen. Not only that, but some of the changes were actually improvements. We got to see plot lines that were only alluded to in the books, and some of the more villainous characters were given a bit of a makeover in order to make them more sympathetic, making things a bit more ambiguous. But somewhere along the way, something happened. Around season 4, the changes became bigger and more significant. Some scenes were put out of order from when they happened in the books, characters that were alive in the books are now dead, some characters end up in entirely different locations or situations than they're supposed to be in, some of these changes were details that drastically altered their original outcome, some storylines were completely thrown out and went in unpredictable directions. Eventually, the series became its own separate entity.

So what happened?

The way I see it, there were two major things that contributed to the mutation of the show: the absence of the books as a guiding line, and the growing popularity of the show itself.  So far, there are five out of seven planned books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, with the first one published in 1995 and the latest one in 2011, the same year Game of Thrones premiered on HBO. Like I said before, for the first three and a half seasons, they stayed true to the books, but beyond that is where things began to get complicated. The first three books in the series, A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords, while rather lengthy and complex, were able to keep things pretty concise. But once they got to book 4, the plot became such a massive, tangled web of fracturing plots that they couldn't be contained in one book, even by the beefy page count standards of the series. George RR Martin's solution: separate them not by chronology, but geography. The fourth book, A Feast For Crows, focused on the goings on in King's Landing and its surrounding areas, while its follow-up, A Dance With Dragons, happened at the same time as Feast, but covered the plots in The North, The Wall, Essos and Slaver's Bay, converging things together in the end. This was obviously not an option for the show, so not only did they have to streamline everything, but they had to rewrite several subplots to cut back on production costs. Some were unnecessary (There was a sex scene in the book that was turned into a rape and threw a wrench into one of the main characters' story arc, but the context of it was pretty icky in the book too, so it was going to be unpleasant no matter what.) while others were purely utilitarian (like killing off one of the major contenders for the Iron Throne when the actor playing him decided to leave the show), but those choices created waves that shaped the show into its current state, and with the show still going strong seven years after the latest book and no indicator of when the next one will come out, the show had no choice but to chart its own path.

But something else happened: the show became one of the biggest cultural phenomena in the world. The books have been pretty well loved in the fantasy literature circuit for years, but it was the show that catapulted it into the stratosphere, opening the floodgates for subversive fantasy series like Westworld, The Magicians and American Gods. For the longest time, the fandom was strictly divided into two camps: those who have read the books, and those who haven't. This created a different dichotomy than other shows that captured America's attention like Dexter or Breaking Bad, in that half the people watching knew exactly what was going to happen. On one hand, this forced people to keep tight lips around certain fans, on the other hand it allowed them the chance to capitalize on their reactions to big game changing twists like the death of Ned Stark or the Red Wedding. When the show decided to go in different directions than the books, that dichotomy was gone and now everyone is on the same level of uncertainty. Without the guidance of the books, the show was forced to become its own entity. Whether or not it succeeded is debatable, but it inadvertently pulled the ultimate hat trick in defying expectations.

There are so many more examples of adaptational changes that I could give. I could talk about how Jurassic Park was able to maintain its main storyline while arranging nearly all of the inner details. I could talk about how the most iconic scenes in The Shining were purely Stanley Kubrick's creation, how Stephen King hated the changes and the more loyal but far less interesting mini-series that was made in reaction to it. I could talk about how The Princess Bride, Forrest Gump and The Godfather became stone cold classics despite the fact that the books they were based on weren't very good. Every book that gets turned into a movie or TV show has its own set of challenges when making the transition from page to screen, so expectations should be adjusted accordingly. Sure, there have been a ton of terrible adaptations (don't even get me started on the hatchet job that is Hollywood's relation with Dr. Seuss), but the next time you go see a movie based on a book that you have read, just remember that changes aren't always bad. In fact, they're both inevitable and neccesary.

Movies based on real historical events, though, that's a different story.