"The book was better than the Movie." That's what literate movie goers say time and time again.
Somehow the world created for us by the author is not the world created for us on the screen. Characters that live on the page are strangled at birth by the screenwriter. Whole sequences disappear. New characters are created. Sometimes there are good reasons for the changes.
The compressing a novel into a feature length screenplay is an intellectual feat. One screenwriter called it akin to turning a cow into a bouillion cube.
Novelist John Irving has seen the process of novels to films from Both Sides Now. Others adapted his novels with varying degrees of success. Before Irving did the job on The Cider House Rules himself ... and earned himself an Oscar-nomination for "best screenplay adapted from another source."
Now Irving has written a memoir (turning his epic of orphans and abortion into a multiplex length drama) that explains the process of adaptation.
The nuts and bolts of turning novels into screenplays - in this hour. (Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)
