Books Turned into Movies

Books are awesome. We can all agree about that, I think, or else you probably wouldn’t be hanging around my website! (Of course, that’s my assumption, and you know what they say when you assume something . . .)

Movies are . . . not books. Generally, I don’t enjoy them as much. I’m pretty sure it’s been my husband’s goal since our kids were born to turn them into movie-lovers so he’d have someone to watch all the movies with. It’s partly because I don’t think many movies are worth watching, and partly because I don’t always like the experience of going to movies.

Think about it. We pay to sit in a chair and watch something. We pay ridiculously high prices for junk food (or even higher prices for decent food at “fancy” movie theaters), because my husband can’t comprehend that you could go see a movie without buying anything to eat at all (despite the fact that I never got any snacks as a kid going to the movie and somehow I survived just fine).

Most of the time, if I’m going to watch a movie, I prefer to do it at home. In my pajamas. With my own snacks (good snacks, and alcohol). At a time that was convenient for me. Where I could pause it to get more snacks or go to the bathroom without missing anything. And without having to pay ticket prices or babysitter fees. Now, that’s usually still the case, but some movies are – I admit – better on a big screen with the sound turned up too loud.

But, I digress. I could probably write a college thesis on why people do or do not prefer movies in theaters and why there could be exceptions to the generalities.

Movies are still not books, and I’d always rather read the book than see the movie. Always. My husband didn’t go see “The Martian” in theaters because I hadn’t bought the book yet and I was NOT going to see that before I read the book. A few months after it debuted, I read the book, and we watched it at home while I nitpicked all that they changed from the book.

books do not equal movies

I think that’s part of the problem – I nitpick. If they cut or add scenes, cut or add unnecessary dialogue, add characters because heaven forbid you have a protagonist with no love interest, or the directors or authors take “creative liberties” to make things better for a visual audience . . . I notice all that. And you know what? The reason the book is always better, for me, is because I read the book and my brain has a preconceived notion of how things play out – it’s like a tiny little projector in my brain is showing me the movie while I’m reading the pages, and that’s my baseline for when I see an actual movie. If I love the book, or even just like the book, I have that baseline of what I’d like to see – and the movies almost never get it right, according to my brain interpretation.

Lately, however, there seems to be this shift in turning more books into movies or adapting them to TV shows. Just this month, Stephen King’s “IT” and Vince Flynn’s “American Assassin”. Several years ago, “Game of Thrones” and “Outlander” got turned into TV series, and earlier this summer, Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” and Stephen King’s “Mr. Mercedes” all found homes on television. Later this year, Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” hits the big screen, and they’ve just started filming on Neil Gaiman’s “Bad Omens”.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for bringing the books to life; it’s better than remaking films or coming out with spinoffs and sequels to things that were previously successful.

BUT.

There is a big difference in my head between simply “making a movie based on the book” and “making a movie of the book”. Personally, I only want to see the movies that are “of” the book. I want to see the movie that played in my brain appear on a screen. I want it to live up to my expectations. I want it to inspire me to go back, read the book again, and visualize the actors living the characters instead of whichever face I had created in my mind.

Last weekend, I saw “American Assassin”. I will be the first to admit, I had no idea who the actor was that played Mitch Rapp. No idea. None. When they cast him and said things like “Teen Wolf” and “Maze Runner” (both of which I had to Google because I’d never heard of them), and I saw that he had made a lot of PG-13ish type of things and looked like kid in middle school, it made me nervous. I was even more nervous knowing that Vince Flynn wasn’t around to provide input or feedback. Then they cast Irene Kennedy’s character, and she wasn’t going to be strawberry-blonde, and I got more nervous.

Plus, the books are great. They have a huge fan base because they are great books – and I really didn’t want the movie people to butcher it. Maybe I’m unique, but I would assume that if you like a book, you want to see that book on film, not someone’s interpretation of that book on screen. Right?

Alas, it was, I felt, a true movie of the book, which made me VERY happy. I liked all those people in those character roles. I like that some of the conversations were verbatim from the book. I like that things I remembered from the book were all there in the movie plot. I liked that they pulled in the guy who played Hercule Poirot in the BBC series to be the lead CIA guy. Mostly, I liked that – even though I knew what was coming – I was literally sitting forward in the seat the whole movie.

book equals movie

So. Now I know: it is possible to make a movie of a book, not just a movie based on a book.

No, this isn’t the first successful conversion. “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “Hobbit” trilogy, “American Gods” show – those are all successful for the same reason: the directors and cast are legitimate fans of the book and are trying to do the book justice. And I think “American Assassin” was enjoyable for the same reason: they didn’t stray from the book and wander into Oz to make a movie with bigger movie stars or crazier plot twists.

If this movie is – at the end of the day – a success for the movie studio, I hope 2 things: 1) that they continue to turn movies into books the right way, not the commercialized-Hollywood way; and 2) please make the sequels.

[And, no, whoever the movie critic is at Vanity Fair that wanted Thor (the actor and his justice-for-all-mentality) to play the role: in the book, Mitch is a 23-year-old dude with a serious “bad guys deserve to die” mentality, so the movie got it totally right. Do your research next time.]

Discussion

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