Gah!!!
So damn frustrated. Gah! I feel like shouting, but it's a quarter to midnight, and even in New York City, there are probably people sleeping nearby. This author I've been speaking with, a client of my agency who'd written a screenplay, a sort of futuristic action-adventure thing, asked me to take a look at his novel based on the screenplay, which I finally got a chance to do tongiht, after ignoring it all holiday break. And in less than two pages -- hell, in the first paragraph -- I can see that all he did to transcribe it from screenplay to novel was take out the camera descriptions. Everything else -- stage directions, descriptions of action, dialogue -- is the same. Has this man never read a novel? Never flipped through one in a bookstore? Gah!!
What's a shame is that the story idea is pretty good, in a kind of Aeon Flux (not that I saw it) meets Dark Angel meets something way. But the execution... oh man, the execution.
I have to go cleanse my reading palate. The roomie mentioned something about a Joss Whedon article somewhere...
posted by ktbuffy at 11:45 PM
5 Comments:
As an interesting juxtaposition, I found that the novelization of the Serenity movie was very much the same way -- a reshaping of the script into a novel. Disappointing.
1/04/2006 12:47 AM
To me novelizations of movies lack the one thing that novels that become movies have, and that is depth.
I read only one novelization back when I has in high school, and found it word for word like the movie and so it didn’t add any insight as two what was going on. Where as when the reverse happens, the is so much more going on in the novel that never makes it into the movie you, come away feeling more in tune with the novel.
1/04/2006 10:50 AM
Blegh.
Novelizations of movie scripts, if they are written by the same person, seem often to be very lacking like that. Just not really adding any actual 'meat' to the story, just a dull re-tread of the movie storyboards in written form.
Novelization's written by someone who wasn't involved in the movie process sometimes turn out better, as the different writer will lend their own voice and emphasis to the scenes, assuming of course they are given the actual freedom to do that and aren't just lending their name to a ghost-written piece of crap.
1/04/2006 2:36 PM
The one thing novelizations sometimes bring is the "extra" bits that got cut out. Novelists sometimes work from earlier versions of scripts, or work from the scripts and include the sections that ended on the cutting room floor.
Of course, these days, with DVD extras and extended editions and the Internet, there are rarely any "surprises" of that sort. And studios tend to exercise a lot more control over these things than they used to, more's the pity.
1/04/2006 7:31 PM
If you can believe it, when I wrote the author and honestly told him what I thought, he replied that that's how he intended the novel to be. Like a screenplay. He referenced a story in the New Yorker, like, hello? When was the last time a New Yorker story became a gigornmously successful thriller?
1/04/2006 10:10 PM
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