Crimes Against Tolkienity

[Eurytus]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR> I just don't accept that a director of an adaptation only owes a duty to the studio and the audience, there is something due to the integrity of the source material too.<BR> <HR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>That is doubtless a point of view that many hold but it does not necessarily ring true all of the time. Sometimes an adaptation needs to show less integrity to the source material. As an example we can view the Godfather film. Now that is pretty much universally hailed as a classic and yet would never have been the film it was had it followed the book. Indeed whole storylines have been ruthlessly cut out from the book. That does not mean that the book was bad, in fact I like it very much perhaps as much as the film, but the book would not have worked as a movie. The cuts were needed.<P>Often adaptation can become more interesting once they deviate from the source material. Two examples of this (in my case) are the films Richard III (with Ian McKellen set in a fascist 1930’s Britain) and Love’s Labours Lost (set as a 1930’s musical). In my view both of these films benefit from making changes.<BR>The same could be said of Moby **** . The novel is massive and contains a great deal of basically documentary descriptions of the business of whaling. It would have been overlong if incorporated into the film.<P>The Shining (Kubrick version) plays very loose with King’s book but just compare it’s quality to the TV version King endorsed. At their heart they are very different stories, they have different focus’s, but Kubrick’s adaptation is superior for the changes in my opinion.<P>Changes were made to the Exorcist, changes which the author did not like but again the end product justified these amendments.<P>The Shawshank Redemption takes a barebones story by King and transforms it into an absolutely classic film.<P>Jaws made many changes and again was all the better for it.<P>2001 A Space Odyssey left more unanswered than did the book and this made it different, and yet not the lesser for it.<P>To my mind once a director acquires the rights to a work he is within his rights to make whatsoever changes he feels are needed. The “rightness” of his actions will only become apparent or not once the critics and the public judge him. It is not his job to make a film “for the author” or “for the hardcore fans”. An example of what happens when the film is made “for the author” is to be found in the Harry Potter films. To my mind they are too weighty and flabby.