Fantasy Authors Are Not Playing: Creators Increasingly Call Out “Unfaithful” Adaptations
Posted by Ripclawe
Fantasy Authors Are Not Playing: Creators Increasingly Call Out “Unfaithful” Adaptations
Posted by Ripclawe
6 Comments
It’s a fine line. Sometimes you need to have the freedom to make some changes. Peter Jackson walked the line beautifully with The Lord of the Rings. But what’s important at the end of the day is that the creators love these stories and characters. Any changes need to come from a place of passion. Right now, a lot of these adaptations feel like mandates from executives trying to cash in on a popular IP. Not “Oh my God, this person came to us with such a good script and a love for this world!”
Eichiro Oda is showing with the success from LA One Piece that having author control of the content can generate success. It won’t be the way studios want success, which is as cheap and self serving as possible, but you can really tell the difference from the casting to the costumes to the essential soul of the story being intact between a truly great adaptation like LA OP and the god awful fan fiction mess House of the Dragon turned out to be. I hope they redo the Dance accurately as an animated series one day but I won’t hold my breath.
“Accuracy” is not at all relevant to how good an adaptation is , and generally novelists are bad judges of what will make a movie good or bad
See. Unfaithful doesn’t mean as close to the original as possible. Unfaithful means that it fails to capture the vibe of the original or has changes that fundamentally alter the story. Probably the most egregious choice i’ve ever seen is in the wheel of time show in episode one so not a spoiler Perrin had a wife that he accidently kills during a battle. Perrin did not have a wife at the start of the books. Him having a wife and her dying is a super bizarre choice because there is an actual scene in the book that accomplishes what I assumed they wanted from the dead wife plot point and it fundamentally alters his character. In season 3 and like 6 in universe months later he’s having smoochy time with his real love interest that is actually in the book and it just feels weird. Like, damn bro you moved on a little too fast from accidently murdering your wife.
“No movie-length version of The Shining could have ever captured Jack Torrance’s very gradual slide into madness as well as King’s novel.”
Off topic, but I have never gotten this. Even Stephen King has lobbied this specific complaint at the Kubrick film, saying that Nicholson was bad casting because you know he’s going to be crazy right away.
But the first chapter is all about how Mr. Ullman is this huge dick to Jack, and Jack keeps having these violent, intrusive thoughts towards him, which he doesn’t express out loud. Before we reach Chapter 2, we know we are reading a ticking bomb. Kubrick can’t capture internal dialogue without voice over, so instead Ullman is nice and you know Jack is a time bomb because of how Nicholson acts, but it’s still achieving the same effect.
Are there differences between them? Yes, but I think King just disliked the film in his gut and then went back and tried to give reasons why. It’s not THAT unfaithful of an adaptation (the entire monologue Jack gives is straight from King) as people make it out to be or even some of the movies and shows that King has praised!
This is a self-correcting problem. Authors who have these concerns can simply include language in the rights contract that requires the author’s approval of any element of the script that differs from the original work. The problem, of course, is that such a provision would likely make the work less attractive to producers and thus less lucrative. So the question is simple: which is more important to the author, the work or the paycheck?