Books and movies

Do novelists have a movie deal in mind when they’re writing? Does the anticipation of a Hollywood bonanza affect what and how they write, to the detriment of the product? Rachel Donadio explored that question in this essay in the New York Times on 11/25/07. The general consensus seemed to be that authors write what they must and share Rick Moody’s view: “if the film community cares to try, that’s fine with me and indicates fortitude on their part,” Donadio quotes Moody as saying.

Several say that writing for the movies made them a better novelist. They become aware of and use devices that would confuse movie audiences. Movie writing “has the paradoxical effect of making me a more literary writer, much more conscious of what I can do in a novel that I can’t do in a script: the ease of a flashback within a flashback, how you can have immediate access to any event in your character’s life,” said Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children.

Only somewhat apropos of all this, we are reminded of the Hollywood-insider joke: Did you hear the one about the ambitious blonde starlet? She slept with the writer.

When the movies come a knockin’, authors – OK, authors’ agents – gladly answer the door. The writer doesn’t have much say over what happens once the option is granted and, as we understand it, CAN’T say much. Diana Gabaldon called it the “Tom Wolfe/Anne Rice” clause in the option contract, forbidding the author to say anything bad about the movie. (Those who saw the movie of Bonfire of the Vanities might understand Wolfe’s vitriol.)

And speaking of movies into books, we suspect Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men fared much better on the screen than All the Pretty Horses (although I have to confess, I haven’t read No Country for Old Men). The Coen brothers’ images – a pool of blood oozing across the floor, vast landscapes shimmering with heat, a shabby motel room – were redolent of the poetic images McCarthy conjures.

Tags: Authors, Books