Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge in Stanley Kubrick adaption of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange
The poet John Godfrey Saxe is
attributed with first saying Otto von Bismarck’s famous maxim: laws are like sausages, it's better not to see how they're made. In politics and government, sometimes ideas become much different after moving through the process. With laws, everything starts as a bill, "
just a bill." But by the time it gets through committee, is amended, maybe has riders and earmarks attached and moves to final passage, it can end up as something the original author may not even approve of or recognize.
The same is true about entertainment, especially when it's an adaption of an author's work for film or television. Most movies have multiple screenwriters, some credited and some not, and the resulting screenplay is usually a hodgepodge of different ideas and threads from multiple sources. If the material is based on someone else's work, the author may be involved and give input (e.g., George R.R. Martin with HBO's Game of Thrones), or they may be shut out of the process and have absolutely no say in the adaption, even though their name will be on the film and may be part of the marketing.
So, in this week's post, I thought I would look at the things not intended where the creator of a work hated the adaption. Follow beneath the fold for more ....
- The recent Saving Mr. Banks is a fictionalized history of the making of the 1964 Disney classic, Mary Poppins, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Saving Mr. Banks takes some artistic license with what actually happened (in fact, some have accused Disney of historical revisionism with Saving Mr. Banks), but the basic facts are that Walt Disney pursued the film rights to Mary Poppins for 20 years. Author P.L. Travers ultimately relented and was involved in the development of the film. However, most of Travers' suggestions were disregarded and she hated the final product because of changes made to the story (e.g., Travers wanted Poppins to be much sterner, as she is in the books) and her dislike of the animated sequences in the film. At the Mary Poppins premiere, Travers broke down in tears after the film finished, while at the same time the audience was giving Mary Poppins a five-minute standing ovation. When a stage musical based on Mary Poppins was being developed in the '90s, Travers made it a condition of her approval that no one from the film production could be involved with the making of the musical, including the Sherman brothers, who wrote "Feed the Birds," "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," "Let's Go Fly a Kite" and the Oscar winner "Chim Chim Cher-ee."
From Caitlin Flanagan at
The New Yorker:
The première was the first Travers had seen of the movie—she did not initially receive an invitation, but had embarrassed a Disney executive into extending one—and it was a shock. Afterward, as Richard Sherman recalled, she tracked down Disney at the after-party, which was held in a giant white tent in the parking lot adjoining the Chinese Theatre. “Well,” she said loudly. “The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence.” Disney looked at her coolly. “Pamela,” he replied, “the ship has sailed.”
- Ernest Hemingway loathed Frank Borzage’s 1932 adaption of A Farewell to Arms starring Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper. The novel is semi-autobiographical and was based on Hemingway's own experiences on the Italian front during the First World War. The movie focuses much more on the romance between Henry and Catherine Barkley than the book, and downplays some of the elements of horror in World War I that Hemingway wrote about. The movie also changes Hemingway's ending.
- With so much being made into a film, why has The Catcher in the Rye never been adapted into a film? J. D. Salinger's short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut was adapted to a film called My Foolish Heart in 1949. The film took many liberties with the source material, and Salinger hated it so much that he never again relinquished the film rights for any of his works.
- In general, Alan Moore tends to run the gamut between disliking and hating the attempts to translate his stories to film. Moore has claimed to have never watched any of the movie adaptations of his stories, which include V for Vendetta, From Hell, Constantine, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen. Moore has stated that his opposition is based on his belief that these stories were created to be comic-books and not films, and they're meant to be experienced in a certain way. Moore has went so far as to ask that his name be removed and not used in marketing for any film he doesn't own. He also refuses to accept any money from these adaptions.
- A major theme of Stanislaw Lem's work is communication and understanding. Solaris has one of the most intriguing questions of any of his novels. If we have problems communicating with each other as humans, or coming to terms with our own internal feelings, how do we expect to talk to and understand something alien? Both film adaptions of the novel, the 1972 film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and the 2002 version by Steven Soderbergh, focus on human relationships and the impact to the personal psyche of the characters than the larger question of trying to understand the nature of the alien intelligence that is a sentient planet called Solaris. Lem has stated that both movies miss the point of his story.
"To my best knowledge, the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space ... As Solaris' author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book was entitled "Solaris" and not "Love in Outer Space."
- A Clockwork Orange is an interesting case of "creator backlash," given the attitude author Anthony Burgess came to have towards the film adaption. Reportedly, the story of A Clockwork Orange was inspired by the assault and rape of Burgess' wife, Lynne. Burgess expected the audience to be repulsed by Alex and the Droogs. But instead, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is considered one of the director's best, and the Droogs became iconic in pop-culture. That led to Burgess coming to regret that he wrote the book in the first place.
From Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess:
“We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.”
- Roald Dahl seems to have hated most of the film adaptions of his works. He despised The Witches and found it "utterly appalling." The only thing he was said to have liked was the casting of Angelica Huston as the head witch. Reportedly, Dahl was so angered by Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory that he left it in his will that Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator could never be made into a movie. Dahl found the movie to be "crummy," thought Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka was "pretentious" and "bouncy," and criticized director Mel Stuart as having "no talent or flair." Interestingly enough, forty-years later Gene Wilder was the one doing the criticizing with the release of Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
- Ayn Rand hated the 1949 movie version of The Fountainhead, even though the screenplay was written by her and barely altered. She refused to let any of her other novels be filmed unless they let her pick the director and edit the film herself. It was only after her death the film rights to Atlas Shrugged were finally sold by her estate.
- The works of Clive Cussler, especially the adventure novels featuring the character Dirk Pitt, have been horrendous adaptions hated by Cussler. Raise the Titanic! was adapted into a 1980 film starring Richard Jordan that was a critical disappointment and a huge box office bomb. Cussler then refused to option the rights to any of the Pitt novels unless he had both casting and script approval. Eventually Cussler agreed to sell the film rights for Sahara, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Penélope Cruz. As per his agreement with the production company, Cussler retained casting and script approval only until a director was hired, and then those rights would be reduced to "consultant." However, this was not Cussler's understanding of his powers in the production. Eventually a director was hired and the production proceeded without Cussler's agreeing with its direction that involved 10 different writers taking turns writing the script. Cussler then sued the production company claiming breach of contract. The production company counter-sued Cussler claiming fraud and that his actions had sabotaged any possibility of success for the movie. The legal issues surrounding Sahara spent years in litigation before being resolved with no one getting anything.
- Anthony Burgess was not the only author to be pissed off by a Stanley Kubrick adaption of their work. Stephen King loathes Kubrick's version of The Shining, so much so that he made his own adaption for ABC back in the '90s. In order to receive Kubrick's approval to re-adapt The Shining, King had to agree in writing to tone down his criticism of Kubrick's film. Although, King has been more vocal about the situation recently and said that his book was about a normal man who goes crazy, where Kubrick's film is about a crazy man who goes absolutely bonkers. King has also stated that he disliked what Kubrick did with the character of Wendy Torrance. In order to get what he thought would be a better performance out of Shelley Duvall as the meek, terrified wife in The Shining, Kubrick verbally abused her, told the crew to treat her like shit and did everything he could possibly do to put her through misery during the shoot. The scene in which Wendy confronts Jack Torrance and nails him with a baseball bat is in the Guiness Book of World Records for "The most retakes for one scene with dialogue." Kubrick made her redo it 127 times in order to wear her down to the point she was actually hysterical.
From Will Gompertz at
BBC News:
King: "[It’s] cold, I'm not a cold guy. I think one of the things people relate to in my books is this warmth, there's a reaching out and saying to the reader, 'I want you to be a part of this.' With Kubrick's The Shining I felt that it was very cold, very 'We're looking at these people, but they're like ants in an anthill, aren't they doing interesting things, these little insects’ ... Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film, she's basically just there to scream and be stupid and that's not the woman that I wrote about."
- Peter Benchley came to regret writing Jaws. Benchley didn't like some of the changes from his novel to Steven Spielberg's film. For example, Richard Dreyfuss' shark scientist Hooper and Chief Brody’s wife (Lorraine Gary) have an affair in the novel, which is dealt with karmically at the end of the story when Hooper is eaten by the shark during the climax. The film excises that and replaces it with an ending that has an oxygen tank that goes boom, spreading pieces of shark all over the ocean. However, that's not why Benchley regretted the book and the film. When he learned that drastic overfishing was driving many shark species to extinction, Benchley came to believe he was at least partially responsible due to Jaws contributing to a fear of sharks around the world. Benchley became a very vocal ocean conservation activist.
- With One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Miloš Forman film adaption of Ken Kesey's story won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay at the Oscars. However, Kesey disliked the shift of the point of view away from Chief Bromden to McMurphy, and also thought Gene Hackman would have been a better fit as McMurphy than Jack Nicholson. Kesey long claimed that he had never watched the film and had no interest in doing so, but Kesey's wife, Norma Faye Haxby, claimed his position on the movie softened over time.
- Ursula K. Le Guin despised the Sci-Fi Channel adaptions that were very loosely based on her Earthsea trilogy. And she seemed to get really ticked off when people involved in the production started giving interviews where they claimed to know what her intentions were with the novels.
"I've tried very hard to keep from saying anything at all about this production, being well aware that movies must differ in many ways from the books they're based on, and feeling that I really had no business talking about it, since I was not included in planning it and was given no part in discussions or decisions. That makes it particularly galling of the director to put words in my mouth. [Director Rob] Lieberman has every right to say what his intentions were in making the film he directed, called "Earthsea." He has no right at all to state what I intended in writing the Earthsea books."
- When you say the title Death Wish, you probably think of Charles Bronson gunning down criminals on the subway. Based on Brian Garfield's novel of the same name, the story involves a middle-aged New York City architect whose life is irrevocably changed after his wife is killed and his daughter is raped and left comatose by thugs. The movie, along with Dirty Harry and other films of the mid-70s, tapped into concerns and fears over rising crime rates. However, the film is always on the main character's side as he transitions from being a pacifist to walking the streets of Manhattan with a .32 caliber Colt revolver looking for criminals to gun down. In Garfield's book, the shift is much more ambiguous, and the vigilantism is not seen as a good thing or is it as much about vengeance or deciding "we're not gonna take it!" anymore. It's an expression of the main character's desire to prove that he's still in control of his life. Each Death Wish sequel devolved and became more formulaic with each iteration. In response, Garfield wrote his own Death Wish sequel called Death Sentence which has the character having to deal with the effects of his actions. However, Death Sentence was also adapted into a film that is not what Garfield intended either.
- Bret Easton Ellis either dislikes or is ambivalent about almost all of the adaptions of his novels, including Less Than Zero and American Psycho. The latter film has become something of a cult classic, with many critics thinking it's one of Christian Bale's best performances. However, Ellis thinks the film is flawed because it conflicts with the nature of his novel.
“American Psycho was a book I didn’t think needed to be turned into a movie. I think the problem with American Psycho was that it was conceived as a novel, as a literary work with a very unreliable narrator at the center of it and the medium of film demands answers. It demands answers. You can be as ambiguous as you want with a movie, but it doesn’t matter — we’re still looking at it. It's still being answered for us visually. I don’t think American Psycho is particularly more interesting if you knew that he did it or think that it all happens in his head. I think the answer to that question makes the book infinitely less interesting.”