Let's Talk Adaptations

This week, I’ve been weirdly followed around by the topic of book adaptations, so Kristin told me to take that as a sign and write about it. TV or movie adaptations can be a contentious topic among fandoms, and my opinion might differ greatly from where others fall, but let’s have a conversation about what plays into making an adaptation favorable or unfavorable.

            Essentially, this topic cropped up from a random tweet I saw where someone was asking if people had a favorite movie adaptation, which automatically broke my brain with the question “Do I have a favorite movie adaptation?” It took me a second, but I realized that I did.

            This might be a bit of an odd answer, but I really love the 2006 movie adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s novel, Hoot, for many reasons. One, this movie came out when I was younger, so I think it has that crucial nostalgia vibe for me. Hoot is a very good book, and this movie adaptation stays pretty close to the original story. It has a star-studded cast with the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Clark Gregg, Luke Wilson, Tim Blake Nelson, and that’s before you even count in the kids portraying the main trio (most of whom would become household names) of Logan Lerman, Brie Larson, and Cody Linley. Like, come on, what a cast, and all of them are so spot-on with their characters. I know the author, Carl Hiaasen, does make a brief cameo in the film, though I’m not sure how much he was involved in the development of the story. If he was involved quite a bit, that might be why this adaptation falls closer to the original story than others. This is a definite comfort movie for me and every time I watch it, I actually notice something else that makes me appreciate it more. Hoot is an extremely nature/conservation-driven story and this movie has beautiful B-roll to emphasize this point featuring Florida’s landscapes and animal life. Florida is a place that’s very special to me as I’ve spent quite a bit of time there as I’ve grown up, and this movie has a special connection to me as well as I’ve actually gotten to visit one of the places it was filmed, the Silver Springs state park where many famous movies have been shot due to the clarity of the water (crucial for underwater scenes), most notably Universal’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

            Like I said, this movie and book in particular might just check a lot of boxes for me in story, nostalgia, personal connection, casting, and beauty of film, but all those things play in to why I like it so much. Because I liked this movie so much, I sought out the book and have read it several times since, as I’ve done with countless other books. From a strictly business perspective, a movie/TV adaptation is an extended commercial to drive sales to your book, though that’s a bit of a cold assessment. In truth, I think what most people want from an adaptation, if they’re already familiar with a story, is a respectful portrayal of the thing they love, clear in dedication and purpose. If you’re unfamiliar with a story and are the type of person that will seek it out, you kind of want the same thing, you just don’t know it yet.

            I think what truly makes a good adaptation is the intention behind it, and knowing where your boundaries lie on how much of the story needs to be true to the original and how much wiggle room you have to change, add, or adapt. I don’t remember exactly where it was, but I once heard the point made that each iteration of a story will likely have to be changed and adapted a bit, and that might be something readers and writers will have to learn to grapple with. I think the question then becomes proportioning the correct balance of these things.

            I’m not sure if other people feel this way or not, but I’m someone who tends to give a bit more lenience to movie adaptations that maybe don’t always go the way I want them to.

Let’s take a notorious example (Now would be the time to sound the jingle because I’m going to talk about Percy Jackson). Okay, so to back up, I was not familiar with Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians before seeing the 2010 movie adaptation (also coincidentally starring Logan Lerman), and this movie is infamous for not being a good book-to-movie adaptation. I’ve always found this a little weird since Chris Columbus directed this movie adaptation which was extremely dissimilar to the book, while he also directed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, both of which are pretty faithful to their J.K. Rowling book counterparts, but I digress. Most of the plot of the movie version of The Lightning Thief is taken from one chapter of the book, the cast were aged up significantly, and there were just a lot of changes made to the story in general. Does this necessarily make it a bad movie? In my opinion, no. Does it make it a not-so-great adaptation? Yes.

            I’ve always been able to watch the movie version of The Lightning Thief and find it enjoyable- it’s got a star-studded cast, it’s an exciting action movie, and it’s a fun story. As I said, I had no knowledge of what Percy Jackson was supposed to be before watching it, so maybe that’s why I can have this opinion of the movie. I liked the movie so much that I immediately went out and got the book, which as it turned out was really different, but even better. More importantly, after leaving the movie theatre, my parents and I went shopping before we went home and I remember walking around just baffled at a story that had so many elements of interesting characters, mythology, action, and humor that I loved, that I’m pretty sure this is the first story that made me go: “I want to write something like that!”

            Say what you will about this movie adaptation, but I guess I’ve always got a place in my heart for it in that sense: it showed me the type of story I really loved, led me to the books that would eventually become my favorite series, and- for whatever reason- started that inkling thought that maybe I could tell that kind of story too.

            The Lightning Thief is also a good example of an adaptation to discuss because Disney+ just released their TV adaptation. This adaptation was produced by Rick Riordan and his wife, so I think that might have helped him keep it a bit more true to his original vision, but at the same time, it had enough changes within the story to keep even the most devout fandom members guessing. Honestly, I think I probably need to watch it again because I might have been a smidge too excited (read: way too much) to truly take in everything about the story. In one sense, there was a lot about the Disney+ adaptation that was really different from the book, but I actually liked the changes. For example, the cast did not necessarily meet their book descriptions, but Rick promised that the casting would be done in the spirit of the characters for whoever best embodied them and I spent the whole show marveling at how well cast they were. Leah Jeffries, who plays Annabeth, deserves an award solely for sassy eyebrow raises because I cracked up the entire show at Annabeth’s quiet, calculated persona. Speaking of Annabeth, one scene I was really curious to see was the Waterland side quest with the spiders. In the Percy narrated Lightning Thief, the reader just thinks Annabeth is really scared of spiders and freaks out, but later in The Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena, Riordan dives deeper and reveals that Annabeth’s fear of spiders is deeply rooted in childhood trauma. As it was not in the movie adaptation, I was curious to see what Disney would do with this scene as it is probably one of Annabeth’s lowest moments within the original series, and interestingly, they did not take Annabeth to this dark place. They actually replaced this scene with a heroic moment of Annabeth showing her true bravery and tenacity by convincing Hephaestus to release Percy, thereby saving him. A huge switch in terms of episode plot point and reader expectation, but I actually really liked that instead of torturing Annabeth, they gave her a great moment.

            Why they decided to make that change, I’m not really sure. Maybe it was a calculated risk of changing story or Rick wanted to give her a strong moment versus a weaker one- who knows what went down in the writer’s room. Still, this is what I mean by different iterations having room to experiment and add and be different, measured out in the equation of what your fans expect, will tolerate change-wise, and what gels with the spirit of the story.

            In this scenario, you had the writer in the room to help keep the story on track with its original intent, which could’ve played into the quality of the adaptation too. A lot of the book adaptations that are well-regarded do seem to have some level of writer-involvement, for example Stephanie Meyer with the Twilight saga or Suzanne Collins with The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games was actually the first series I read before the movie came out and I remember watching religiously for any kind of update about it, which was kind of a cool experience since everything I’d read prior to that point either hadn’t been adapted or had already been covered.

            I can understand though why movie productions might be wary of author-involvement though, as I’m sure it wouldn’t be a good scenario if you tried to bring someone in that was not very open to change necessary to taking a story between iterations. On the page, even if you’re like me and think very visually in writing, you can literally describe and make a story as detailed and complicated as is fitting. A movie or TV show doesn’t have the luxury of that time- you’ve got what? Two hours? Eight to twenty episodes, if you’re lucky? Visual mediums have to move fast and explain as they go.

            Two movie adaptations that are very dissimilar from their books that I still don’t dislike as movies are Beautiful Creatures (2013)(book by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl) and Inkheart (2008) (Cornelia Funke). In both these instances, I think the changes made, however drastic, were done purposefully. In the case of the Beautiful Creatures movie (which I rewatched after rereading the book last year), I think the changes are just made for speed. This series is insanely complicated and I think the story was just too big to shove into a two hour movie. It had a great cast, the scenes that were similar to their book counterparts were spot on, but I noticed some characters were combined role-wise, the plot was sped up time-wise, and I think all of this is done just to fit the complex story into the adaptation. I would actually be really curious to see if this series would work much better in a TV show format so there would be a more extended period to dig into the large cast and tangled backstory. In the same sense of Percy Jackson, Beautiful Creatures has a story that expands and flows straight into the next leg of the larger plot, which TV maybe does a bit easier than a movie that has to have a harder stop between movies rather than seasons.

The Inkheart movie, which I actually really like, I think made changes that were more for legal purposes. Meaning that where this story is dealing with characters from famous books, I think there might have been legal rules considering who and what could be shown. For example, in the book, the main girl Meggie is accompanied for a bit by Tinkerbell from J.M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan, but in the movie, Tinkerbell is replaced by Toto from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. This is me guessing, but I’m curious if Tinkerbell could be used in the book due to Peter Pan being past its copyright ownership, but not shown in a movie as I presume someone like Disney owns the movie rights to Tinkerbell. That’s purely conjectural, but that’s my guess. I’m also not sure how much Cornelia Funke was involved in making the movie, but I suspect she was as Inkspell, the second book in the series is dedicated to Brendan Fraser who played Mo in the movie. The book seems to have been published before the movie though, so I assume this was added into later versions.

Though they’re different, I didn’t dislike either of these movies because I felt they were trying to make an adaptation pleasing to the readers even if some things had to change. Adaptations can really go all over the place, and even in the ones I’ve touched on, I’m not sure how these authors feel about them. But what about authors that can’t advise a new adaptation of their story?

One of my favorite TV shows ever is Netflix’s 2017 adaptation of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series, Anne with an E. Like seriously, if you haven’t watched this show, do yourself a favor and look it up. The Anne of Green Gables series follows Anne well into middle-age, and I genuinely would not care if Amybeth McNulty wanted to play this character for decades. She’s a fantastic actress, and always keeps Anne toe-to-toe with all the adult actors on the show.

Anyway, this show tackles a lot of modern issues within the 1890’s set Prince Edward Island, which always made me wonder how L.M. Montgomery (who wrote most of the books in the early 1900s) would feel. I mean, someone back then might have a drastically different opinion on a lot of modern issues the show discusses, but after reading the books, I think a lot of the topics the show covers fall within the same spirit of the original series. Anne, in Montgomery’s original series, is brave, outspoken, and always a character who tends to gravitate toward people who are different or misunderstood or avoided by other characters, also not to mention one of the most educated women in classic literature I’ve ever seen. She constantly befriends lonely people, neighbors who are thought to be disagreeable, and outsiders, whereas Anne in the show behaves in the same manner though the issues are in a different context. When I read the books after watching this show, I thought every character was perfectly cast and the show strives to have conversations that are unquestioningly important: friendship, education, race, responsibility and freedom of speech, love, adoption, humanity. I mean this show covers a lot, not to mention that it’s got one of the most respectful coming out scenes I’ve ever seen and actively addresses something as historically ugly as cultural erasure. It’s insane and I desperately wanted to see where the show would have gone had it run longer. If Netflix was to ever revive it, I’d be there for it in a heartbeat.

All that being said, this is all just opinion. In truth, I like all the movies and shows I’ve talked about in this blog, and it was never my intention to trash them or anything like that. I mainly wanted to illustrate my point that, when it comes to adaptations, even an adaptation that isn’t particularly great in terms of keeping to the original story doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad movie or show. I think authors have to decide (assuming they have any say at all) what changes they’re cool with and what readers expectations are, and readers have to understand that maybe not every minute detail (no matter how precious) will be able to make it in. Some changes might be good, some might be bad, but all in all, hundreds if not thousands of people are working behind-the-scenes to make a show or movie they can be proud of. If dedication and respect are paid to the story and the fans that love it, and all changes are made in the spirit of the original story, then most adaptations will be okay.

What do you think? Are adaptations something to anticipate or dread? Do you have any favorites and why? Let us know!

Thanks for reading. Write on.

-Kamryn