TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040191/0401460.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 134 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 72

Hollywood Dances with Words


Books are coming off the shelves and onto the screen. Are
producers seeking more complexity, or just tidy packages?

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York


    You can make book on it: Hollywood is back in love with
novels. After a decade or so when movie moguls thought that
literacy was hazardous to their fiscal health, theaters are
burgeoning with films based on books. Best-selling books:
Misery, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Presumed Innocent, The
Hunt for Red October. Cult faves: The Grifters, The Sheltering
Sky, Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge. Nonfiction too: Wise Guy
(become GoodFellas) and Awakenings. Some sizzle at the box
office; some fizzle. But when the year's first two runaway
hits, The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy, are
close adaptations of novels, movie people notice. And when
Dances with Wolves blossoms from the project no studio would
touch into this week's Oscar darling, every unsung novelist
must feel like cheering.

    A book needn't have a critical pedigree; it needn't even
have been conceived as a novel. Four years ago, writer Michael
Blake had sired a bunch of orphan scripts and one Hollywood
credit: Stacy's Knights (1981), starring an unknown Kevin
Costner. One day Blake pitched the star this idea: cavalryman
goes to new fort, finds no one there. Wouldn't that make a good
screenplay? "Don't write a screenplay," Costner said, pointing
to a pile of scripts on his living-room floor. "It'll just end
up in that stack. Write a book instead." A book called Dances
with Wolves.

    As long as the cinema has told stories, it has plundered
from print. More than half the movies that have won an Oscar
for Best Picture have been based on novels or biographies. But
the '70s saw the dominance of popular original scripts (Rocky,
Star Wars, The Deer Hunter), and producers figured that the
nuances of literature would be lost on their newly powerful
teen audience. For a while, most best sellers went unfilmed,
unless they were written by Stephen King, or else they surfaced
as TV mini-series. That's all changed; Hollywood is again
courting authors with six-figure options and seven-figure sales.

    The trend may be encouraging, a hint that Hollywood movies
demand more complex characters, not just more elaborate special
effects. Or it may be further evidence of the industry's
creeping conservatism. Studio bosses haven't become more
literate. They are simply playing it safe, luring an aging
movie audience with properties that have already proved their
appeal. Why pay as much as $3 million for an original script,
then pay someone else to rewrite it, when you can pick a
test-marketed product off the bookshelves for a tenth of the
price?

    "A book is now part of a package," says Peter Gethers, the
publisher of Villard Books as well as a novelist and
screenwriter. "It gives producers and studio people something
to hold in their hands, instead of just pitching an intangible
idea to a director or actor. They trust themselves not an iota.
And rightly so, since they don't know what makes a good movie,
and they don't know how to turn a book into a movie. So they're
buying up a lot of books. And from these they will get
screenplays that just don't work. Once that happens, they will
move on to the next thing. It goes in spurts. Right now, this
is the book spurt."

    Buying a book also allows the studio to sidestep all that
messy artistic independence; the writer and the director have
a blueprint they'd better stick to. "Studios don't like to take
chances with something that hasn't been validated in another
commercial form," says screenwriter-director Paul Schrader,
whose sleek, sere new movie, The Comfort of Strangers, was
adapted by Harold Pinter from Ian McEwan's novel. "A film like
Silence of the Lambs would have never hit the screen had it
been original material. It's just too raw. It could be filmed
only because it had been a best-selling book. If you're
investing a lot of money, you want some sense that the audience
is going to like what you're investing in."

    The trick is to convince the people who liked what they read
that they like what they see. Readers are a possessive lot;
they have, in effect, already made their own imaginary film
version of the book -- cast it, dressed the sets, directed the
camera. They resent cuts and changes. The Bonfire of the
Vanities would probably have flopped even if it weren't a lame
movie, because Tom Wolfe had already created a great movie in
the minds of his readers. Most of the popular novels that have
become popular films (Red October, Presumed, Misery, Silence)
are thrillers with strong, straight plot lines. Here,
directors are less adapters than illustrators; their job is to
shoot things by the book.

    There's a catch, though. Hollywood, like the characters it
puts on the screen, wants to be loved at the final fade-out.
So Bonfire ends in a brotherhood-of-man speech instead of a
race riot. The evil nurse in Misery doesn't chop her captive's
foot off with an ax; she breaks it with a mallet. The heroine
in Sleeping with the Enemy doesn't bravely confront her husband
on her own terms; she cringes like a silent-film maiden tied
to the railroad tracks. Plus ca change. Movies, even if they
have literary beginnings, still need Hollywood endings.