"I straightened up my New Yorker office, expecting a call any day announcing that she was heading over. I mentioned it to friends at work—something along the lines of 'Oh, Meryl Streep might be dropping by, just in case you see a stranger wandering around,' and tried to imagine which gestures of mine she might focus on. Time passed. More time passed. I finally called Ed and asked him when Meryl was coming to see me. He told me she didn’t need to, because she had already created the character on her own."
Writes Susan Orlean, in 'The Making of “Adaptation'/When your quirky book becomes a quirkier movie" (The New Yorker).
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37 comments:
Books can't be movies, or movies books. Different mediums. Rarely does a great novel make a great film. Film's cant' translate a great prose style or get inside people's heads. And are usually limited to only have six or less main characters. Novels can bounce all over the world and stretch out over a person's lifetime from childhood to old age, film has trouble showing the same characters at different ages. Its literal.
I'm surprised that Streep wanted to study or talk to someone to get a take on the character. I thought she just winged it. More Larry Olivier than Dustin Hoffman.
Well I read the book and liked it, but haven't seen the movie and probably won't.
I am talking to my daughters about the concept of "Canon."
How do consumers of stories interact with creators? How does the fandom participate in the creation of Canon and what is a Retcon.
The left is flowing like a plague through valuable IPs like Starwars and Warhammer 40k.
I assume that an employee for the New Yorker is a leftist and has leftist fans. Of course they are going to complain about something they do to others.
The creator herself is obviously going to be influenced by the money received.
"Rarely does a great novel make a great film."
I thinkt there have been quite a few, "The Godfather" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Gond With The Wind" come to mind. Maybe it depends on what's considered a "great novel" and what's done to that source material in making the movie for the latter to be considered great as well, at least as a representation of the book in some way as opposed to being just "inspired by".
The primary conflict in our culture creation environment right now is between creators and fans and entities like Hollywood that are infested with leftist totalitarians that want to tell you what to do and what good people are.
This is bleeding into things like Netflix and Amazon Prime who are infested with "show runners" that just ruin IPs with their stupid gay girlboss crap.
Sally327 said...10/11/25, 10:49 AM
Your examples are perfect.
I, too, immediately thought back to movies that I believe masterfully conveyed the content and mood of their inspiring novels. They were all from decades past. Ben Hur was one. I think that the Jane Austen-based movies collectively were another.
However, I haven't seen a theater movie in quite some years. I think the last theater-shown film I saw was a WW I documentary "They Shall Not Grow Old." Or, perhaps, it may have been the Tom Hanks movie, "Greyhound," based on the C.S. Forester book, "The Good Shepherd."
Yeah, I'm kinda picky that way. :- )
Adaptation won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. It's actually an original screenplay about how hard a book is to adapt to cinema.
Here's Meryl Streep accepting the award for Charlie.
"Another scene included a fictional love affair between John Laroche and me, which was not only embarrassing but, if it had actually occurred, would have violated journalistic ethics."
Journalistic ethics?
I just hope I'm alive when "Frankenstein, Part II" wins the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
The 1996 version of Persuasion with Ciarin Hinds is a perfect film.
The trailer is pretty good. That song is doing a lot of work in the trailer.
I finally called Ed and asked him when Meryl was coming to see me. He told me she didn’t need to, because she had already created the character on her own.
"Yes, I prefer a lot of semen. I always have."
The Graduate would be my #1 example of a movie that's way more artistic than the source material. I don't even know if you could find a copy of the original novel today. It's horrible. No humor whatsoever. Buck Henry saved that movie. The novel is supposed to be a drama. Oh my God.
Dashiell Hammett would be my nominee for best author adapted into cinema. The Maltese Falcon and the first two Thin Man films. Did you know Bogart's movie was actually a remake? They got it right that time.
As for the worst movie from a great book? I would suggest The Raven
I gave it a solid F in my movie book.
Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson. Guess which actor is the worst. No. You'll never guess. No. Wrong. It's a four way tie! They all suck. Roger Corman is the director, that's the important thing. Or maybe the writer is to blame. Who put Peter Lorre in a bird suit? This would work a lot better if I was six.
I thinkt there have been quite a few, "The Godfather" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Gond With The Wind" come to mind. Maybe it depends on what's considered a "great novel"
Good point. I was thinking more of things like "Lord Jim" "The Great Gatsby" or "Ulysses" or "crime and punishment" or The Sun also rises. Now that I read your comment, maybe I should have said "Very Great" LOL.
Some great 18th-19th century literature seems to translate well into film: Tale of two cities, Oliver Twist, Ben Hur and Tom Jones come to mind.
I've read Agatha Christie and her books are very filmable. Same with Chandler and Hammett. Although, Nero wolfe has never been that good on film.
i'd be hard pressed, to think of a movie that improved on the book.
this includes movies i saw 1st.
i REALLY liked The Big Sleep, with Boogie and Becall..
Until i read the Chandler's book, and realized how much they'd butchered it.
(i DID like the female taxi driver though)
Well the librarian scene is better fleshed out but thats due to dorothy malone (they had to work in the constraints of the hays code which left more to the imagination)
It’s a great book and a great movie. There is a lot of overlap, but the stories are fundamentally different, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
As discussec before gatsby has rarely been properly adapted the robert evans version was ok the luhrman one incorporated the journal but left out most other elements
I can't quite figure out why I find Susan Orlean's writing disappointing. It seems as if I'd enjoy it, but I always used to come away thinking maybe she didn't enjoy writing it. Hit and a miss, at least for me, and maybe for her.
Wow, has Wince always been so on-the-nose?
Artists don't "own" their art. The world intakes the art and runs it through a very complicated Goldberg machine of a billion steps through trillions and trillions of synapses resulting in an infinite number of opinions and interpretations.
Let it go.
Like Owen Gleiberman (mentioned here a few days ago), Orlean is an alumnus/a of The Phoenix, Boston's sometime underground/alternative weekly.
Adaptation was a good movie. All the better since La Streep had to take second billing to Nick Cage. One of the things that turned me off Streep and the Oscars was how they'd just toss her an award when they couldn't think of anything else to do.
Read any of Tom Clancy books and the movie that followed. Never the same. The books were always great. Movies not so much.
St Croix, The Raven movie is meant to be an over the top camp parody of horror films, and the actors gleefully satirize their own horror careers. Sort of like a John Waters film without coprophagia and transsexual rape. CC, JSM
I agree with St Croix. It was really two movies, one about the orchid poacher, and one about a screen writer trying to make a movie out of a book about an orchid poacher that had no narrative structure that Hollywood knew how to use. It was a great movie. I don't see it much around on the streaming services, I think I only saw it in the theater, but it was a great movie.
The best Meryl Streep movie I can think of is Ricki and the Flash, and it should have starred somebody other than Meryl Streep, maybe Cameron Diaz, for example. The garage band that Rick Springfield put together for the movie was great, and their performances of just four musicians, not overstuffed by production, but instead with the limited equipment a garage band might realistically have. So it showed off their musicianship, including that of Rick Springfield himself. It's just that Meryl Streep did not come off as the kind of woman that the movie was written about.
Here is the the band:
Greg (Rick Springfield) — guitar (We all know him.)
Buster (Rick Rosas) — bass (Session musician Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and others)
Joe Vitale (Himself) — drums (session musician, Joe Walsh, The Eagles
Bernie Worrell (Himself) — keyboards (Famous in P-Funk, and worked with the Talking Heads)
Nero wolfe has never been that good on film.
Have you seen the A&E series? It's fantastic.
Here's the one where Stout skewers J. Edgar Hoover.
Timothy Hutton is a huge fan of the books. He's a fantastic Archie Goodwin. It is a righteous adaptation.
Christie has had a lot of fine adaptations. My favorite is Rene Clair, who made And Then There Were None, Christie's darkest (and strongest!) book. He gave it a happy ending which is kinda awesome. That's a good example of an artist re-doing a novel to make it work for cinema.
I also love the French version of Christie, Agatha Christie's Criminal Games. New characters, but they use all her murder plots. Lot of fun. The French add both humor and sex to Christie.
Other good examples would be Kurosawa with MacBeth. Kurosawa called it Spider Castle, but in the USA some lame distributor renamed it Throne of Blood.
MacBeth is not actually a book, of course. They still made me read the damn thing.
Shakespeare in Love is a fantastic adaptation of Shakespeare. I don't know if that movie inspired Charlie Kaufman. But the theme of the writer trying to find inspiration is running through both movies.
The Bible. Movie great. Book so so. But it has its followers.
St Croix, The Raven movie is meant to be an over the top camp parody of horror films
I think that's some academic trying to uplift Roger Corman from the shit pile of really bad filmmaking. Roger Corman has made one or two good movies, and a whole pile of really bad cinema.
<>i>Ed Wood is a fantastic movie because the artists knew what they were doing. (And had the money to do it). Ed Wood's actual movies are worse than you think. Plan 9 From Outer Space is unwatchable. It's horrible. And it's still better than The Raven.
I gave A Bucket of Blood an A-
A Bucket of Blood (1959) I love Roger Corman. Not so much his movies, which on the whole suck, but the way he makes them. He knocks them out on the cheap, in a hurry, and finishes the whole thing in a frickin week. Make the movie! Get it done! Move on to the next one! I find him inspirational. Whenever I worry about my future career, or lack thereof, I think of Roger Corman. If you make it cheap enough, you'll make money, and you can make your next movie. Despite all the odds, by the way, Bucket of Blood is a nice film, darkly funny. It's far superior to Corman's Little Shop of Horrors, which despite the presence of a young Jack Nicholson, isn't very good. Bucket of Blood, on the other hand, has really cool cinematography and a wicked sense of humor. You know all those low-budget movies that people rave about, like Mad Max or El Mariachi? Those films suck. Most Roger Corman films suck. People who rave about those films are doing charity work. This film ain't like that. It's like the best Twilight Zone episode, ever. Yeah yeah, even better than the girl on pig planet who wanted plastic surgery.
"I assumed that I would at least meet with Streep so that she could study my mannerisms and pick up my Ohio accent," writer Susan Orlean penned regarding the honor she received when Meryl Streep agreed to play her in a fictional movie.
Orlean's 1998 nonfiction book, "The Orchid Thief," was adapted into the film "Adaptation" (2002). Meryl Streep received an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Orlean.
I find it difficult to believe that Orlean has a perceptive accent, since she grew up on the "white side" of Shaker Heights, surrounded by houses on small lots adjacent to black and Asian folks in the nearby Cleveland/Warrenville neighborhoods and the fancier homes in adjacent Beachwood. Moreover, the entire Cleveland area is settled by all of the middle European whites who chose to live together in separate communities, so it is difficult to assume that there is an "Ohio" accent. I spent much of my life listening to my Polish uncle (by marriage) tell Polish jokes.
The Nero Wolfe adaptations are up on youtube. Here's the one where Stout skewers J. Edgar Hoover.
Timothy Hutton is a huge fan of the books. He's a fantastic Archie Goodwin. It is a righteous adaptation.
Christie has had a lot of fine adaptations. My favorite is Rene Clair, who made And Then There Were None, Christie's darkest (and strongest) book. He gave it a happy ending which is kinda awesome. That's a good example of an artist re-doing a novel to make it work for cinema.
I also love the French version of Christie, Agatha Christie's Criminal Games. New characters, but they use all her murder plots. Lot of fun. The French add both humor and sex to Christie.
Other good examples would be Kurosawa with MacBeth. Kurosawa called it Spider Castle, but in the USA some lame distributor renamed it Throne of Blood. Far and away the best version of Shakespeare to hit the big screen.
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