Well-Read Life™

Boovie-Book-in-the-Making: We Want Your Reviews

The 2009 Oscar nominees for best adapted screenplay were…

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
DOUBT
FROST/NIXON
THE READER
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Slumdog was the winner, but what I find more interesting is the diverse original material that begat this year’s nominees.

Doubt was first a play. Frost/Nixon was first broadcast on television; later, the TV interviews were worked into a play and finally to the movie.  Only The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire were books originally, while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

For those of you helping us develop the material for the forthcoming Levenger Press boovie book, our quest is to see the movie first and then read the original material (when it started as a book or short story), in order to experiment with this uncustomary approach.

The first reason we might want to read the book after seeing the movie is to gain more detail and perspective. As we read for the eight or ten hours we can take in the richness that the typical 100-page screenplay must leave out. But what about for a short story? They often aren’t any longer than scripts. Is there any benefit to be had from reading them after the movie?

Should we bother reading original short stories?

For the 2008 Oscar nominees, two were adapted from short stories. I’d like now to report on my own experience of reading these short stories after seeing the movies.

I found reading “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” unrewarding. For those who saw the powerful movie, you know how hard it was to watch as this man in the prime of his life is reduced to a vegetative state and forced to communicate by blinking one eye.

The movie is stronger than the written form for its remarkably imagery. Reading the short story did reinforce the gratitude I feel for my physical self, and my admiration for Jean-Dominique Bauby for his nobility of spirit. That said, the movie was not only more powerful, but sufficient, at least in my opinion.

The movie Away from Her was originally a short story titled “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro. Here too, the movie captured nearly all the material in the short story. It’s interesting that the relationship between Grant and Miriam, which was left ambiguous in the story, was explicit in the movie. But is that enough to merit the time of reading the short story? Perhaps not. But one thing was for me.

There is a passage when Grant is wondering how much of the beauty he sees in his failing Fiona is because he knew her when she was a beautiful young woman, a perspective that a newcomer could not have. For me that single realization is worth the whole reading, for it gives me a larger perspective about the musty needlepoint adage, “Grow Old With Me, The Best Is Yet To Be.”

So my verdict is still out on whether it’s generally worth reading the original short stories that give life to a movie you’ve already seen. With great anticipation, I look forward to watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and then reading, Fitzgerald’s story. And I look forward to hearing your perspectives on this question.

The Reader

I never know how much I like a movie until the morning after. If I arise thinking about it and discovering new layers of meaning—that’s a movie I like, or at least admire. And this was the case in spades with The Reader. Lori and I discussed it quite a bit both after seeing it that evening and again the next day, as gradually we saw how pieces fit together and made sense.

Now I’m reading the book, written originally in German by Bernhard Schlink. It is marvelous so far because of all his observations on life, from which the movie could only pick and choose. The man writes in first-person, remembering his life-transforming affair with the woman old enough to be his mother—the woman with a horrific past not yet known to the boy.

He reflects about happiness and whether ugly truths discovered much later must irreversibly tarnish memories that otherwise would gleam, or whether it’s possible for old memories to remain beautiful. This and many other nuances and scenes, beautifully expressed in Schlink’s writing, were necessarily left out of the film.

For a different perspective, I’ve heard that some viewers of the movie were upset at what they saw as a glamorization, or at least humanization, of a former Nazi. For them, I would think they would have little, if any, interest in devoting the hours involved in reading the book.

Revolutionary Road

Although not nominated in the adapted-screenplay category, this movie was first a book by Richard Yates that was a National Book Awards finalist in 1962. I greatly admire the bleak tragedy about 1950s angst, but it doesn’t make me want to spend more hours with the subject matter.
I just read the publisher’s review of the novel, which confirms that the theme of the book is the same as the movie. I’ll skip it. And isn’t this just the point of seeing the movie first? We can devote a couple of hours and take in a beautiful piece of storytelling art, and then decide whether we want to devote more time to understanding the themes.

Please let us hear from you, dear moviegoer and reader. What do you observe about this year’s adaptations (or any others)? We’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Has a Movie Changed Your Life?

It’s not unusual to ask people if there was a book that changed their lives, but it’s not common to ask the same question about a movie. Why not?

Literature is about books. Books are what we make our children study in school; movies are what they watch on weekends to have fun. Okay, we do offer courses in film, but these are offered in college for the most part, after we’ve been grounded in the more fundamental art form of “real” literature.

And when movies are made from books, it’s assumed you should read the book first. Then it’s common to hear people say they are disappointed by the movie (“The book was so much better!”).

We surely admire our movies and the people who make them. Yet I think there’s also a certain prejudice against movies, a belief that they are lower art forms compared with books.

Whether movies are lower art forms might be answered in part by this question: Has a movie ever changed your life? If so, what was the movie and how did it change you?

To kick things off, I’ll go first.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” changed my life.  I saw it when it came out in the ‘70s, while I was a young man. It shook me to the core. And it has affected my behavior ever since. Because of McMurphy’s tragic error of underestimating his adversary in Nurse Ratched, I choose my battles carefully. When I do fight, which isn’t often, I arm myself with enough knowledge and tools to make sure I win. (Well, for the most part.)

So… has a movie affected what you have done? Inspired you to live somewhere? Caused you to take up a career? Led you to the love of your life? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Charming Boovie preserves the old world of hard-to-find books

With the rapid pace of technological change, the old way of struggling to find out-of-print books is a fading memory. Fortunately, the old way has been marvelously preserved in a delightful boovie that also happens to be a true story.

The book is 84 Charing Cross Road. Set in the years immediately following World War II, it chronicles the transatlantic correspondence between Helene Hanff, a New York City booklover, and Frank Doel, a straight-laced British bookseller. The uncertainty and serendipity of the old ways come through with humor, pathos, and love. Published in 1970, the book was made into an equally heart-tugging movie in 1986, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.

Tight finances and her busy writing life kept Hanff from visiting England. In the end, when she finally does, Doel has passed away and the shop is empty. And so an inefficient yet sweet chapter in the evolution of reading has passed into history as well.

What’s a boovie, you may ask? It’s simply a movie adapted from a book. The conventional practice is to read the book first and then see the movie, but there may be equal (perhaps even greater) merit in seeing the movie first and then reading the book—a reverse boovie.

Now it’s my turn to ask. What are your thoughts about boovies, and those boovies that give one last toast to a way of life that is no longer?  Let me know what you discover while pursuing your viewing and reading. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Boovies Score at the Oscars

Gratifying it was for us boovie lovers to watch the 2008 Academy Awards. There was tuxedoed Cormac McCarthy smiling each time his No Country for Old Men won an Oscar. It beat out three other books and a short story to win the award for best adapted screenplay. It also won Oscars for best picture, best directing, and best supporting actor by Javier Bardem, with his chilling portrayal of evil incarnate.

The Kite Runner received an Oscar nomination for original score.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement was yet another bestselling book paired with a movie adaptation.

That makes three bestsellers that those commenting on this Well-Read Life blog had already crowned as boovies before Oscar did. (A boovie is that welcome serendipity of both the book and the movie being good, if not great.) The Academy apparently agrees with our readers.

The Oscar-nominated short story was Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which formed the basis for Sarah Polley’s screenplay for Away from Her. Searching online, I see that a book has been issued under the same name as the movie, with a cover showing Julie Christie. Sounds like a great opportunity to do a reverse boovie—watch first and then enjoy a quick read of the book’s 96 pages.

The other short book, at 144 pages, is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Its brevity is understandable. The now-deceased author, Jean-Dominique Bauby, was left paralyzed and speechless after a stroke. He wrote the book by blinking his left eye.

All of the above are relatively new writing. The outlier, in terms of its age, is There Will be Blood, for which Daniel Day-Lewis snagged the Oscar for best actor. This movie was based on the 1927 novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. For an historical description of this relatively unknown work by the author famous for The Jungle, see this fascinating piece by movie reviewer and biographer Scott Eyman.

Personally, I’m going to do reverse boovies with Away from Her and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t have discovered either of the books if the movies hadn’t achieved acclaim. But happy days! Boovies lead us from one good art form to another.

As “Once” composer Glen Hansard said as he held his Oscar aloft, “This is amazing! Make art! Make art!”

How about you? Are you enjoying a boovie, or reverse boovie, now? Let me know what art you discover while pursuing your viewing and reading.  Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Boovies Take 2

Awed, humbled, inspired—does that begin to tell you how I feel after reading the hundreds of comments on Let’s Go to the Boovies?

It reinforced my oft-made comment that Levenger customers are the real who’s who of America—authors, teachers, screenwriters, poets, and all sorts of other brainy people with buckets of talent. Thanks to all for your postings.

Do you know what you’ve done? Together you’ve skewered one old misconception that badly deserved it—namely, that it’s a rare thing to find a movie as good as the book it came from.

Contrary to popular opinion, boovies (my term for that cultural star formed when both the book and the movie are good, if not great) are not rare. There are scores and scores of them.

Of course, people can, and do, disagree about whether the book or the movie is better; these are lively, interesting discussions. But more important is that both art forms, though different, are worth experiencing.

That brings me to the question I have for you—two actually:
1.    Have you ever read a book after seeing the movie?
2.    If so, would you comment on the experience?

Wishing you good reading—and good viewing,

Steve

Let’s Go to the Boovies

You can’t go for too long into a conversation with a group of people about movies before someone will say, “The book is so much better….”

But when you think about it, the comment is a bit strange. We love movies well enough, don’t we? All you need do is try to park at your local cinema on Saturday night to feel that love. If the books are always better, why don’t people just stay home and read?

Being naturally curious about such seeming contradictions, over the last few years I’ve endeavored to take movie conversations in a different direction. I ask people whether they can think of any movie that, in their opinion, is as good as the book on which it’s based.

Most people look off into space and come back empty, but a few have offered, a bit tentatively, some candidates. Here are some I’ve heard so far:

Several folks have nominated To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning solo opus, which became the triple-Oscar winning 1962 classic with Gregory Peck, Brock Peters and a young Robert Duvall as Arthur “Boo” Radley.

Another nomination hit theaters exactly ten years later and also won three Oscars, The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola directed the movie version of Mario Puzo’s book. (Several respondents have told me the movie is actually better than the book.)

A third candidate, nominated by no one but myself, is Cry the Beloved Country.  It lit the big screen in 1995, starring James Earl Jones and Richard Harris. The movie is based on Alan Paton’s book, which was assigned to my son’s tenth-grade English class (and also to Oprah’s television audience). It’s about a young black burglar who murders a young white man who, ironically, was working for black equality in pre-apartheid South Africa. The scene when Jones and Harris, playing the two fathers, first meet is one of the finest scenes I’ve seen in the movies—both actors at the peak of their powers. And the book, too, is marvelous.

There are no doubt plenty of examples of good movies so different from their original books that there’s little point in searching for the original. In these cases, the movie is the thing.

In other cases, there never was a book. Casablanca, for example, was based on a play written in 1940 by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” which the playwrights, unable to find a producer, sold to Warner Brothers.

Plenty of good books should, by rights, make fine movies—but don’t. (I would put forth Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.) The reasons are multitudinous. Only rarely do stars align to create the double breathtaking book and movie combo.

We need a name for such rare double winners, so I suggest, with apologies to all lexicographers, the boovie.

Identifying boovies makes for more than just good dinner conversation, although that’s a worthy enough goal.  The hunt for boovies can make for a deeper appreciation of our contemporary arts. We can argue the artistic judgments made in casting, acting, directing—what to leave out, what to create anew, why this or that element in the story works marvelously in print but can’t be done on the screen—and vice versa. That’s fun stuff to argue or agree about.

Boovies are rare for a few reasons. The story must be so compelling that screenwriters, directors, actors, and even business-minded producers become passionate about the project and are inspired to do their finest work. And then, on top of this, we have to get lucky.  When we do get lucky enough to have a boovie, the book and movie can reinforce our enjoyment of the other.

The hunt for boovies gets people reading, and watching, and being moved by art—maybe even leading their lives in new ways.

So what do you think, dear reader and viewer? Can you nominate some boovies?  Let me know. We’ll post the Levenger List of Most Popular Boovies, in order of most mentions.

Here, to prime your pump, are some more nominations:

Gone with the Wind
Ben-Hur
The Wizard of Oz
Treasure Island
Dr. Zhivago
2001: A Space Odyssey
Rosemary’s Baby
Jaws
The Firm
The Last Picture Show
House of Sand and Fog
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Great Expectations
Exodus
Sophie’s Choice
The English Patient
A River Runs Through It
No Country for Old Men
High Crimes
Pride and Prejudice
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Blade Runner
Rocket Boys/October Sky
Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Shipping News
Mystic River

Mystic River is a boovie candidate nominated by author and friend Joe Finder, some of whose books—including High Crimes—have been made into movies. Click here to read more about Joe’s reading habits.