If you saw a movie in 2009, chances are it was based on a book.
Film adaptations of literary works are nothing new, but they are ubiquitous as of late. From “The Blind Side” to “Invictus” to “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” fewer and fewer screenplays prove to be completely original pieces of work.
While not all adaptations have found the success they sought, recent history seems to be on their side. The last two films to take home “Best Picture” at the Academy Awards were “Slumdog Millionaire” and “No Country for Old Men,” both based on books.
For filmmaker Peter Jackson, a veteran when it comes to adapting novels, one motive is clear: It’s easier.
“Unless you’ve got an incredibly inspired idea for something that no one’s ever seen before, it’s difficult to come up with fresh and original and new ideas. Novels at least have a head start,” Jackson said in a conference call about his latest film “The Lovely Bones.” “So I found them a bit easier to make, because half the work is done for you at the beginning.”
Jackson said he also finds it easy to get excited about converting a book into a movie.
“We’re not really setting out to find novels to adapt. But … when you do read a book, and I read novels like anyone else, just for recreation and for fun, is that I often start imagining a movie in my head,” Jackson said.
From a business point of view, best-selling books have already proven to have an established fan base, evident by the fleet of Twihards that took over Westwood last November for the “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” premiere, books (and all other possible “Twilight” paraphernalia) in hand.
But not all adaptations elicit such a high-pitched and profitable reaction. Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” sat comfortably on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, yet Jackson’s big screen version has made less than $400,000 domestically when its production budget was $100 million.
Not only did it disappoint at the box office, but the film’s modifications also upset many familiar with the novel. Jackson, who co-wrote the screenplay, opted to have the rape and murder scene take place off screen so that the film would earn a PG-13 rating allowing younger kids like his daughter to see it and hopefully learn its message.
“We didn’t want to make an R-rated movie. We’ve got a daughter who was 12 years old when we made the movie … and we wanted her to see this film. We really made the movie partly for our daughter,” Jackson said. “We wanted to have some aspects of the movie be a lesson … that our daughter should look at, because this stuff does actually happen in real life, unfortunately. … But the emotion in “˜The Lovely Bones’ is really one of the primary reasons why we wanted to make it.”
Jackson said he tried to hang onto the feeling he got from reading the novel and communicate it into the film, but his creative liberties that strayed the film from the novel resulted in mostly negative reviews of the final product.
Then there’s Jason Reitman, whose inventive take on Walter Kirn’s “Up in the Air” continues to garner praise from critics, audiences and award groups with a total of six Golden Globes Award nominations. Released in select theaters on Dec. 4 and nationwide on Christmas Day, “Up in the Air” underwent many more modifications than “The Lovely Bones,” proving the secret to book adaptation success is not strict adherence to the written word.
“When I talked to (Kirn) about adapting the book in to a film, I told him, “˜I like your book and I want to use it for a film, but I’m trying to make a movie,'” Reitman said in a press conference.
Reitman and co-writer Sheldon Turner’s leading ladies Natalie Keener, played by Anna Kendrick, and Alex Goran, played by Vera Farmiga, are nowhere to be found in the novel.
“I think (Reitman) decided to put me in because he had a different idea for how the film would play out than the book suggests,” Kendrick said in a press conference. “A straight adaptation would have consisted of an inner monologue in George Clooney’s head, though that by itself would have been pretty entertaining.”
Kendrick also plays Jessica Stanley in the “Twilight” films, and while her character does exist in the world of the books, she said she didn’t read the book before they started shooting. Similarly, “Up in the Air” castmate Farmiga didn’t read Kirn’s novel.
“I’m not in it. … I didn’t feel a need to be faithful to the book because of that,” Farmiga said in a press conference. “I basically tried to embody this character that Jason had envisioned and hoped it could positively augment the book somehow.”
The film at least augmented book sales, which were halted because of the events of Sept. 11 two months after it was published and the book’s unfortunate cover art of animated flying men, one of them on fire.
Whether or not the relationship between a book and its movie is as reciprocal as with “Up in the Air” and whether the movie will be successful continues to be contingent in each case. But a glance at what the box office has in store for 2010 ““ “Alice in Wonderland” and “Youth in Revolt” to name a few ““ tells us these adaptations aren’t going anywhere.
With additional reports by Ross Moody.