08 July 2008

The Running Man syndrome, or Why Does Hollywood Keep Ruining All Your Favorite Books?

I read Stephen King's The Running Man when I was 12 or 13, and I absolutely loved it. Set in the year 2025, when the TV network (they all merged, apparently,) and the government have become one, Ben Richards, an unemployed, dirt-poor father of a very sick baby, volunteers for a game show in which he is set loose to disappear into the world while he is tracked and hunted down, with the audience participation coming in the form of a 1000 dollar bounty on his head, payable upon his death. While it is a futuristic, dystopian novel, it is also a comment on urban poverty, what happens to the people who have lost everything while the fatcats sit back with their fancy Cuban cigars. Also, not to ruin it for you, (COLETTA FACTOR: I'M GONNA TELL YOU THE END,) but an airplane is flown directly into a skyscraper. Needless to say, that ending has taken on a lot more significance in the last few years.
The Running Man was made into a movie a little while after I read it. I was of two minds: I was a big fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, (youthful indiscretion on my part) but it wasn't the movie I wanted. It was a popcorn flick, lots of action, comic-book villains, light on social comment. They changed the story entirely; all they really kept was the basic idea of a game show where you fight for your life. I really enjoyed it at first, but I watched it again recently and it's terrible. Arnold should never have been the hero of that movie; at that time (1987) any movie with Arnold was an Arnold movie first and foremost, and the public expected certain things from his movies. (This was even a year before Twins, Arnold's first comedy.)

All the substance was replaced by style, the characters replaced with cardboard cutouts.
I saw the first 4 Harry Potter movies before I read the books, and I thought they were great, at the time. They were exciting, and touching, and suspenseful, particularly the 3rd chapter, The Prisoner of Azkaban. Having now read all the books, I saw the 5th movie, Order of the Phoenix, and it was dreadful. Granted, book 5 is a long, complicated tale, but to see it butchered like that was painful. The actors didn't seem to like it very much, either, as most of them phoned in their performances. Last night, I caught about an hour of the 4th movie, Goblet of Fire, on tv, a movie I enjoyed immensely before I read the book, and I hated every minute of it. They made up scenes, combined characters, lost so many plotlines and fine details, all in th name of profitability. There are not enough Harry Potter fans to make a movie just for them, they have to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, which is the problem with most mass-produced entertainment today. There have been a few movies that have been faithful to the books and have been successful: The Green Mile, The Godfather, The Virgin Suicides. While these movies were literally faithful to the book, they also retained the tone and the flavor of the book. Even Contact, with Jodie Foster, was a good adaptation. Carl Sagan adapted the screenplay himself before he died, and while much of the story was changed, it retained a lot of the sense of wonder, and it had something to say. But these are few and far between, most adaptations are garbage.

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