Books to Film

The effort to translate books into works for the screen has never been an easy one and right from the start filmmakers were confused as to how to be true to the book and still fit the one literary form, books, into the frame of another, movies. Early efforts attempting to follow any book they were trying to film line for line and chapter for chapter produced monstrosities such as the first Quo Vadis that ran for seventeen hours and had to be viewed over several nights. While such a film might make a good mini series for television, something like that in a theater would not only be laborious but boring in the extreme. And not to put to fine a point on it such a film would hardly be profitable. The film business is just that, a business, so producers seeing potential in filming great works of fiction needed a workable solution to putting books on the screen without putting audiences to sleep.

The problem of bring books to the screen lay in the different nature of the works, books have been traditionally the realm of protracted thought. A character can go on for pages reminiscing about an incident that happened to them in childhood and how it affects them in some present situation. This can all take place in the midst of an action sequence and not seem out of place because the mind is receiving its information word by word and line by line. Books easily skip forward and backward in time without a sense of discontinuity or slowing down the forward momentum of the piece. The mental picture of action in the book is thus build chapter by chapter in a slow mounting way to a crescendo image that pulls everything together. In a book in doesn't matter if the work is two hundred or a thousand pages long as long as it pulls everything together in the end.

Film on the other hand has time limits that have to be strictly followed if the film is to entertaining and not a bore. The basic three act structure first used for stage plays holds true for film. While a reader may read a chapter in a book, put it down, and come back to it a few days later, and feel very satisfied picking up where they left off, a film must be presented all in one showing.

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