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Filming the Title:  The late submariner, naval historian, and novelist Edward L. Beach, Jr. has been quoted as saying of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, the producers of the film version of his novel Run Silent, Run Deep, "They bought the title." It was his contention that Burt Lancaster's production company already had their own submarine story, and simply wanted the rights to his best-selling novel so they could use his characters and a couple of plot elements.

When Run Silent, Run Deep was published back in 1955 it quickly became a national best seller. I still have my copy sitting on a shelf in my library. First edition, first printing—I just checked. I'm something of a book fetishist, and even the dust jacket is still in good condition. The point of this, of course, is that I bought the book right after it came out and read it two or three times before the movie was released in 1958.

I have to agree with Beach's assessment. The movie shared the book's title, and the main characters had the same names, but the story itself, aside from some key elements, was significantly different. Richardson isn't married in the book—a good bit of the conflict comes from the fact that he's in love with the same girl as Bledsoe—and Richardson and Bledsoe aren't together during the climactic battle with Bungo Pete. In fact, in the book, Bledsoe is no longer among the living at that point, while Richardson, who dies in the movie, goes on to appear in two other novels before, presumably, retiring.

Now, that's not saying Run Silent, Run Deep isn't a good movie. It is. I've discussed this with my publisher, who knows a lot more about submarines than I ever will, and he agrees it was a good movie, generally considered one of the best in the genre, despite some technical errors of the sort that the average viewer would never notice. "The movie is an outstanding piece of cinematic story telling," is the way he put it. "It's just not the same story that's in the novel."

And that's the point of this essay. The movie people buy the film rights to hundreds of books every year, and a certain percentage of those are actually made into films. Sometimes a real effort is made to follow the storyline of the book, but, more often, it becomes a case of "filming the title." As an author, I don't particularly care for that, despite the fact that no one has, as yet, been inclined to tempt me to let them do it to something I've written.

I'd probably change my mind at that point, though I wouldn't count on it changing my opinion of how poorly most screen adaptations turn out. I suppose I'd sell the rights, then complain about the result, just as many other authors do. I'm not sure anyone has ever filmed one of Stephen King's books in a way that really pleased him. Mind you, with King, I'm not sure he's ever really liked the result even when he wrote the screenplay himself and rode herd on the production.

One thing we'll have to acknowledge here is that movies and novels follow somewhat different story telling conventions. The novelist has a lot more opportunity to develop his characters. He can spend a couple of chapters just delving into the protagonist's background, letting the reader come to understand just how this character ended up this way. The film maker has to do it a lot quicker, utilizing recognized cinematic shortcuts.

Thomas Harris & Hannibal Lector:  Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon is an example. Harris spends many pages on Francis Dolarhyde's childhood in his grandmother's retirement home—that is, the retirement home she operates, not one where she's confined—and delves deeply into the old lady's own distinctly unpleasant character. Combining this with Dolarhyde's own physical problems—he has a cleft lip and palate, making clear speech difficult and presenting a fairly unpleasant appearance—it is easy to see how he would develop the sociopathic personality that results in his murderous behavior. It is equally easy to see the source of his obsession with transforming himself, into gaining power over others. That obsession manifests itself in murdering entire families at once.

Most of this background was lost when Red Dragon was brought to the screen. Neither of the film versions was really able to allot the screen time required to fully document this. In Manhunter, the first version, Tom Noonan's makeup shows the scar from the surgical repair to his upper lip, but it isn't really explained. If you read the book, you'd know why it was there, and why someone would comment that he speaks quite well (Dolarhyde always presumed he didn't). And the second film, which retained the novel's title, concentrates much more on Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lector character than Harris did. In the novel, Lector was an important character, but not by any means central, the story mainly revolving around Dolarhyde and Will Graham.

Now, I haven't heard that Harris is unhappy with the films made from his novels. And, when you think about it, this sort of condensation and revision is probably inevitable. Except in the mini-series format, film simply doesn't have the time to go into such detail. Filmed with all the background character development, and with the original, rather than Manhunter's compacted ending, that film would have required at least six hours of screen time (much of it too harrowing and sexually explicit for television, which is the only place where that amount of time is generally available).

With Silence of the Lambs, a clear effort was made to stick fairly close to the book. Again, some of the background had to be condensed. I haven't seen Hannibal yet, but some of the comments I've heard suggest the movie tried to stay more or less true to the book. If it did, it's probably not something for the faint hearted, because the book was fairly revolting at times.

These are single books, turned into stand-alone films (true even of the Lector film "trilogy" of Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, each of which can be watched without needing to see the others). But what about a series? Some, like the recent Lord of the Rings trilogy, may be adapted faithfully, but also bring with them the problem of absolutely requiring viewing in sequence. If you don't start at the beginning with that trilogy, nothing is going to make very much sense.

Then there are film series based on books, not necessarily directly sequential, about the same character. Faithful adaptations aren't really the rule here, either.

James Bond, Growing Deviation:  The James Bond movies, based on Ian Fleming's novels, provide a good example of a film series that begins with reasonably close adaptations of the novels and progresses to a point where "filming the title" becomes the standard mode. Fleming wrote his Bond novels roughly in sequence. That is, Bond's life seemed to progress more or less in the same time line as the stories in each successive novel, though most were stand-alone stories. Only Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice really carry a single storyline through all three books.

But the Bond stories were filmed out of sequence with the novels. EON, the company that has produced all of the "official" Bond films, has never filmed the first Bond book, Casino Royale. Originally, it wasn't available, as the rights were held by others (hence the Woody Allen movie). Currently EON has the rights, but this first Bond book is subject to more fan pressure than the others, with most wanting to see it, if it's filmed at all, filmed as a tight adaptation and, preferably, set in the early 1950s. Whether those suggestions really affect the producers, or they simply haven't come up with their own idea of how to film it, remains to be seen.

Some deviation from Fleming's concept appeared as early as the first Bond film, Doctor No. Until Thunderball, the principle "villain" in the Bond novels was the Soviet Union. Particularly, this meant SMERSH, the department of the NKVD/KGB specially tasked with the assassination of enemy intelligence agents (though they also killed Soviet defectors or non-approved Communist idealogues, such as Trotsky). But SMERSH never appeared in the Bond movies. Starting with Doctor No, the villain became SPECTRE.

I've never been entirely sure of the logic behind this. Most likely, the producers were simply more comfortable making a huge, international criminal oganization the villain, rather than an agency—even a defunct agency—of an already unfriendly government. In any case, Doctor No became a SPECTRE member, and this same association either transfered to other SMERSH agents from the Bond books, or they became independent operators with no obvious outside ties.

The changes in Doctor No were, for the most part, minor. The Doctor was still busily involved in sabotaging American missile tests at Cape Canaveral, as in the novel—he was just doing it for someone else. One somewhat disappointing change was that Honeychile Ryder was given a bikini top (along with Ursula Andress getting someone else's voice), and Doctor No died, either drowned or cooked, in a nuclear reactor vessel, instead of being suffocated under several tons of bird droppings.

The second movie, From Russia With Love, continued the substitution of SPECTRE for SMERSH, making the book's Colonel Kleb a SPECTRE operative. One divergence in the film was the casting of Tony Award winning actress Lotte Lenya as Kleb. Despite the makeup department's efforts to make Lenya look as plain as possible, she was still rather more attractive than Fleming's Kleb, who was described as looking like a toad. Another change was more or less forced by making SPECTRE the villain. The code machine in the movie was called Lektor, in the book it was Spektor.

In Goldfinger, the changes still weren't all that great. SPECTRE wasn't there, but neither was SMERSH, Goldfinger's employer in the novel. Instead, Goldfinger is working a plot with Red Chinese agents to make America's gold supply radioactive—and, hence, valueless—in one blow causing economic chaos in the United States and making Goldfinger's own holding far more valuable. In the book, he actually did intend to steal the gold, with the help of a number of American mobsters (who were not murdered in the book), and there was really no subterfuge about sleeping gas. Everyone knew the troops at Fort Knox were going to be murdered. Both the book and the movie seem to presume you can "cure" a lesbian by exposing her to a "real man," something I personally tend to doubt. The end was also somewhat different. In the book it was Odd Job who went out the airplane window; Bond strangled Goldfinger.

Thunderball, with the novel based on the screenplay, matched pretty closely. But it was followed by You Only Live Twice, which was the third book in Fleming's Blofeld trilogy. Among other things, this led to the curious fact that Blofeld failed to recognize Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, despite having already met him in Japan. In the book this wasn't a problem, because the meeting at Piz Gloria in Switzerland actually was the first time the two men met.

After these films, the plots started to move farther away from the books. Fleming's Diamonds Are Forever was a fairly straightforward smuggling story, featuring a pack of American gangsters, and without any involvement of super-criminal organizations or foreign governments. There were no super weapons in the book, such as the space laser featured in the movie, and Blofeld wasn't around, either, if only because he hadn't been thought up yet, the book appearing well before the arrival of SPECTRE. After this film, the movie plots have less and less to do with the books, often little more than a small plot incident, or the name of a character.

Fact Fictionalized  In addition to his novels, Ernest K. Gann wrote a couple of autobiographies. The best known of these is unquestionable Fate is the Hunter, which could be classified as his "flying" autobiography. A remarkable work, one of the classics of aviation literature, Gann chronicled something over 10,000 hours of a commercial aviaton career in this volume. During that career, which spanned most of the propeller-driven airliner period, starting with the old DC-2, Gann spent a lot of time in the air and lost a lot of friends. Planes still go down today, but it was much riskier in the early days, when passenger aircraft flew a lot closer to the ground.

Fate is the Hunter could as easily be called a work of philosophy as pure autobiography. Running through the book is the consistent theme that, very often, it just seems that someone's time is up and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Planes ice up and fall out of the sky in what seems like clear air. An experiment with a new spark plug design makes engines suddenly stop running. Long flights over water end at a destination where the pilot can't see the ground. Contaminated fuel, possibly intentionally contaminated, nearly brings Gann's own career to an end in the early days of the Air Transport Command. A long list of incidents are chronicled, some affecting Gann himself, others, particularly the fatal ones, happening to his friends and colleagues.

The movie version of the book seems connected to it only by the presence of an airliner. The film is mainly concerned with investigating the crash of an early jet airliner, brought down by the pilot after one engine fails and the other catches fire. But when the second engine is tested, it works perfectly, suggesting that the pilot had enough power available to avoid the crash landing. In the end, the accident proves to be caused by spilled coffee, an electrical junction box cover with a seam down the middle that allows the coffee to drip inside, and a warning light that should never have come on, but did. The second engine was fine, but the plane's systems were reporting that it was on fire.

What Hollywood did here was, I suppose, make a movie that expressed the philosophy of Gann's book. The notion that fate, here in the form of a flawed design that failed to anticipate coffee spills and short circuits, really is hunting for us, and hunting, in particular, for pilots. The movie works, and the book itself, covering such a long period of time and with the action spread literally all over the world, would be hard to film any other way.

Some of Gann's other books, such as his novel The High and the Mighty, have been filmed with far less interpretive deviation. That story of an airliner running into trouble on a flight from Hawaii to the Mainland was filmed pretty much as written, and resulted in one of John Wayne's better film roles. (And a rather catchy theme song, too.)

Real events also suffer at the hands of film makers. Often this happens as they attempt to make the story "relevant" to the audience. One of the more obvious examples in recent years was Pearl Harbor, which was the victim of any number of indignities. The logic behind the complicated love story escapes me. I suppose it might have been interesting to women, but it really seemed to get in the way of the dramatic progression.

Now, I would be the last person to suggest that fictional characters should never be inserted into real events. Writers do it all the time. It's just that, here, there is way too much soap opera and not nearly enough history. Couple this with some bad effects, planes in a near vertical bank two feet off the ground—computer graphics may be able to override physics, but real planes would have crashed. A battleship capsizes, but the hull rotates around a point far above the waterline. Explosions are preceeded by shots of whirling propellers on bombs that have already crashed through the decks of ships, which would have smashed the props and, in any case, that's not how delay fuses work. All in all, you get a valiant effort at dramatizing history that just doesn't make it. Tora! Tora! Tora!, which took more of a semi-documentary approach, worked a lot better.

And then there's Titanic, where the love story was probably a good idea as a technique for personalizing the disaster. I just think they could have come up with some better characters. What you got wasn't romantic so much as sleazy, and it's hard to escape the notion that, had both of the lovers made it to shore, Rose would have found herself knocked up and abandoned within six months.

In conclusion, I find that I am still somewhat conflicted about this whole book to film, or even life to film question. As a not particularly wealthy writer, I find the prospect of someone handing me a check for a quarter million dollars to let them film something I've written more than a little appealing. Money may not buy happiness, but, as someone once pointed out, it makes being miserable a lot more comfortable.

And miserable is how many an author feels when he sees what a producer, director, and screenwriter did to his book. The more complex the book, the more likely a film adaptation is to make a hash of it. When an author writes his own screen adaptation, he has little room for complaint, presuming he can find a director who takes a stage, rather than a cinematic, directorial stance. That is, in legitimate theater, the playwright is the final arbiter of what the characters say and do, and the director enforces that. Stage actors are rarely given the opportunity to ad lib, and the necessity of doing the same thing in exactly the same way night after night enforces conformity to the script. There are no retakes in legitimate theater.

In film, even if the screenwriter is careful to get it exactly right, you have to contend with actors who are prone to say things along the lines of, "I'm really getting into this character now, and this guy wouldn't do this." Of course, the guy did do that in your novel, and you do understand the character a lot better than the actor. The actor, after all, is only pretending to be the character, whereas you created him. Telling an author about how much better you understand one of his creations is a bit like arguing with God over the nature of Moses.

But the actor makes, generally, a lot more money, and the writer walking off the set isn't going to shut down production, so you can guess who'll win that argument. Sure, there are some very intelligent people who happen to be actors. There are a lot more who are simply very skilled at portraying whatever the director desires, but on a personal intellectual level make Matt LeBlanc's "Joey" character look like a Mensa member.

All in all, selling a novel for a film adaptation is probably a losing proposition when it comes to the integrity of the story. The only real advantage in going ahead and selling it yourself is the probably that, if you don't, your heirs will do it once you're gone, and they're generally a lot less likely to worry about art when presented with the prospect of enough cash.

And, should you make a movie sale, take comfort in the fact that you're not alone. A quick viewing of The Sum of All Fears will clearly demonstrate that even an author as wealthy and influential as Tom Clancy—who could probably afford to buy a studio if he wanted to—is still going to have his work chopped up and thoroughly massacred in the interests of making—well, whatever that movie was.

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