> By no means am I the resident expert on filmmaking, however. I'd be interested to hear what Sam has to say about this.

The problem is that the two mediums are just not compatible. They are the two most popular narrative mediums ever, though, so what does well in one is inevitably made into the other. And in spite of the lousy success rate, I can't say it's a bad thing. Movie storylines written directly for the screen are frequently weak.

Literature is based on words. Movies are based on images. What is communicated well in one is not necessarily communicated well in another. Not all artistic mediums are well-suited to conveying all ideas. Try as you might, you cannot make a sculpture that duplicates the impact and ideas of any one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Nor can you write a novel adaptation of the Mona Lisa that remains true to the spirit of the original work.

Novels and movies are closer together, but that fundamental incompatibility is still problematic. In a novel, you can get inside character's heads. That's very difficult to do in movies -- voiceovers that narrate inner thoughts are tacky almost without exception. Narration by the character from whose viewpoint the story is told is better but limited by its inappropriateness in some genres and how little of it you can do before it becomes a distraction. Another thing novels can do, which is a lot of what makes them such a powerful storytelling medium, is leave visual images up to the imagination. Movies can sort of do this, too, by making good decisions about what NOT to show on the screen, but it's not the same. Novels can describe extremes that are impossible to convey in an actual incontrovertible image. If a novel describes the vastness of a city in just the right terms, it can create an unforgettable, awesome image in the mind of the reader. A movie that tries to duplicate that effect will either fail to reach that extreme or upstage itself by impressing you with its special effects.

Length is another consideration. The reason original movie screenplays seem soslight a lot of the time is that the "natural" story length that can be told ina movie is not a novel but a short story or novelette. This is why movie adaptations like "Angela's Ashes" and "Lone Star" can push three hours and still cut a lot out. Once you ruthlessly cut all pages that have to do with the inner thoughts of individual characters, it's still not short enough, and then you have to cut out characters and plot points. And then the movie's audience is ungrateful because the story is changed. AND because it's, well, three hours long.

My ideal world of movies has 3-5 hour movies being made with regularity, yet still with 90 minute movies fairly commonplace. The world of literary fiction is restrictive enough in what lengths are saleable, but the world of movies is even worse. Too many stories that should be told in less than 90 minutes or more than 135 are artificially expanded or condense to fit the time limits. But now I'm getting way off topic.

On the movie side, there is much they can do that books simply can't. While the images novels describe may indeed be compromised on screen, that's not to say all visual images suffer when actually shown. "Pleasantville" is a "natural" movie. It contains a story, ideas, and art that cannot be conveyed with the same effectiveness as a novel. "Star Wars" is a "natural" movie -- although its story would not be even a slight challenge for the written word, the aura, the atmosphere of the Star Wars universe is conveyed via the on-screen charisma of the actors, ease with which a variety of weird aliens can be shown fleetingly in the background rather than devoting pages upon pages of describing them when they're not central to the story, the nifty sound effects caused by the ships as they fly through space, James Earl Jones' commanding voice, and so on.

Any musical ever made is better on film and undoable on paper, although most of them are better still on stage, even some of the musicals written directly for the screen, like "Singin' In the Rain." But see "A Hard Day's Night" for an exception -- a great movie that would be undoable on stage even if the Beatles were all alive and as young as they were in 1964.

Once in a while, a great movie can be made from a literary work. The opinion that "Bicentennial Man" is one is not particularly widespread. But "The Third Man" is often cited, but it's a close race, and there are some that favor the book. Then there is an interesting anecdote about Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks. Hawks bet Hemingway that he could make a great movie out of Hemingway's worst novels. He was right. "To Have and Have Not," the first screen pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (and Bacall's first film ever) is a great cinematic treasure.

The reasons are, I believe, very telling. (1) The original novel WAS indeed bad. It doesn't make sense to take an exemplary work, in any medium, and adapt it, unless you're just hoping for cash or some other non-artistic goal. If a novel is a great novel, it's great for a reason: because it uses the medium of the written word in an effective manner, to convey ideas and practice a type of artistry that are suited to being expressed in that medium. It's folly to try to transplant all that to another medium and expect to do it faithfully and yet still achieve the same end results. Better to take a novel that didn't work out so well yet which a master in the medium of film recognizes as containing ideas that *could* be better conveyed in film. Or, as was the case with "To Have and Have Not," take the seeds of the ideas and artistry in the original work and reinvent them, augment them, so that they are partially original and more cinematically-inclined. Artists always build upon the works of their predecessors. Those who do so by injecting wholly original material into partial remakes are just being honest about it. This principle is no different with movies remaking other movies. You don't remake Casablanca or Red River or It's a Wonderful Life or The Godfather. But remaking flawed films with potential ("Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" is a vastly superior remake to 1964's "Bedtime Story," with David Niven and Marlon Brando) is a very viable way to go.

(2) The team of Hawks, Bogart, and Bacall (all three of whom I consider individually more commendable as artists in their fields than Hemingway is in his, but that's just me) is a powerhouse of talent and were great enough, with enough natural working chemistry, to be *able* to discern what parts of the original work were worth keeping and cinematically-inclined, what parts weren't, what good original material could flesh out, expand, and augment the parts worth saving. Let's face it. It's not often any movie has that degree of brilliance before and behind the cameras.

The short answer is that it's a risky business trying to force a compatibility between novels and movies that just isn't there. When it works, it's almost always (perhaps even without exception?) the original work was weak or flawed to begin with or because enough was changed so the remake is suited for its medium.