I Liked The Book Better

A new podcast called I Liked the Book Better is co-hosted by writer Kevin Sharp of Palo Alto, CA. Each episode of the show compares a novel or short story with its cinematic adaptation; the hosts review the similarities and major changes, then decide which version of the two they prefer.

Episodes include The Shining, written by Stephen King and adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson; A Scanner Darkly, written by Philip K. Dick and adapted by Richard Linklater; American Gods, written by Neil Gaiman and adapted for television by Bryan Fuller and Michael Green; Minority Report, written by Philip K. Dick and adapted by Jon Cohen and Scott Frank; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, written by Ken Kesey and adapted by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben.

The show can be found on iTunes or directly through the site Ilikedthebook [dot] com.

There are a number of challenges in executing a successful adaptation from one written medium to another. Two major ones are:

1) Making the internal into external.  Novels and short stories can take readers inside the head of a character (or characters) through first person narration. Hearing the thoughts can be entertaining and captivating; however, watching a character simply think onscreen isn’t visually dramatic. One way around this is to include voiceover in the filmed version, but overreliance on this technique gets away from what film does best and give the impression of the screenwriter leaning too heavily on the original prose.

2) Dealing with the length problem. A typical screenplay runs between 100-120 pages. A novel might run 200, 300, or even 1000. Numerous subplots might have to be pared down or jettisoned altogether in shaping the story for the screen. If the adaptors have the option of presenting, say, a TV series or miniseries, then much more of the book can be ported over. A short story, on the other hand, could present the opposite challenge: how to expand a shorter work into something that fills a movie’s expected runtime.