a financial event

With Oscar season imminent, David Milofsky looks at the relationship between literature and Hollywood.

Historically, Hollywood has done best with schlock epics like "Ben Hur," "Gone With the Wind," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and "Exodus." In cases like this, plot is all, and such literary tropes as characterization, description and tone hardly count at all. The films become screen vehicles for major stars and a cast of thousands is de rigueur.

More problematical are the occasional attempts to bring literary classics to the screen. Film versions of novels such as "Moby Dick," "Ulysses" and "War and Peace" are doomed from the start because of the filmmakers' excessive respect for the original text, which often gets in the way of producing an entertaining film.

It's worth pointing out that none of these adaptations won the Oscar the year they were produced. Part of the problem grows out of a reluctance to see fiction and film as disparate, if sometimes related, arts. Novels are all about characterization and language. What differentiates a good novel from a bad one often has virtually nothing to do with story. With film, however, an adage has it that, "if it's not in the dialogue, it's not in the play." Which means that what makes a novel great could very well make the film version of the same material tedious or, worse, pretentious. As a producer once commented in giving advice to a novelist who had turned screenwriter, "Whenever you start thinking film, Bube, think movie."

Via Rake's Progress