Sunday!

Burt Likko says:

As I look through the list of books that take longer to read than the movie, I grow skeptical. Just as The Hobbit (the three-part movie) could have benefitted from more aggressive editing, so too could some of these books. The of the top ten books-turned-into-movies were later-in-the-series Harry Potter books, and each of them needed some serious trimming.*

I notice all four of those teen Vampornography books there and while I didn’t inflict them on myself, I did catch about 20 minutes of one of the movies and it was awful and saw how thick those books were and saw how intensely the fans insisted on literalist adaptation of the movies, from which I can confidently infer that an editor would have produced a shorter, tighter, better product.

Both of the major Dumas novels on the list would surely get some editorial snipping in today’s world and probably would benefit from a little less wallowing in description and exposition even for modern readers unfamiliar with the precise cultural mores of post-Revolutionary France where Dumas set his tales. Dumas, like Dickens, was literally paid by the word, and while both had rollicking good stories to tell (hey, maybe Stephenie Meyer had a rollicking good story to tell too), the incentives built in to the system created to get those stories out puffed them up a lot more than they really needed to be.

That sort of economically-incentivized bloat is what gives us two-movie splits of single serialized books like we see with Hunger Games, The Hobbit, and so on.

* I think in the discussion thread that Saul DeGraw started, there is some discussion of “heretics.” Obviously, I am one since I did not think every single word, clause, sentence, paragraph, and chapter of every single Harry Potter book was pure magic.Report