More novel-based films are staying truer to their source
The Oscars
Complex stories and nuanced characters mark many in this year's crop.
THERE'S an old joke of sorts -- attributed to Norman Mailer, or maybe it was Hemingway -- about how writers should respond when studios start sniffing around their work. "Drive to California," the punch line goes, "throw your book over the state line, and wait for them to throw the money back."
Here we have a cautionary tale, about the corrupting influence of Hollywood, the way the industry will take first your art and then your soul. Yet it also offers a more philosophical message, having to do with the ambiguous place writers hold in the movie business, the century-long push and pull between words and film.
For the last few months, the relationship of writers to Hollywood has been a loaded subject, no matter what side of the picket lines you were on. It's telling, however, that even during the height of the WGA strike, book writers remained somehow marginalized.
In a Jan. 28 post on the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass, former San Francisco Chronicle Style Editor Paul Wilner lamented that at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, "almost no actual writers were acknowledged for their contributions" to the winning films. "I waited in vain to hear . . . Cormac McCarthy mentioned in conjunction with the multiple honors for 'No Country for Old Men,' " Wilner wrote, "or a nod to . . . Alice Munro for the short story upon which 'Away From Her' was based. . . . Daniel Day-Lewis' tribute to Heath Ledger was moving, but somehow Upton Sinclair's role as the progenitor of 'There Will Be Blood' was not noted. [The film was inspired by his 1927 novel 'Oil!']"
This is an old story; Ken Kesey, Wilner notes, went unacknowledged when "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" won the best picture Oscar in 1976, and 19 years later, Winston Groom was similarly slighted after "Forrest Gump" took the top prize.
Such a disconnect is particularly ironic this year because so many films, nominated and otherwise, have roots in literary work. Not only is there "No Country for Old Men" and "Away From Her" but "The Namesake" and "Atonement"; not only "There Will Be Blood" but "Persepolis." Literature figures even in "The Savages" and "Margot at the Wedding," which deal, in part, with the struggle to come to terms with writing, its odd and at times parasitic connection to the world.
What does this signify? I have a friend who believes people tend not to trust something that lacks an established lineage, that there is a cachet -- for producer and audience -- in a film that comes from an iconic book.
