My favorite book of all time, too. I’ve hesitated to watch the series for the reasons you articulated. No way to stop the experience of watching the film from impinging on my personal relationship to the novel. While reading your essay, I was also thinking about the film, The Shining. King hated the film at first because it didn’t have much to do with his novel, but as time passed, he came to appreciate it as a good scary movie. I liked the Shining novel but watch the film once a year or so around Halloween. It’s Kubrick at his best, as was Coppola on The Godfather. Maybe that’s the difference. Takes a great artist to make something new based on the work of another great artist. If you watch Cien Anos, I hope you write about it.
I for one, couldn't wait to see this. We are enjoying it immensely. We only watch one episode each evening, therefore preserving the sense of suspense that a true story should impart. It's been years since I read all of that amazing book. I own two copies but rarely have the free brain space to devote myself fully to the reading experience.
You raise important questions about the language of film and literature; they're a completely different species when it comes to our imaginations, like magnets facing the wrong way. Isn't it the motive of the maker we are watching, not the adaptation?
I wrote an adaptation of my mother's novel (the most hated film of 2008); she was a novelist, and I am a filmmaker - I ended up producing it, not directing it, for Nicolas Roeg, a legendary British film director, dead now, who baulked at the idea of adaption in principle but stuck closely to the script - it was a complicated arrangement. I was the screenwriter, producer, and son of the writer, plus, 'Puffball' was about a pregnancy, and the main character was the foetus, who was based on me (or my brother Sam, depending on who is telling the story).
It was probably more meta-megalomania than straightforward adaptation.
The adaptation, critics said, didn't do the novel justice, but I knew it was closer to the original in ways that mattered. And the film is getting kind attention these days; it has a cult following apparently because maybe without the label 'adaptation', people have permission to like what they see, not what they think it should be. Who knows.
The best thing to do with an adaptation is to not-adapt; you're right.
Like you, I am also struggling with the Netflix series.
And to add more meta to a meta-stew, I love interconnected connections (like in One Hundred Years of Solitude), I made a film a few years ago (another film, not Puffball) that went looking for Macondo in Colombia (Gabriel Garcia Marquéz is in the film). The Macondo we found looks nothing like the one on Netflix, and that's a big problem.
I've been writing about it on Substack as I bring back 'MY MACONDO', the documentary I made, from the analogue graveyard in the light/shadow of the Netflix production. I am restoring the original film negative, and writing a kind of journal.
My favorite book of all time, too. I’ve hesitated to watch the series for the reasons you articulated. No way to stop the experience of watching the film from impinging on my personal relationship to the novel. While reading your essay, I was also thinking about the film, The Shining. King hated the film at first because it didn’t have much to do with his novel, but as time passed, he came to appreciate it as a good scary movie. I liked the Shining novel but watch the film once a year or so around Halloween. It’s Kubrick at his best, as was Coppola on The Godfather. Maybe that’s the difference. Takes a great artist to make something new based on the work of another great artist. If you watch Cien Anos, I hope you write about it.
I for one, couldn't wait to see this. We are enjoying it immensely. We only watch one episode each evening, therefore preserving the sense of suspense that a true story should impart. It's been years since I read all of that amazing book. I own two copies but rarely have the free brain space to devote myself fully to the reading experience.
I liked your piece a lot, thank you.
You raise important questions about the language of film and literature; they're a completely different species when it comes to our imaginations, like magnets facing the wrong way. Isn't it the motive of the maker we are watching, not the adaptation?
I wrote an adaptation of my mother's novel (the most hated film of 2008); she was a novelist, and I am a filmmaker - I ended up producing it, not directing it, for Nicolas Roeg, a legendary British film director, dead now, who baulked at the idea of adaption in principle but stuck closely to the script - it was a complicated arrangement. I was the screenwriter, producer, and son of the writer, plus, 'Puffball' was about a pregnancy, and the main character was the foetus, who was based on me (or my brother Sam, depending on who is telling the story).
It was probably more meta-megalomania than straightforward adaptation.
The adaptation, critics said, didn't do the novel justice, but I knew it was closer to the original in ways that mattered. And the film is getting kind attention these days; it has a cult following apparently because maybe without the label 'adaptation', people have permission to like what they see, not what they think it should be. Who knows.
The best thing to do with an adaptation is to not-adapt; you're right.
Like you, I am also struggling with the Netflix series.
And to add more meta to a meta-stew, I love interconnected connections (like in One Hundred Years of Solitude), I made a film a few years ago (another film, not Puffball) that went looking for Macondo in Colombia (Gabriel Garcia Marquéz is in the film). The Macondo we found looks nothing like the one on Netflix, and that's a big problem.
I've been writing about it on Substack as I bring back 'MY MACONDO', the documentary I made, from the analogue graveyard in the light/shadow of the Netflix production. I am restoring the original film negative, and writing a kind of journal.
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Dan