When books become films
The summer issue of Bookforum features a lengthy piece entitled “Reflections,” in which numerous novelists weigh in on the experience of having their books adapted into feature films. You can read the article here.
Elmore Leonard talks about his attempts to adapt one of his own early works, Glitz; Tracey Chevalier talks about the surreal experience of seeing a crew of hundreds transpose Girl with a Pearl Earring to celluloid; Patrick McGrath recounts how David Cronenberg kept pushing him to whittle a screenplay of his Spider down to a bare-bones outline; Barry Gifford reveals how two lines from his novel Night People became the basis for David Lynch’s Lost Highway; and, most fascinating of all, Frederic Raphael argues that Eyes Wide Shut was ruined when Stanley Kubrick threw out too much of his screenplay, which was adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle.
The article also includes mini-essays by Michael Tolkin, Jerry Stahl, Susanna Moore, Tim Krabbe, Irvine Welsh, Myla Goldberg, and directors James Ivory and Alexander Payne.
