Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!

Here now is the third and final installment in my investigatory attempt to answer the question of whether or not a book based on a movie is inevitably better than the movie itself. WARNING: When compared to the glib smartassery of the previous two entries, this final column may strike some as irritatingly sincere. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause anyone.

TOTAL RECALL by Piers Anthony

Movie: The irony of the movie version of TOTAL RECALL is that the very thing that allowed it to finally be made is precisely what kept it from being as great as it could have been.

In other words, it’s all Arnold’s fault.

Given the enormous budget required to make a movie so ambitious, the producers needed a huge international action idol to star in it if they ever hoped to recoup its costs. The problem is that by casting such a star, the movie’s central conceit — that we are never sure if what we are watching is real or a computer-generated memory — is negated to the point of oblivion.

By casting a star that the audience has been trained to accept as a superhero, the filmmakers lost the ability to successfully spread doubt toward the authenticity of his heroics. As a result, the movie never goes any deeper than its mega-budget surface. What could have been an insightful treatise on humankind’s desire to use the mind to escape the bonds of mundane reality is instead nothing more than a fast-paced, über-violent sci-fi thriller with lots of mutants and a tri-breasted ho.

Which, of course, means that it’s one of the awesomest movies ever!

Book: Sometime near the beginning of last year, I was browsing through a local bookstore’s collection of audiobooks when I saw something that almost caused me to have an aneurysm right then and there. It was the book-on-tape version of the novelized adaptation of V FOR VENDETTA. That they saw fit to release an audio version of a book based on a movie that was based on a graphic novel was simply too much for my mind to digest and I had to run home and lay down for a while.

As far as I know, no one put out an audiobook version of TOTAL RECALL, but that wouldn’t make its existence any less strange. This is because this is a book based on a movie that was based on a short story (“We Can Dream It for You Wholesale”) by an author (Philip K. Dick) who has been virtually deified by genre fans since his death (I’ve personally never read anything he’s written and only know his work from the bastardized movie adaptations they have loosely inspired).

Thanks to Dick’s reputation and connection to the project, it is understandable that the folks responsible for putting this particular literary tie-in together decided to avoid hiring the usual moonlighting housewives and pseudonymous hacks and instead found a well-known and highly successful genre hack to do their dirty work for them.

Let me admit now that I have a history with Piers Anthony. Back in my younger days I was a huge fan of his INCARNATIONS OF IMMORTALITY books (ON A PALE HORSE, WITH A TANGLED SKEIN, BEARING AN HOURGLASS, etc.) until one afternoon when I sat down to reread my favorite title of the series, FOR LOVE OF EVIL, and had a shocking epiphany. I was midway through reading a sentence on its sixth page when I suddenly realized that the book — from a pure writing standpoint — was terrible. Anthony’s phrasing was blocky and awkward, and his dialogue was flat and unconvincing. “Oh, my god!” I heard myself say aloud. “This book sucks!”

Needless to say, I haven’t read any of Anthony’s work since. So I’m probably the wrong person to listen to in regards to the overall quality of his adaptation of a movie based on a more famous author’s work. But it isn’t awful. It’s generally faithful to the movie and – without the burden of the future governor of California – does a much better job establishing the ambivalent narrative the story’s theme deserves, but Anthony’s prose is also prone to moments of tone-deafness and he completely fails to capture the sense of joyful sleaze that made Paul Verhoeven’s film so much more entertaining than it should have been (see below).

Verdict: I’ll leave it up to you. Would you rather read this:

“He looked at her. He noticed that she had three full breasts, prominently displayed in a special bikini top. For any man who got his kicks in that department, here was extra measure!”

Or see this:

Yeah, me too.

We Suggest: That, despite his being completely miscast in TOTAL RECALL, you give Arnie his due for being the rare Republican who can appreciate both the value of latex boobery and universal health care for children.

ALL THAT JAZZ by H.B. Gilmour

Movie: Okay, here is where the fun stops and Allan gets all serious and sincere. In the period that stretched between my mid-teens and my early 20s, I had one answer ready at my lips whenever someone asked me what I judged to be my all-time favorite movie and it was Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ.

As a teenager, I faced the world with an attitude of such corrosively cynical existentialism that even the creepy psycho Goth kid who literally worshipped Glen Danzig gave me a wide berth, but inside me there also lay dormant a soft, gentle mega-pussy who loved musicals and puppies. And it was with these two disparate identities churning inside me that I first experienced the glory that is Fosse’s masterpiece.

Here was a movie musical that used the glossy, sequined tropes of the genre to tell the story of a shattered narcissist who was so completely lost to his demons that he literally imagined himself flirting with a gorgeous blonde version of Death. In the film, Fosse used the joyful expressions of dance and music to highlight, rather than disguise, the miseries that can come from success and fame. And what made it even more remarkable was that it was a thinly veiled autobiography in which the main character, who he imagined dead in the film’s shocking, horrible last shot, was himself.

Needless to say, the movie blew the sweet holy fuck out of my mind.

To this day, it remains one of my most-cherished cinematic experiences. Trust me when I say that you don’t want to be in the same room as me during the scene where Joe’s daughter and girlfriend perform a special dance for him. Seriously, I’m getting verklempt just thinking about it.

Book: Sometime during my mid-20s, my mom shocked me when she brought home a copy of H.B. Gilmour’s adaptation of Fosse’s movie. She had seen it on a table at a used book fair and assumed — correctly — that I would want it. I was amazed to discover that such a book even existed. As I think the majority of the books I discussed in these past three columns can validate, I assumed that the kind of movies that got turned into quicky paperback novels were strictly of the craptaculer variety, but here was one in my hands for a dark, serious movie that I loved beyond all reason. I almost didn’t want to read it, knowing how poorly it would measure up to the movie, but I did anyway.

And I loved it.

Despite not being able to incorporate the music and dance that made the film such a unique and exciting experience, Gilmour (who, I have just learned via Google, is a woman and the author of a whole series of books based on the CLUELESS movie and TV series) still managed to capture in her prose the movie’s sense of desperate inevitability. Her Joe Gideon felt as real as Roy Scheider’s and her writing stretched beyond the confines of the genre and — at times — even touched upon the realm of poetry. Her work was not as brutal as Fosse’s — she was kinder to him than he was — and she ends the book not with the director being zipped up in a body bag, but rather with him embracing the beautiful femme fatale he has been trying to fuck from the book’s beginning.

Suffice it to say, this is a real book and not a promotional tie-in. If even a small percentage of other adaptations attempted to be equally as ambitious, then I highly doubt I would have given up on the genre when I was still in my teens.

The Verdict: As much as I love this book, I have to still go with the movie. Anyone who has received an e-mail from me or is familiar with either of my two published pseudonyms can probably tell you why.

We Suggest: That you try and find out if one of your all-time favorite movies was adapted into book form and see if reading it makes you feel the same feelings all over again.

Conclusion
After reading eight books based on 20-year-old movies, I can satisfactorily conclude that few, if any, film novelizations are as satisfying as their cinematic forebears. Out of the eight, I found that only one book (RED HEAT) was better than the movie that inspired it and that had far less to do with the quality of the book than the utter wretchedness of the movie.

Two books (DICK TRACY, THE RESCUE) did prove to be as entertaining as their originators, but in the case of the movie that didn’t star Madonna’s boobs, this was not something for its author to brag about. In the end, five of the eight books failed to be as entertaining as the movies they were adapted from, although in a couple of cases (POLTERGEIST, ALL THAT JAZZ), the authors did a far better job with the material than they had any right to.

I suspect that my findings are somewhat biased by my own preference for images I can see with my own eyes over those I have to imagine in my mind. Every idealistic school librarian in the world will tell you that the sights you can imagine on your own are far more exciting than the ones brought to us by the magicians in Hollywood, and while it is certainly a noble proposal, it is one that I think can be refuted by a single image:

I think that settles it. –Allan Mott

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