Fri, November 4, 2005
Books - Words + Stars = Movies
Random House and Focus Features have announced that they're joining forces to create Random House Films which will pursue film adaptations of books from Random House's extensive archive as well as upcoming releases. In the past, although plenty of the major media conglomerates have both film and literary holdings, there has not been a formalized partnership of this size. In my opinion, it was better that way.
Random House Films is excited to be able to fast-track literary adaptations, but by creating a formal pipeline for this process, there's a risk of homogenization. Having an automated one-to-one relationship between Random House books and Focus Features movies might stifle creativity and force adaptations to fit together unnaturally. For example, what if a certain Random House publication would be a better fit at Paramount? Or what if Focus wants to make a movie out of a HarperCollins book? Does this agreement marginalize the role of the author in the negotiations for the film rights of his or her book? I don't know that much about how this is done – maybe the negotiation is done by the publisher and always has been – but I get the sense that the best results come from a collaboration between the creative people on the project. The book's author and the film's producers should seek out a good match that will realize the author's vision faithfully, rather than shoving a book into a production pipeline just because of a business agreement.
Also, I fear that the bulk of the adaptation projects will come from new work. Does Random House already own the film rights to all the books in its library? I'm betting that new agreements will be necessary for new Random House authors, which will package film rights along with publishing rights by default, and could include an evaluation of their work as a potential film property as well as a book. Some in the literary community are worried that sharing manuscripts with filmmakers will constitute a leak of an unpublished work, but I think greater dangers lurk. The last thing you want is authors getting script notes on their unpublished novels. Think of it: you bring a novel to Random House where they are considering publishing it. Ordinarily, book editors will help you make it into the best book it can be, and then send it into bookstores. But now, the book also has the eyes of movie people on it – an industry far more attached to broadly appealing stories and mainstream characters. Will there be pressure to give your heroine more "mass-market appeal," even before the book goes into print? When will the adaptation process begin? What additional pressures will be brought on by marketing tie-ins and other agreements? And will all this have a chilling effect on authors bringing their work to Random House, if they don't favor big-screen adaptations?
There seem to be many dangerous possibilities. We'll have to see if Random House Films meets these challenges intelligently or bumbles through them the way most movie companies do. One bright spot, however, is the possibility for adaptations that work the other way. Books are constantly being made into movies, but you never see movies being made into books. I'm not talking about those cheesy rip-off synergy-magnet "novelizations" – like the junior novelization of It Takes Two (which I happen to own). I mean real adaptations, just like the page-to-screen version, where characters and situations may be changed to suit the medium, and new ideas incorporated and explored. Maybe this is seen as a dangerous venture into the world of fan fiction, but I think there could be interesting potential there. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie translated to TV in a somewhat similar way, but of course I'm not referring to writers snatching their horribly mangled screenplays from the jaws of movie studios the way Whedon did. I'm more interested in a novelist taking a look at a movie story and re-working it with his or her own ideas, the way Alexander Payne reshaped About Schmidt into its screen version. It could be interesting.
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