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- Verified Buyer
As one who read dozens of novelizations during the 1970's, I can say with absolute certainty that this 1995 trip down memory lane is the only, and thus the best, volume on the subject.First some fault-finding, and then some thoughts:Even my limited knowledge of movie and TV tie-ins exposed two omissions and one interloper: among the missing are "A Study in Terror" (Ellery Queen) and "Mr. Arkadin" (Orson Welles—not!), and Jeff Rice is listed as author of the novelized "The Night Stalker" and "The Night Strangler." Close, but no cigar. He wrote a novel called "The Kolchak Papers," adapted by Richard Matheson into the first, made for TV, movie. The second was an original script by Matheson, subsequently adapted into a novel by Rice, a kind of literary boomerang.It's interesting, by the way, that such books, the product of professionals, are accorded exactly the same respect within the publishing industry as that of amateurs—i.e., the writers of fan fiction—which is to say, none at all.One of the authors profiled has a sharp observation. If novels to screenplays are respectable to the point that one wins an Oscar every year, why should the reverse process be considered a disreputable trade in a lesser form of writing? "2001," anyone? "The Third Man"?And to those who say these are derivative efforts using plots, scenes and characters invented by others, mere verbal patty cake, I'd name Rice, and Clarke and Greene above, and all the many scriptwriters who wrote the novelizations themselves to protect their work.We're left with the haste with which such books must almost always be written, and the lack of regard for quality on the part of studios if not the writers themselves. But lots of good to great books have been written quickly, from "As I Lay Dying" to "The Killer Inside Me," from "A Study in Scarlet" to "A Clockwork Orange.""Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." "The Remains of the Day." I could go on.So if it's not that they're second hand fiction, and not the speedy delivery, then what? Perhaps the fact that whether or not they *are* good, they simply don't *have* to be good. Enter literary snobbery.Incidentally, the nature of novelizations is that as a reading experience, they often have more in common with each other than with any presumed genre. They could legitimately be studied as a discrete genre, in and of themselves.Times Literary Supplement--the ball is in your court! *Side note. Readers of this book might want to check out a recent memoir by one of the form's most prolific writers, Alan Dean Foster, titled "The Director Should've Shot You" (Centipede Press).UPDATE. Wrong, now that I think of it, to call these books a genre unto themselves (*pace* Jan Baetens and his analysis in "Novelization: From Film to Novel"). In Thomas J. Robert’s “An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction,” stories are separated into literary works, where writers are read for thematic complexity or stylistic innovation (and may end up being part of the so-called Great Conversation); bestsellers, read so that we can join another, rather less great, conversation, the one around the water cooler; and genre or category fiction, read because individual stories exist as “chapters” of the larger corpus of that genre, and partake of the same tropes and iconography, returning the reader to familiar environs again and again.But novelizations. This is fiction people read as a memento, a souvenir, a shadow experience of another art. Universities ought to elevate them into a fourth type of fiction, along with the lit, the bestsellers and the category stuff.Harvard University, the ball just bounced into your court…*Incidentally. Novelizations as a sui generis fiction are quickly written, yes. With little concern for quality, sure. No cult forms around the authors, nope. And if they're uncreative, derivative, well, that's a feature, not a bug. All we want is a movie rendered in prose.The one kind of fiction perfectly suited to large language models.I took the online screenplays of several films, copied the first scenes into Chat GPT (not the whole scripts -- too big to swallow in one gulp), and with careful prompting, had no-sweat novelizations in seconds.This is probably the road that all such work will take in the near future. Hey, Skynet! May I please have the collected oeuvre of Adam Sandler, done in the style of Annie Proulx? Much obliged!
