@tmcat I'm not a Lynch fan at all but I give him a pass on Dune. His book (Catching the Big One) mentions very little about his work - besides the fact that he strongly regrets giving up final cut rights on Dune. That is enough for me to conclude that the studio killed the movie.

But at the same time I'll never get over how poorly Baron Harkonnen was portrayed.

@jeffharriger Hit the nail on the head about J.B., I thought exactly the same thing.

Yeah, the vast majority of bad adaptations stem from the typical studio interference that would and do make many films bad. Casting this actor in the roll, not because they're right for it, but because they're popular right now. Use this music vs what's described in the book, because the parent company has a deal with this artist and they want to sell more CDs, etc.... Marketing not artistic changes.

I actually like Dune a lot. The movie has so much style and great performances, great production design. I consider it a "Noble Failure", something with lots of talent going on, but it doesn't quite come together in the end. Though I didn't read the book til after I saw the movie.

And there's a big difference between leaving stuff out because of time, budget, continuity or the adapter didn't like this subplot, etc...., vs creating new scenes to CHANGE the plot or story or character types or character motivations. Most of the time, changes are really the studo's "death of 1000 notes" or a high powered actor wanting something more suitable to his or her ego(or acting limitations), not the story.

Get Shorty and it's sequel Be Cool, are perfect examples of the best and the worst. Get Shorty is one of the best adaptations of a Elmore Leonard book. Travolta even said at various times in production when they were having script or story problems, "What did they do in the book?" They checked the book and the book was, of course, better so they changed it back to the book and we got a great movie.

Ironic then, how bad they screwed up it's sequel Be Cool. First the Linda Moon character in the book was white and as soon as I saw Beyonce, I knew the character was going to be nothing like the book, and she wasn't. Can't remember his name, but a black bad guy character who died in the book, as soon as 5 minutes went by in the movie, I knew he wasn't going to die because they were making him too funny, completely changing the character, and yep, he survived.

These are perfect control cases to see what works and what doesn't.

@tmcat

It gets even stranger, when you consider that the classic cable TV series (Sopranos, Wire, Mad Men, etc.) are more "novelistic" than mass-market novels today.

I have not often seen films that come close to the experience of reading the book, the one execption for me was "The Shining".

David Lynch's Dune was pretty bad, though nice to look at. I thought the Sci-fi channel's mini-series were pretty good. They made some changes with the character's in Children of Dune, but it worked for me.

It gets a little more complicated these days, because novel-writing has changed: the writing is more "cinematic", sometimes in the hope of getting picked up as a movie, but also as an approach to conceiving and structuring the material.

"Savages", out this week, actually slips into screenplay form (in the novel). It's meant to be ironic and all that, but even so.... The book itself pretty much reads like a movie, despite hyper-stylized prose.

Or consider a mass-market author who apparently had literary pretensions -- Stieg Larsson (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.). These books are pretty clunky, the guy didn't have a developed literary technique or an accomplished style (at least, not in translation). But they make for good movies (check out the 3 Swedish films, don't know about the Fincher version), because their basis is more in cinema than the classic novel.

I agree with Gabel. Movies generally work best when they closely adhere to 3 act structure. There are other elements as well that are common denominators in films -- such as the existence of a thruline or story spine. Novels and other forms of literature have no such rules so it's usually difficult to take a novel and make a tight and consistent screenplay that closely follows the beats and structure of the source material.

@CRFilms: Part of what makes a good adaptation is how close they stay to the original source material.

Not always. I think a good adaptation is an adaptation that knows what works and what doesn't. Film and literature are two different media. Something might work great on paper, but not at all on film. As @brianluce said, Lovecraft is an amazing writer (my favorite) but can make rather lousy for movies. The best adaptation of a Lovecraft story is Herbert West: Re-Animator, which strays from the material, but as the story is one of Lovecraft's weaker ones, I found it superior to the story. But there are two films that capture the spirit of Lovecraft (the second one being a mythos film-proper, but not adapted from his stories) and those are John Carpenter's The Thing and In The Mouth of Madness.

And take something like Jurassic Park. The film does change a lot from the book, but in many ways for the better. Michael Crichton co-wrote the film and his first draft was a word-for-word adaptation of the book and he himself agreed that it was no way it would make a good film. After all, it's his story and if he agrees with the changes, are we the ones to complain? And Spielberg has made an adaptation that definitely improved the book and that is Jaws. He made all the characters way more sympathetic (especially Hooper, who in the book is a complete asshole, while becoming a great, lovable character in the film). Possibly the greatest film of all time is itself an adaptation: The Godfather. It removes two main characters (Johnny Fontaine getting a few scenes at the start and Connie's mistress showing up without lines in a quick shot) and puts the focus on Michael. Yet most people agree that it is a superior adaptation, with the book being a bestseller, but the film regarded as a (or the) masterpiece of cinema.

In both cases it shown where the filmmakers knew what was good in the story, but also bad or unsuitable. They stuck with what worked and removed what didn't. In these cases they improved on the books, but what about adaptations of great books?

Take L.A. Confidential. James Ellroy is often called unfilmable, with long books taking place over a long time periods and with lots of different characters. The film L.A. Confidential manages in some weird way to make a great film, without ruining the book. While it made quite a few changes, the most obvious putting focus on Ed Exley, Bud White and Jack Vincennes, removing a lot of subplots and compressing the narrative a lot, it still stayed true to the main story, characters and feel of the novel. Even Ellroy himself was impressed by how well they had made it. Same thing with Lord of the Rings. Major changes are made, both to compress the time and also to make the films watchable. The books are very heavy on exposition and explanations of the world, with very little action. The film does shift focus, but manages to still be faithful to Tolkien's world to a big degree.

After my long rant the conclusion I think is this: To make a good book into a good film, you need to understand it well, see what will work on a screen and what won't and not to be afraid to change that. They are two different medias, being suited to different things. What will work in one won't work in the other. Sometimes being too close can be bad too (while I loved the Watchmen film, it would in many ways have worked better had it changed it up a bit).

Polanski's adaptation of The Ghost Writer ("The Ghost" in the UK) is almost exactly the same as the book. I watched the movie first and then read the book and it is almost scene for scene. Freaky. I thought it was an excellent movie (beautiful camera movement-good acting) and a pretty good book.

I will have to think more about the worst as there are a lot more to choose from.

@jweeke I LOVED Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but then I've never read the book. I agree about expectations. EVERYTHING we take into the theater factors in, and in honest criticism you should give full disclosure for why you think something or why it affected you in certain ways.

Enders Game is one of my all time favorite books, and I am dreading the film adaptation. I'm expecting it to suck, so hopefully if it doesn't suck I won't be devastated.

but the fact they used exact dialogue makes something better than if they made it up.

That's subjective. I would say false, too, but definitely subjective.

I'm a fan of this guy's method: http://joeposnanski.blogspot.kr/p/movie-plus-minus.html

You don't expect "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" to be a good movie, and so when it's not, you don't care. On the other hand, "The Road" was an incredible book, and I expected the film to be great as well. It was not. Which adaptation was worse? To me "The Road" was, by far.

By the way, I agree with you about the Jurassic Park adaptation being oversimplified. Its special effects hold up much better than its plot and dialog. However, it's also probably the movie that got me into filmmaking. I saw it in a sold-out movie theater when I was six -- and I've been chasing the dragon (raptor?) ever since. Seriously, there's no greater movie-going experience. So, despite that there are a hundred movies I like better, in a sense it's the best movie there is.

Stick to the source material or GTFO!

Yeah I have to take issue with you here. The relationship an adaptation has with its source material ends the moment it's released for consumption. From there a viewer's perception of it may change based on his knowledge or opinion of the source material, but that's completely subjective and can't be part of a serious critique. That's like saying you don't like the Mona Lisa because the woman was better looking in reality.