I’ve never been a big fan of film adaptations of books. If I watch the movie version and then decide to read the book, as is currently the case with American Psycho, I can’t help but have an image of the actors in my head. If I read the book and then watch the film, I’m tempted to be that guy who says, “You know, the book is much better.”
One time when I was interviewing a Hollywood screenwriter who had just published his first book, I asked him if he’d like to see a movie version of his novel someday. Absolutely not, he said, noting that having turned books into screenplays, he knows that by the end of the process one rarely looks like the other.
But what bothers me most is when books for children are adapted for the big screen. I’m not talking about projecting Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! onto a movie screen. That’s fine with me. The book already has colorful pictures and isn’t considered a novel in the literary sense. Instead, my gripe is with, oh, say, the film version of J.K. Rowling’s wildly successful Harry Potter series.
As a kid, one of the things I loved about reading was how I could create an image of what the characters looked like based on the author’s description. Sure, I suppose some of those books had pictures of characters on the cover, but that’s a far cry from seeing Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter, on billboards and in commercials for the movies.
Admittedly, I also am not a big fan of the Harry Potter books. I read the first installment, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, before seeing the movie, and I had no desire to find out what happened next.
I acknowledge the movies probably have spurred thousands of children to read more than they had before, but it’s the kind of reading that concerns me. In the end, kids end up reading books about wildly imaginative characters while being denied the pleasure of imagining what those characters look like. That disappoints me.
Who knows, maybe most kids can easily separate the Harry Potter books from the films, especially since some of the screen adaptations allow for some creative license. I just hope the movies haven’t stifled the literary imagination of young readers.
