Unlike literary adaptations, film and book do not draw one from the other but instead each produces in a different medium an adaptation of a shared source. In the vast majority of cases the books are not based on films at all but on their screenplays. If we think of films as the source of novelisations we slip into a great fallacy however. This point of view is in strong contrast with the now customary acceptance that in the reverse process of adaptation-from book to film-while some elements may be necessarily or wilfully sacrificed, significant gains in emotional impact, characterisation or other dramatic features may often be made as a result of the different techniques available through the film medium. In this denuded form, it is implied, a great deal of value has been lost while only rarely has anything of significant value been added. This is the idea of novelisations as pale shadows of the movies deemed to be their source, in which only the most manifest content of characterisation and plot are reproduced. The quality of the writing in many novelisations is certainly hard to defend, and yet one other widely held view of them holds considerably less water. Based on his extensive correspondence with authors, Larson suggests four to six weeks as around the average writing time, with some adaptations, such as Michael Avallone’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes, spewed out in a single weekend (12). When one considers the time constraints under which a lot of these books were produced this is hardly surprising. For one thing, many are simply not very well written according to any conventional measure. Other reasons though lie beyond these prejudices. The fact that many are genre novels-sci-fi, western and crime thrillers-and that the majority are decidedly low-brow has not helped to secure them critical plaudits. Jonathan Coe’s caustic appraisal of novelisations as “that bastard, misshapen offspring of the cinema and the written word” represents the prevailing attitude toward them (45). Despite the vast consumer appetite for novelisations, however, their critical reception has been noticeably cool. At the same time, the Internet age has fuelled the creation and dissemination of a vast array of “fan-fiction” that supplements the output of authorised writers. Even today they continue to appear in book shops. It shouldn’t be forgotten that before the advent of home video and DVD books were, along with television broadcasts, the most widely accessible way in which people could do so. The sixties and seventies were boom years for novelisations as they provided film lovers with a way to re-experience their favourite movies long after they had disappeared from cinema screens. Indeed, as Larson notes, “novelisations have existed almost as long as movies have” and can be found as far back as the 1920s, although it was not until the advent of mass-market paperbacks that they truly came into their own (3-4). Retelling film narratives in a written form is nothing new. Even Linda Hutcheon’s admirable recent publication, A Theory of Adaptation, makes scant mention of novelisations, in spite of her claim that this flourishing industry “cannot be ignored” (38). Larson’s valuable Films into Books, which is centred mainly on correspondence with prolific writers of “novelisations”, academic study of this extremely widespread phenomenon has been almost non-existent. A relationship far less well-documented though is that between popular novels and the films that have spawned them. Countless words have been expended upon the subject of literary adaptation, in which the process of transforming stories and novels into cinematic or televisual form has been examined in ways both general and particular. Based on the profusion of scholarly and populist analysis of the relationship between books and films one could easily be forgiven for thinking that the exchange between the two media was a decidedly one-way affair.
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