| Re: "If it ain’t broke: stop tinkering with good books to make bad movies," by Andrew Aitkenhead, Film, March 16-22, 2006.
I appreciate the sense of righteousness with which Andrew Aitkenhead makes his case, but his article on Congo is hopelessly off-base on a few counts. Typical of this kind of anti-Hollywood, why-did-you-ruin-my-favourite-novel screed, Aitkenhead propagates the erroneous idea that a film owes total fidelity to its source material. The only thing a screenwriter, director or actor owes the audience when adapting a novel is an honest attempt to make the best film possible. And what makes a great novel is often not what makes a great movie (this is perhaps less so in the case of Congo, an admittedly atrocious piece of crap).
Why we expect great novels to automatically translate to great cinema is curious. They are fundamentally different art forms with different strengths. This is one of the reasons many screenwriters have struggled to adapt, for example, Kerouac's On The Road. What makes it great as a novel wouldn't be visible on screen. Novels are not a "fully realized product" as much as they relate to their filmed counterparts. It takes an enormous amount of work to translate a novel to screen.
Ultimately, when Aitkenhead criticizes Hollywood for treating a novel as "a blueprint to build upon and change," he misunderstands the nature of a screenwriter's and a filmmaker's relationships to their source material. A blueprint to build upon and change is exactly the way an adaptive artist should look at a novel. When he suggests they "leave things alone" and addresses Hollywood power players directly (as though they're likely to glean insight from this kind of ivory tower rant), his thesis comes completely undone.
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