Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 22, 1990 TAG: 9006220530
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Chris Gladden
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"How can they do this?" she fumed. "I was reading it and thinking, `This is wonderful. They can't make a movie out of it. They'll ruin it.' "
This is a person who likes movies, too.
All of us who fall in love with certain books have the same fear.
What Hollywood does to literature is too often similar to someone painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Filmmakers can "improve" books into ruination.
I'm always torn when I hear about plans to turn a favorite book into a movie. But, generally, I'm for it. A good movie from a good book is an immensely satisfying achievement. And some books beg to be made into movies.
A big-time literary pundit recently noted that the best writing today is in crime fiction. These books handily lend themselves to film. The best have good dialogue, interesting characters, suspense, action, plenty of atmosphere and a lot of other elements that can make for popular - and good - movies.
How Burt Reynolds could take Elmore Leonard's excellent "Stick" and turn it into such a bad movie is one of the mysteries of our time.
A few of us have formed a fan club, a cult if you will, around one of the best Southern California books to come out in years - Kem Nunn's "Tapping the Source." We talk about what a great movie it would make and play the casting game, picking out the perfect actor for each character.
"Tapping the Source" has vivid West Coast types - outlaw bikers, drug dealers, aging surfers, satanists, tough-guy Samoans. The setting is Huntington Beach; the surfing scenes and melancholy seediness of the town are beautifully described. The hero is an innocent young guy who comes from the desert in search of his lost sister and finds himself in the midst of a deepening mystery.
Everything is in place to make this first-rate modern film noir. But what if Burt Reynolds buys the rights to the book, decides to direct it and casts himself in what will surely amount to another valentine to Burt Reynolds from Burt Reynolds? Mona Lisa with a mustache again.
Sometimes a book from this genre makes it to the screen with the writer's vision in tact. "Miami Blues" is a good example. Charles Welliford, who died not long ago, wrote fine cop novels featuring a toothless, rumpled Miami detective named Hoke Mosely. In a bit of inspired casting, Fred Ward plays Hoke. It's a violent, hard-boiled but well-done movie with a mean sense of humor and other good performances from Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alec Baldwin.
I recently stumbled across a writer whose detective books are so good I can't understand why movies haven't been made from them. That mystery ranks right on up there with Burt Reynolds and "Stick."
His name is James Lee Burke, and he turns crime writing into literature. His mysteries are set mainly in Louisiana with a hero who's an alcoholic cop.
Burke's dialogue is so authentic, his descriptions so expert, his action so cinematic that a director wouldn't even need a screenplay to work from. I think I could make a movie out of one of his books and not ruin it.
But, then again, we've all seen what bad movies good books can become.
So the book-lover/movie-lover is continually sentenced to a state of ambivalence: giddily hopeful on the one hand, deeply fearful on the other.
by CNB