A couple of weeks ago I saw a very good biopic about Alejandro Jodorowski, an avant-garde director, that tried to bring out a version of the science fiction novel, Dune, to the big screen back in the 1970s. Apart from directing he has been known to star, produce, and screenwrite his movies. One of the things that he said in the movie struck me as very revealing.
“The challenge of creating a movie is to take what is essentially the auditory experience of reading and turning it into a visual experience”
This is a problem that I have seen in various attempts to adapt very good books into movies. For example the stories of H.P. Lovecraft are notorious for being nearly impossible to capture on the screen. The few times they have been adapted they were not only box office flops but dramatic flops.
Part of the problem is that the elements found in some books such as the setting descriptions, character descriptions, even the general tone of a novel are hard to represent on the screen.
That’s why for me it’s a pleasure to find those screen writers that are consummate professionals and can turn something that would normally reside in the pages of a book and capture not just the basic elements of the story but the essence of the tale. I think it’s a special skill.
I’ve been wanting to write a post about a book I read a couple of months ago but I haven’t quite known how to approach it. David Itzkoff from the New York Times wrote a book about the movie Network. The book is mainly about the making of the movie but for me the most important part was about the writer, Paddy Chayefsky. A truly brilliant writer, the term prophetic is usually used to describe his work. He takes complex subjects that he could probably have put down on paper but his preferred medium was visual (movies and TV).
His works pretty accurately summarized the post war change of the nuclear family in the 1950s (Marty), the coming institutionalization of modern health care (The Hospital), and the turn towards “reality programming” in TV (Network).
If you haven’t caught any of these movies I would urge you to catch-all of them but Network is the jewel in the crown. The movie centers around a failing TV network that exploits a mentally disturbed man, Howard Beale, for ratings and follows it up with covertly supporting and filming a criminal group of revolutionaries for a TV show and then having them execute Beale on live television for more ratings.
Along the way Chayefsky pens a truly disturbing scene about the corporate view of the world and nature.
The movie delves deeply into what we might expect in the future (back in the 70s) of television programming and considers just how ruthless corporations can be about getting their way.
Chayefsky creates complicated supporting characters, each with their own fears and desires and all striving to control Howard. The movie has mini subplots revolving around the marriage of one of the supporting characters and the unspoken machinations of the corporation in charge trying to make as much money as possible.
But Chayefsky isn’t alone in creating works that would have a lot to say about the future that we would live in. Other luminaries would tackle a wide range of issues and let us look at the possible dystopian worlds that could occur if we were not vigilant and that have partly occurred anyways. Most of these are only found in movie form. I could write entire articles about each (and still may one day), but briefly:
- Harry Harrison tackled global warming, overpopulation, and resource shortages in Soylent Green.
- George Lucas took a page from Aldous Huxley and explored social engineering and drug escapism in THX1138
- Ray Bradbury delved into the degradation of culture and literacy in Fahrenheit 451
- Phillip K Dick explored the thin line between man and machine in Blade Runner
- Andrew Niccol considered the social ramifications of genetic engineering in Gattaca
- John Carpenter did a brilliant send up of runaway capitalism in They Live
These movies provide me as much satisfaction to me as would a well written book. They provide all the elements that I would find in other media and to me at they have a lot to consider and think about long after the image fades from the screen.
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