comment #1

George Prager says ...

The book is great. Stylistically, it more in common with something like James. M. Cain than John Updike. Lots of interesting well-thought out characters, action, life-living, not much navel gazing...in other words, no bullshit. Sy Richardson would say "You better read it."

I've heard that Ellen Barkin owns the rights to Yate's THE EASTER PARADE (Ron Pearlman money). Another great book. Do it, Elllen, do it. Yates is the inspiration for Elaine Bene's dad in "Seinfeld." Larry David went out with his daughter when he was down and out and living in Sherman Oaks (and being paid by David Milch (a former student, who Yates thought was an arrogant prick)).

comment #2

K. Bowen says ...

There have been some good books made into good films. The RIght Stuff comes to mind, although that's not a work of fiction. Speaking of Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse is a pretty good film, although maybe not great, and Mother NIght.

By the way, when so many women feel the need to starve themselves into thinness. why do men almost uniformly find Kate Winslet gorgeous?

comment #3

Balthazar says ...

Sure this isn't a scene from the top-secret "Titanic 2: Jack's Back"

comment #4

Chapman Carruthers says ...

Nice job quoting William Styron. I'm still waiting for an adventurous screenwriter/director to come along, do what Cronenburg did with Naked Lunch, and make Set this House on Fire for the big screen. It needs to be done.

comment #5

George Prager says ...

"By the way, when so many women feel the need to starve themselves into thinness. why do men almost uniformly find Kate Winslet gorgeous?"

Because women starve themselves to impress other women, not men. They're in a competition. Who buys Vogue? Not men.

Norman Mailer called "Set This House on Fire" a maggoty novel.

comment #6

BurmaShave says ...

It gives me pause that everyone who praised it above is dead now. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD curse? Can we find out what Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes thought about it?

comment #7

The Bandsaw Vigilante says ...

"Mario Puzo's The Godfather being the paramount example of this."

I was about to make a pun-comment here, but...

comment #8

R. Hunt says ...

I can't quote this accurately, but I recall an essay about "A Clockwork Orange" in "Rolling Stone" in which Anthony Burgess described a conversation with Susan Sontag. he said that they agreed that the three authors who had best luck with film adaptations were himself, Nabokov (for Kubrick's "Lolita") and Vonnegut (for "Slaughter-House Five".
I think it may be something of a truism that pulpy novels make better films: there are lots of interesting ways to film a book, from the slavish we-must-get-every-minute-item-on-screen approach of Peter Jackson to the more experimental efforts like "Naked Lunch" and "Tristram Shandy". It may simply be that pulpy movies, regardless of their source, simply have a numerical advantage.

comment #9

Chapman Carruthers says ...

Maggoty. Excellent word choice. I heard the same thing about Mailer. Maybe it was because one of the "protagonists" was modeled after him. Or, because he thought the book was an attack on the mores of the counterculture (it seems like an attack on excess, detachment, and dumbfuckery, but I'm not the author, nor was I alive in the 1960s, so who am I to say). Or, because he simply thought the book was maggoty, which it probably is, in all the term's uses.

For those that haven't read it, I'd give it a go.

comment #10

Marcello says ...

It's a great, great book that would be difficult to make into a film without a real flattening effect. These are characters with internal lives that don't come to the surface easily. This will turn out to be something like an episode of Mad Men, without the humor and with greater self/Oscar importance. Mad Men meets The Hours. Enjoy!

comment #11

Mgmax says ...

Yeah, well, Kubrick may have been able to please Nabokov and Burgess, but he couldn't satisfy Stephen King.

I think there's no great mystery. The more a book is a purely literary experience, the harder it is to capture that. Where the soapier or pulpier a book is, the more it is about outward conflict and dramatic events that translate easily to the screen (or the stage for that matter). It's hard to film a gradual sense of disillusionment; it's easy to film two thieves betraying each other during a heist.

Andrew Sarris put it best: "There are more great movies from the novels of W.R. Burnett than the novels of Dostoevsky." And there are.

comment #12

Richardson says ...

"It may simply be that pulpy movies, regardless of their source, simply have a numerical advantage."

Also, it's easier to see how to adapt a pulp novel, which tend to be plotty, and have the sorts of plots that make solid jumping off points for movies, as opposed to how to adapt 'Tristram Shandy' or even 'Lord of the Rings'.

comment #13

Richardson says ...

BTW, if we're going to knock pulp novels as less than art, I have to bring up 'Maltese Falcon', which is great pulp, great art, a great novel, and a great movie (though it's also two bad movies).

comment #14

cjKennedy says ...

Well said Mgmax.

comment #15

Aladdin Sane says ...

Marcello, I was thinking something along the same line. I haven't detested any of Mendes' films mind you, but he really will be hard pressed to top American Beauty I think.

As for Winslet, she's awesome because she doesn't conform to the "standards" of Vogue - still when she was airbrushed skinny a few years ago, I thought it was a little lame on her part to allow that (I can't remember what magazine it was).

comment #16

Gordie Lachance says ...

Revolutionary Road is one of the 2 or 3 greatest things I've ever read in my life. The fact that the movie can't possibly convey the feelings and observations that, in prose form, are magic, will not discourage me from seeing this one bit.

Plenty of dramatic stuff left, including a fight that should be up there with Sutherland / Moore in Ordinary People and Wilkinson / Spacek in In The Bedroom.

Can't Wait for this.

comment #17

actionman says ...

I can't wait either. I still think that Road to Perdition is the best film that Mendes has done, followed by Jarhead (extremely underrated and misunderstood), and then American Beauty.

Haven't read the book but the leads sound perfectly cast and Mendes has such a sharp visual eye that I will always be interested in what he does.

comment #18

JeffGP says ...

This movie should have good acting, particularly from the great Michael Shannon. The best cast role in this movie by far, similar to the wonderful casting of Bardem as Anton Chiguhr. Nonetheless, this movie cannot possibly be a hit, and will most likely not be good considering the marvelous book, particularly the end. I think Marcello is correct in assuming what Mendes will turn out.

comment #19

EricGilde says ...

The Grapes of Wrath is a pretty good film....

I sort of think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is pretty good, too...

Or if we're talking about Kubrick.... Clockwork Orange is a pretty fucking great book.

To Kill a Mockingbird... Maltese Falcon...

I don't know. I see what you're saying, but I think there's too many examples of incredible films from incredible books to make any solid claims. Good writing is good writing. Now, it's dumb to assume that just because the novel is brilliantly imagined and executed, the movie will be as well. There are too many factors and variables at work in the process of adapting it from one medium to another.

It's even dumber to assume the opposite is true. If that were the case, people wouldn't be giving Tarantino shit for reimagining all his weird little genre fetishes. The Da Vinci Code would be right up there with the Godfather....

It's just not as simple as that.

Not to mention that I see the words of praise you point out about Revolutionary Road also happen to be the three blurbs printed on the novel's back cover... kind of emphasizes again that this is a fairly lazy argument to be making...

comment #20

markj says ...

Road to Perdition was a bit of a mess, one of those films where you can see everybody trying too hard to be Oscar-worthy. Mendes is overrated IMO. The Insider should have won back in 2000 instead of the overwrought American Beauty.

comment #21

The Winchester says ...

I remember that No Country movie turning out ok, and that was from the makers of The Hudsucker Proxy.

comment #22

actionman says ...

Markj: I totally agree with you on The Insider.

And The Hudsucker Proxy is terrific fun. So stylish.

comment #23

Mgmax says ...

EricGlide-- all those are great movies with great stories of conflict. The great movie scenes were in the book. Books where the experience is mainly literary or occurs within a character's head are largely unfilmable.

The perfect example is comparing the utter botch somebody made of Ulysses, and the fine job the same director did with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The latter has lots of outward story and so it allows you to dramatize the internal life of the young man as he reaches maturity. The former has little story and so it just comes off as pretentious pantomime of things on the page.

comment #24

Josh Massey says ...

"(Mario Puzo's The Godfather being the paramount example of this.)"

So is Jaws the universal example?

Ba-dum-bum. Tip your waitress!

comment #25

EricGilde says ...

Mgmax--I don't understand how books that are "mailnly literary" should be equated with psychological experience, or the sort of flourish that one equates with Joyce. I don't see how either of those thoughts are strictly true.

Are you saying that Steinbeck, who wrote not one but SEVERAL of the greatest pieces of American fiction, is not literary? What about Burgess--have you read a Clockwork Orange? The language that he creates and uses has to be one of the more literary achievements in 20th century literature.

Look at the Thin Red Line. A very good book by a great author. The film version has far less in terms of story than the novel, and is much more interested in what's going on the in the characters' heads. Not only that, but it's the putting of less priority on the outward story that gives the film it's poetic brilliance.

Look at the Hours. A hugely impressionistic novel, telling three stories simultaneously in which the characters are all having deeply felt internal experiences. The movie is just as gorgeous.

I mean, hell, Into the Wild falls into more or less the same category.

The fact of the matter is that adaptation in general is hard. And adapting something from a literary masterpiece can perhaps be harder sometimes, but is by no means impossible.

comment #26

erniesouchak says ...

I'm more worried by the fact that Mendes' last 2 films were major disappointments (to me) than I am by the fact that this one is based on a great book. Then again, it's a disintegrating marriage in suburbia, just like "American Beauty," and maybe that will prove to be his forté.

comment #27

Josh Massey says ...

Mendes is the most praised, highly esteemed director working who has yet to make a great film.

comment #28

Mgmax says ...

"Mendes is the most praised, highly esteemed director working who has yet to make a great film."

Mendes is the Hugh Hudson of our time.