Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Galló Eszter - Deleting Scenes?

Deleting Scenes?
 
 Nowadays film adaptations from books are very popular, almost every best seller is turned into a movie. While it can be a great experience, films also can ruin a book for the reader. Therefore, a very simple question comes to mind: Is it possible to make film adaptations without deleting scenes? While the fans would love to have a film adaptation that is exactly the same as the book, it has been proven in the past that directors have to delete some scenes from the plot.

  Of course, there are reasons why directors do not like to put everything on the big screen. In 1924 Erich von Stroheim attempted to make a film adaptation from Frank Norris’ novel McTeague with his film Greed. This film was 9 ½ hours long, which was too long for an average person. It was eventually cut to two hours, but the film was very incoherent. Since this event, no director attempted to put every scene into a movie. 

Some film theorists also argued that directors should be entirely unconcerned with the source, because a novel is a novel, and a film is a film. While I agrre with this to a certain extent, fans of a book will not be happy if a director changes the whole plot, but still calls the film an adaptation. A possible solution would be to call these interpretations, and to not give these the same title as the book, because it can be misleading. It is misleading, if a completely different plot has the same title as the book. Therefore, directors should indicate that the film will have a different plot. An example of this is Little Red Riding Hood. Recently there was a film with this title, and while it had elements from the original tale, it was completely different, and it is certainly not suitable for little children. 

Theatrical adaptations, for example adaptations of William Shakespeare’s plays are very popular in Hollywood, and there are multiple versions of many of his works. These are do not neccessarily involve deleting scenes, as they are not that long, but there are slight changes in the different versions. There are many spinoffs that adapt Shakespeares plays, for example West Side Story, or The Lion King.

If a book is adapted to television series, it is more likely to be more relevant to the books. There is more time to tell the story. On the other hand, usually the makers of television series want people to keep watching the series. Therefore, directors change the plot of these too, because if people can just read the books, they will not watch the series which are only released once a week. Thus if people are very curious, they will just read the book, therefore the directors will change the plot of these too whether one likes it or not. An example would be the very popular teen series, Pretty Little Liars, which is based on books. Since it includes multiple mysteries, which keeps people watching, the directors changed the plot quite a lot.

Lastly, one can talk about comic book adaptations and video game adaptations. These are interesting because directors can change the plot entirely, as it is not as important as a book. These films usually try to capture the back story and the characters, but they do not have the same plot as the source. Video game adaptations are less serious, some are well received (for example, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) but some are not as liked by the audience (for example, Super Mario Bros.).

One can conclude that while deleting scenes is very controversial, the directors cannot avoid this. There are different reasons why they do this, but in almost every type of film adaptation, deleting scenes cannot be avoided.

References
Film adaptations. In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 3, 2014, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_adaptation

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