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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_adaptation
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