Written works to flashy flicks

By: Izzy Bellinghausen

With the rise of the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” blockbusters, turning books into movies is the novel practice hitting the silver screens today.

Ranging from childhood stories (“Alice in Wonderland”) to Shakespeare adaptations (“Gnomeo and Juliet”), Hollywood has tapped into the written word for inspiration.

“Hollywood has gotten really, really lazy by taking old mediocre ideas and putting them on screen,” senior Carter Knight said. “With every single book they turn into a movie, it’s apparent that movie producers have become uncreative and are all about the money.”

According to Knight, this ongoing trend has occurred because the movie making industries care more about cash than creativity. In the long run, Knight believes current movie audiences could get fed up with this ceaseless cinematic cycle.

“With the bad economy the movie industry wanted a steady flow of money,” Knight said. “Instead of coming up with new ideas, they’ll take Twilight because ‘everyone loves Twilight’ and then they’ll have an audience.”

For fans of a particular novel however, seeing a beloved tale transform into a cinematic creation could draw them back to the movies more frequently.

“The books are so good, people want to think that the movie is just as good,” said senior Francis Slaughter. “It’s your imagination on the screen, so you’d want to see that.”

Novels are not the only written word being tackled either Slaughter believes. The rise of fairy tale conversions such as Beastly (a modern Beauty and the Beast tale) and Red Riding Hood has sparked the movie industry as well.

“A lot of adults want to recive what they had when they were kids,” Slaughter said. “They want to incorporate them back into society.” At this point in time, no literary genre appears to have been untouched and authors can be used multiple times. Three of Nickolas Sparks’ novels, “The Last Song”, “The Notebook”, and “Dear John” have all received screen time.

Math teacher Shannon Dayton believes this trend has been used over the centuries with different formats.

“You can have the same story written as a novel and then make a play off of it; then they’ll make an opera out of it,” Dayton said. “We’ll take a book and make a movie out of it, so it’s just a different medium to tell a story.”

Dayton looks forward to seeing “The Way Back,” Slavomir Rawicz’s novel The Long Walk, released on January 21. The story takes place with a group of prisoners escaping a Siberian Gulag and forging their way in the wild.

“It’s fascinating too because no one knows if it’s a true story; they don’t know if the guy made it up or not,” said Dayton. “It’s kind of fun because it’s surrounded by controversy.”

Over 44 novels were transformed into cinematic creations in 2010 alone. This trend for filmmakers is longstanding and not disappearing at the present.