After recently bemoaning the declining quality of
films these days with no less an enthusiast than David Thomson—he, of the glorious Biographical Dictionary
of Film (4th edition)—I have been thinking a bit about
the relationship of movies and books over a range of, uh, issues.
In early December PW published a short q & a with pseudonymously
named novelist Ray Shannon (Man Eater), who apparently works
in Hollywood. Here’s the question posed to him:
How would you describe the book and the film industries
today?
Unfortunately I think one is becoming more and
more like the other. There was a time when the book industry and
the film industry were totally separate entities. Not only in
terms of their end products but also in terms of their behavior.
More and more you see the book industry mimicking the business
practices of the film industry in terms of how the material is
produced and how it’s put out there for the audience. In
terms of what a viable product is and what it is not. There was
a time when if you could write a good book your chances of getting
it published were pretty good, and I think that is less and less
true because, again, the book industry emulated the film industry
and it’s looking more and more for a specific type of book
as opposed you one that has literary merit.
That this is sad and bad—well, I think that’s
pretty obvious. That it is new news is puzzling. For a few years
now, reports regularly surface of manuscripts and galleys making
their way (often from the trash) to the desks or whatever is used
as work surfaces in HOLLYWOOD of the big machers before agents have
cut deals with publishing houses or editors have made their magic
they make. I vaguely remember the inestimable Joan Didion excoriating
the art of the deal which these days may be the main art. Let me
segue to an article Laura Miller wrote in the New York Times
Magazine, "This
is a Headline for an Essay About Meta," also, a few months
ago. I am still pondering what alchemical process Ms. Miller employed
to turn a simple idea into a 3700-word revenue source (on that count,
yeah for her) or more honestly what exactly the point was. I’ll
get back to that soon and, if not there is always my tell-all memoir
(where I name names and give dates) It’s All Good.
So as the kids say, “Oyez perro.” Reading
my local shopping and eating magazine, Boston magazine, I
noticed that Rob Reiner’s next film Alex and Emma is
based on Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, a story about a
writer who has problems—like writer’s block (which is
actually a distinctly 20th century ailment) and gambling debts.
And then there is Adaptation, which may be the exemplar of
Ms. Miller’s ‘meta’ fetish. Here a screenwriter struggles
to take a book, in this case, 
RB by Anthony Russo