Fast and loose

New James Bond movie ‘Quantum of Solace’ takes its name from a short story by Ian Fleming. But movie fans looking forward to the book of the film may find themselves at a loss – nothing else in the story remotely resembles the action onscreen. Time Out explores a few more so-called ‘adaptations’ that bear little similarity to their apparent source material

Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1968)
Adapted from the short story by Julio Cortazar
It’s clear how critically lauded South American obscurist Cortazar’s story influenced Antonioni’s thought processes when scripting ‘Blowup’: it’s a fractured, hallucinatory tale of an amateur photographer who, in studying a particular photograph he took in the park, constructs a complex, entirely subjective narrative to explain the attitudes and expressions of the figures within the frame. But there’s no murder, no fashion models and most certainly no London, swinging or otherwise.

East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955)
Adapted from the novel by John Steinbeck
How to adapt a sprawling, multi-generational family epic into a film palatable to easily distracted ’50s audiences? Easy, just lop off the first 500 pages and shoot the climax. In transforming Steinbeck’s Biblical parable into a rebellious youth v old age allegory, Kazan managed to construct a film which appealed to both teenage audiences and literary scholars, and somehow held on to the spirit of Steinbeck’s original vision, keeping his key themes – lost youth, treacherous femininity, fraternal conflict – surprisingly intact.

Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002)
Adapted from ‘The Orchid Thief’ by Susan Orlean
Orlean’s non-fiction book is a long, rambling, unfocussed account of the bizarre and arcane nether world of Floridian flower fanciers. So troublesome would it prove to adapt for the screen that scriptwriter and full-time crazy Charlie Kaufman made the sweaty-palmed, eleventh hour, entirely unauthorised decision to throw his own travails into the mix. The resultant film is thus a self-referential nightmare in which Nicolas Cage plays twin brothers who are mired in a baffling stew of scriptwriting seminars, car chases and gunfights. Kaufman does, however, manage to retain the long, rambling and unfocussed aspects of the original book.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?? (Joel Coen, 2000)
Adapted from Homer’s ‘Odyssey’
Few filmmakers would have the moxie, nous and bare-face cheek to risk a title card announcing their film was ‘Based upon "The Odyssey" by Homer’, but the Coen brothers approached this hallowed material from such a skewed angle that the whole thing married up perfectly. Eschewing ancient Greece for depression-era Mississippi and shitcanning much of the plot in favour of outlaw hi-jinks, Southern politics and bluegrass toe-tappers. But even in this heavily disguised form, it still bore more resemblance to the epic poem than ‘Troy’ did to ‘The Iliad’.

The Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992)
Adapted from the short story by Stephen King
It's hard to think of another movie which diverges from its putative source material more extremely than 'The Lawnmower Man'. The movie concerns a simple gardener whose brainpower is exponentially expanded by the use of futuristic virtual reality technology until he threatens to take over the world. The short story involves a simple gardener who turns up at the writer's house to mow the lawn and reveals himself to be a bloodthirsty reincarnation of the god Pan. The only connection, seemingly, is the word 'lawnmower'... so why use it at all? Quite simply, because it allowed the film's producers to put the name Stephen King above the title. Never mind that King himself wasn't even tangentially involved in the movie, and in fact sued to have his moniker removed from all promotional material. And looking at the sort of dross the writer's been more than happy to attach his name to ('Sleepwalkers', anyone?), that's gotta mean something.

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