Great Kids' Books, Movies Sometimes Get On the Same Page
May 20, 2003By ELIZABETH KASTOR of the Washington Post
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
You've just finished a book. You turn the last page and think, "That was fantastic! Someone should turn it into a movie."
Or maybe not. It's awful to watch a beloved story flickering on a big screen and realize that the moviemakers got it all wrong.
So when fans of Louis Sachar's Newbery-winning novel "Holes" heard it was being made into a movie, some worried it just might not be good enough.
But "Holes", the movie, is getting deliriously positive reviews from both kids and grown-up critics. It's the story of Stanley Yelnats IV, a kid suffering under an ancient family curse. "Holes" takes place at Camp Green Lake, where kids who have been convicted of breaking the law are forced to dig big holes under the broiling sun day after day. It has evil adults (and a few good ones), courageous kids, hidden treasure and poisonous lizards.
Sachar, who wrote the book, also wrote the screenplay (the script for the movie), which may be part of the reason the movie pleases the book's fans so much. Authors whose books are turned into movies often complain that the movie just doesn't feel like what they wrote. Usually that's because they didn't have a role in creating the film.
But Sachar and director Andrew Davis knew that they couldn't just film the book. They had to create something new.
"The kind of books I like to read and that I try to write, there's a real partnership between the author and the reader. You almost feel the author is your friend," Sachar said. The writer's words and the reader's imagination work together to create a fictional world. "In a movie," he said, "you lose all that."
What you gain is excitement: Reading about a car chase or a building exploding is just never going to be as thrilling as watching it. Movies do everything bigger, faster, brighter, louder.
So "Stuart Little", E.B. White's gentle book about a mouse's adventures, became a fast-paced movie filled with laughs. Mary Norton's The Borrowers, which took place in a house more than 100 years ago, became a movie with all kinds of cool, modern technology. Good books. Good movies. But different.
Sometimes, a book is little more than an inspiration for a movie. "Shrek" was a short, funny picture book by William Steig long before it was a hysterical movie. Yes, Steig's Shrek was an ugly ogre, and yes he married another ogre, but that's about all that the book and movie have in common.
But what about the fabulous books by authors such as Christopher Paul Curtis, Katherine Paterson, Jerry Spinelli?
Not all great kids' books can be turned into movies, Sachar says. "Lots of books for kids don't have the big story" that makes for good movies. "A lot of them are about one kid and the problems he's having."
Even books with large stories face challenges. The two "Harry Potter" movies were hugely successful, but they left some adults and kids with mixed feelings. Kids who had basically committed the book to memory were angry when details were changed or left out.
Some other adults and kids thought the movies weren't original enough, that the director was working so hard to stick to the book he didn't create a really interesting movie that could stand on its own.
ADDED PLOT ELEMENTS
"Holes" screenwriter Louis Sachar and director Andrew Davis made some changes in the story to bring it to the screen. Here are a few:
Davis and Sachar added a grandfather who wasn't in the book. That way, the grandfather, Stanley Yelnats II, could tell the kid, Stanley Yelnats IV, the story of the family curse. In the book, Sachar simply told the history.
To let viewers know that the movie was going to take place in both the present and 100 years ago, early on Davis had Stanley IV see a ghostly man, mule and wagon. "I wanted to make sure the crowd was ready to go back and forth in time," Davis says.
Sachar didn't have to dig any holes. The people behind the movie did. They dug 700 of them in the California desert (with the help of machines), and then created another 9,000 holes (with the help of computer animation). The movie opens with all those endless holes in the empty desert.
