Hollywood Dances with Words

By RICHARD CORLISS

You can make book on it: Hollywood is back in love with novels. After a decade or so when movie moguls thought that literacy was hazardous to their fiscal health, theaters are burgeoning with films based on books. Best-selling books: Misery, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Presumed Innocent, The Hunt for Red October. Cult faves: The Grifters, The Sheltering Sky, Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge. Nonfiction too: Wise Guy (become GoodFellas) and Awakenings. Some sizzle at the box office; some fizzle. But when the year's first two runaway hits, The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy, are close adaptations of novels, movie people notice. And when Dances with Wolves blossoms from the project no studio would touch into this week's Oscar darling, every unsung novelist must feel like cheering.

A book needn't have a critical pedigree; it needn't even have been conceived as a novel. Four years ago, writer Michael Blake had sired a bunch of orphan scripts and one Hollywood credit: Stacy's Knights (1981), starring an unknown Kevin Costner. One day Blake pitched the star this idea: cavalryman goes to new fort, finds no one there. Wouldn't that make a good screenplay? "Don't write a screenplay," Costner said, pointing to a pile of scripts on his living-room floor. "It'll just end up in that stack. Write a book instead." A book called Dances with Wolves.

As long as the cinema has told stories, it has plundered from print. More than half the movies that have won an Oscar for Best Picture have been based on novels or biographies. But the '70s saw the dominance of popular original scripts (Rocky, Star Wars, The Deer Hunter), and producers figured that the nuances of literature would be lost on their newly powerful teen audience. For a while, most best sellers went unfilmed, unless they were written by Stephen King, or else they surfaced as TV mini-series. That's all changed; Hollywood is again courting authors with six-figure options and seven-figure sales.

The trend may be encouraging, a hint that Hollywood movies demand more complex characters, not just more elaborate special effects. Or it may be further evidence of the industry's creeping conservatism. Studio bosses haven't become more literate. They are simply playing it safe, luring an aging movie audience with properties that have already proved their appeal. Why pay as much as $3 million for an original script, then pay someone else to rewrite it, when you can pick a test-marketed product off the bookshelves for a tenth of the price?

"A book is now part of a package," says Peter Gethers, the publisher of Villard Books as well as a novelist and screenwriter. "It gives producers and studio people something to hold in their hands, instead of just pitching an intangible idea to a director or actor. They trust themselves not an iota. And rightly so, since they don't know what makes a good movie, and they don't know how to turn a book into a movie. So they're buying up a lot of books. And from these they will get screenplays that just don't work. Once that happens, they will move on to the next thing. It goes in spurts. Right now, this is the book spurt."

Buying a book also allows the studio to sidestep all that messy artistic independence; the writer and the director have a blueprint they'd better stick to. "Studios don't like to take chances with something that hasn't been validated in another commercial form," says screenwriter-director Paul Schrader, whose sleek, sere new movie, The Comfort of Strangers, was adapted by Harold Pinter from Ian McEwan's novel. "A film like Silence of the Lambs would have never hit the screen had it been original material. It's just too raw. It could be filmed only because it had been a best-selling book. If you're investing a lot of money, you want some sense that the audience is going to like what you're investing in."

The trick is to convince the people who liked what they read that they like what they see. Readers are a possessive lot; they have, in effect, already made their own imaginary film version of the book -- cast it, dressed the sets, directed the camera. They resent cuts and changes. The Bonfire of the Vanities would probably have flopped even if it weren't a lame movie, because Tom Wolfe had already created a great movie in the minds of his readers. Most of the popular novels that have become popular films (Red October, Presumed, Misery, Silence) are thrillers with strong, straight plot lines. Here, directors are less adapters than illustrators; their job is to shoot things by the book.

There's a catch, though. Hollywood, like the characters it puts on the screen, wants to be loved at the final fade-out. So Bonfire ends in a brotherhood-of-man speech instead of a race riot. The evil nurse in Misery doesn't chop her captive's foot off with an ax; she breaks it with a mallet. The heroine in Sleeping with the Enemy doesn't bravely confront her husband on her own terms; she cringes like a silent-film maiden tied to the railroad tracks. Plus ca change. Movies, even if they have literary beginnings, still need Hollywood endings.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York