(First published in American Chronicle 2007)
Will the latest blockbuster book make a good movie?
Anyone who knows the answer will get rich quick. The fact that a book is highly readable, unputdownable, a best seller - none of these qualities will guarantee its success as a movie. Some great books have made lousy films, and conversely, some lousy books have made great films. How can this be? What are the factors that make for a great screenplay and a box office success?
Let's look at an undisputed classic - The Maltese Falcon.
Dashiel Hammett's crackling dialogue and rapier-like wisecracking can clearly be lifted from the page and translated into the screenplay, but only a casting director with an expert eye and ear could put the unforgettable lines into the mouths of a Sydney Greenstreet, a Humphrey Bogart and the ineffable Elisha Cook Junior.
The combined talents of the cameraman, the lighting director and the director vibrantly brought to life the wonderful scenes of the plot, and the musical director added that essential atmosphere that can only be implied in prose, however descriptive. But the potential was all there to start with.
Much the same could be said of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and nothing that has not already been said can be added on that wonder of the cinema, Gone With the Wind, a triumphant translation of Margaret Mitchell's best seller into a cinematic masterpiece, a glorious Technicolor realisation of the author's fertile imagination.
So we see the beginnings of what might constitute the essential elements of a book that will metamorphose into a screen triumph, the building blocks that will translate one art form into another.
There must be a strong central theme - the great skeletal underpinning of the book - one that moves from a dramatic statement of purpose, perhaps an initially hidden purpose, that drives the principal characters towards a final dramatic resolution. And what of these characters? We must identify with them, understand their hopes, share their fears, forgive their weaknesses, tremble with them in their moments of trial. Our villains - must we hate them? We must fear them, perhaps on occasion despise them, but nonetheless, feel that they are after all, fallible human beings, subject to loves and hates, hopes and fears.
Of course, a single, central theme will not be enough to sustain interest and momentum - there must be secondary plots, sub-texts, that mirror the complexity of real life, and add the vital realism and suspension of disbelief as we follow the story.
There must be great set-piece scenes, envisaged and described in time and space, ones that evoke strong emotional responses - ecstasy, wonderment, claustrophobia, fear, anticipation.
And perhaps most of all, the dialogue must be vitally real, and come from the fully rounded personalities that the book presents us with, reflecting their whole personalities and inner life - what they have been, what they are and what they may become. Even in the most nightmarish situations, there must be humour - black humour on occasion, perhaps. Above all, there must be love and hate, laughter and tears, a sense of things lost and a sense of new beginnings - and there must be hope!
The descriptive passages on the history and motivation of the characters must be dumped. Faced with the three-dimensional characters (figuratively speaking - cinema is still two dimensional, but not for much longer) on screen, the public need only a few hints to get the picture
But the dialogue must be there - the iron dictum is that a good script can save a bad movie, but good production values and special effects can't save a poor script.
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