Re: Combat films

On Fri, 17 Mar 2000 02:49:18 GMT, db-ft@westmore.demon.co.uk (David
Brewer)
wrote:

>I'm finding this a very curious thread. My recollection of Das
>Boot is that it first appeared in the UK as a TV mini-series of
>maybe four-to-six hours total length. It was marvellous.

It was. *S* As far as I know, the mini-series never made it across the
ocean,
but instead landed as a theatrical movie. Later, a video (and laserdisc,
and
now DVD) "director's cut" version put back a lot of stuff (I think it
doesn't
add much, but it does seem to make the narrative move more smoothly).

>I really think that this is the best way to film novels, or to do
>any intelligent story justice. The two-hour Hollywood format has a
>standard template to which all scripts must be normalised and this
>usually cuts the bollocks off any novel worth reading.

You can't do a 400+ page novel as a 2 hour movie without either ripping
stuff
out or completely re-adapting the thing. Even if you don't like his
fiction,
Stephen King is a classic study in this. Movies of his books,
particularly his
larger books, have usually been awful. The Stand wasn't bad, but that
was
because they too the 1200+ page book and made it into a mini-series. The
two
best films adapted from his books, "Stand By Me" and "Shawshank
Redemption"
were both taken from novellas of no more than about 150 pages (they are
"The
Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" respectively,
both in
the collection "Different Seasons"). 

Allan Goodall		       agoodall@interlog.com
Goodall's Grotto: http://www.interlog.com/~agoodall/

"Surprisingly, when you throw two naked women with sex
toys into a living room full of drunken men, things 
always go bad." - Kyle Baker, "You Are Here"