L.A. Confidential, and other books that have become movies

I just finished reading James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, the first piece of crime-genre fiction I've read in years. It was complex and engrossing, and I had a hard time putting it down on my recent transit flight from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was particularly struck by how different it was from the 1997 movie of the same name -- and it left me with a lot of respect for whoever adapted it into a screenplay, since the screen version of L.A. Confidential does a very good job of using the same characters to tell a rather different and more condensed story. I had a similar reaction when I read Michael Ondjaate's The English Patient: I found the book to be a much different story from the movie, though both versions worked well for me.

There's an old cliché that says that book readers never like the movie versions of the books they read -- but it occurs to me that I haven't even seen the movie versions most of the books I've read. This applies to classic books (Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Cannery Row), but it also applies to more recent books and films, such as All the Pretty Horses, The Shipping News, and Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas. Film versions of a couple favorite books from my teens -- Catch-22 and Breakfast of Champions -- proved so unsettling in comparison to the books themselves that I quit watching inside of fifteen minutes.

After a bit of brainstorming, I can think of a dozen books I've read in recent years (in addition to L.A. Confidential and The English Patient) that I've watched on the screen as well. Four of these books I read before a movie version existed (Jesus' Son, The Beach, Snow Falling on Cedars, and The Quiet American); the others I read after having seen the movie. Here's the breakdown on what I thought:

Good books that made good films

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
Band of Brothers, by Stephen E. Ambrose




Good books that didn't quite match up as films

The Quiet American, by Graham Greene
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson
Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson
The Beach, by Alex Garland

[It's interesting that this category contains all of the books I read before I saw them as films. Save for The Beach (which was awful as a film, and deviated quite a bit from the book), all of these books were adapted fairly faithfully from the original story, but weren't quite able to match up on the big screen. I'll give a special nod to the film version of Jesus' Son (starring Billy Crudup and Jack Black), which did a nice job of adapting Denis Johnson's brilliant, intense, and decidedly non-cinematic book of short stories.]




Books that came off better as films

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk
Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding

[I'd reckon the film version of Bridget Jones focused the story better, and the stylized film version of Fight Club told the story more suitably than the book, which struck me as too slick and contrived.]




Books that have been culturally co-opted by their films

The Graduate, by Charles Webb
Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom
The Short-Timers (a.k.a. Full Metal Jacket), by Gustav Hasford

[I give these books their own category, since their film versions are so much more popular. I'll even admit that I have a hard time remembering the plots of the books themselves, since I keep running into these films again and again on TV. As a longtime Full Metal Jacket fan, however, The Short-Timers made an especially interesting comparison/contrast read.]