Screenplays - Although hundreds of movies based on books have been very triumphant, I believe that watching a movie based on a book really alters how the reader conceived the book.

        Swan Song was an extremely interesting book, so from beginning to end, I never wanted to put the book down. To simply summarize this book, it begins right before a nuclear world war and spans the hard lives of five survivors after the demolition of the world. One of the five characters was a small girl named Swan, hence the title of the book.  After reading this book, I found that the book had been made into a movie.  I watched the movie as soon as I could.  I was very disappointed to find that many of the parts in the book had been left out of the movie.

I believe however interesting the movie is to the author, if the movie turns out bad, the people who read the book and watched the movie may envision the book in a totally different way than they did after only reading the book.   Before reading Swan Song, my favorite book was The Tenth Kingdom by Simon Moore.  The book was a wonderful fantasy about a young woman from New York City who discovers that her mother is an evil queen from a fantasyland made up of ten kingdoms.  When reading the book, I was able to picture in my mind what every place and thing in the book looked like.  After watching the movie, I was very disappointed by the difference of how I viewed the ten kingdoms and how the director viewed them.  The movie totally changed my perspective on the novel, and I never again thought of the book as one of my favorites.

Last of all, not only do a plethora of movies leave out some of the events that took place in the book, but also some actually change the events.  One instance that I observed the changing of events in a story was in the book White Oleander by Janet Fitch.  Within two weeks of publication, Oprah Winfrey, as a selection for her book club, chose White Oleander and it rose to top-five positions on the bestseller lists of newspapers all through the United States (www.rottentomatoes.com) as well as a top-five in my mind as well.  White Oleander was released in movie form in 2002.  I quickly rented the movie from Blockbuster, watched it, and was mildly disappointed with it as well.  The book was far better.  Many parts of the book had been left out of the movie for times sake. Being that parts were left out and I knew the parts that should have been in the movie, I felt that the movie was ruined.  Although the book received great reviews, the movie received some not-so-good criticism.  Todd Anthony of the South Florida Sun Sentinel stated, “How this one escaped the Lifetime Network, I’ll never know.”

        Ultimately, I feel that movies should not be based off of novels.  To put my figures into ratio form, I would say that 2 out of 3 times I am disappointed after watching a movie based off of a book that I read.  When books are made into movies, the illustration of a book should be left to the reader so that the way the book was envisioned by them will not be distorted.  Also, a lot of times parts are changed or totally left out of the movie that were contained in the book, thus, to me, changing the story altogether.  Novels should simply stay novels.  Fancy superstars, lights, and props, in my opinion, do not make the words of the book any better than they were after I read them myself.