Well, yeah, if there were no book and no author then the moviemakers would be home free.
Free to do as they wish (Isn’t that what we all secretly want?)
Unfortunately, most films begin as books.
Books are often rewritten into screenplays.
And then – if the screenplays are lucky – someone dusts them off one day and they eventually get made into movies.
The sentiment here is close to one of the more frequent things I think when reading a good passage from a good book: “I wish I had written that.”
The Ravetches and I only spoke a few words; they were nice words but even then I heard the first faint whispers of something I was to suspect many times: the desire on the part of filmmakers that the author whose book they were filming did not exist. Ideally there should be no book and no author: if not, then the film would be all theirs, something that can never be the case if there is a book and an author.
