Who Watches The Watchmen Adaptation?
This is, obliquely, another comics-y post, but with much more generic concerns.
I've often said that films should adapt short stories rather than novels. As a matter of course, they do sometimes adapt short stories - I gather that this was more common several decades ago than it is now - and of course a very high profile recent Oscar nominee (Brokeback Mountain) was adapted from a "novella," I don't know how long. The crux of my argument is that it takes, on average, two hours to experience a film, and depending on length it might take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to experience a "short" story. A 350-page novel probably takes me about seven or eight hours to read, less if it's breezy or I've read it before, more if it's got any kind of density. You simply cannot put the contents of a novel into a film; there must be abridgements of something. I think there is a real art to adaptation (I'll come back to this in a minute) and recognizing how the strengths of one medium are not the strengths of another, and what must be done to compensate. But when "adaptation" means "cutting out at least 50% of the content" then something is wrong with your conception. Or your source material. One of my favorite movies, Fight Club, was adapted from a novel, but it's not in my estimation a very good novel. Airport books, techno thrillers, and so forth can make compelling source material because much of the content winds up being purely descriptive and/or marking time. A two-page disquisition on the merits of an Uzi vs. a H&K submachine gun may or may not be interesting in text but is ultimately best shed in the transition to film; likewise a lengthy explanation of a tactical team's deployment as they prepare to assault a warehouse/terrorist training center is effectively compressed into three seconds' worth of camerawork.
But for the most part either plot or characterization or dialogue - and the three are all caught up in each other, of course - needs to be severely compromised to make for a bearable running time. And so: why? The market for a particular book is much much smaller than the market for a movie adaptation of same. I can't imagine that Wonder Boys, one of my favorite adaptations of a novel - and yet which cut my favorite scenes from the book - and which lost money while grossing about $33 million, rose or fell based on the book's status as a bestseller (which it was). I can't at the moment find sales stats for the book (Evan? do you know where to look?) but it surely didn't gross $33 million for its publisher, which would imply that it sold well over a million copies. I have a hard time imagining that it sold as many copies as the movie sold tickets, though I could be wrong (call it around 350K tickets?). For the movie to have turned a significant profit its audience would have needed to be much larger than that of the book. So even in the best case scenario, the popularity of a book (unless we're talking about a cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter) can't really have much to do with its success as a film. What's the appeal, then?
I presume it's something like cachet. Film culture is heavily invested (mistakenly, in my opinion) in turning to prose literature for its source material, and the novel is the prestige format for prose material (who reads short stories these days outside of MFA programs? and who writes them except people who went to MFA programs? I'm exaggerating, but only so much), and so that's where the film industry turns. And why do all these books and their publishers/authors want to be turned into movies? Well, $. Excuse me: $$$. But also because the feature film that opened in a cinema was and is the prestige format for the filmed medium. I happen to think that to the extent there should be a prestige format at all vs. a recognition that different things work best in different circumstances, it *shouldn't* be the cinema, but the point isn't worth arguing. I think it should be TV, but that's based entirely on what I perceive to be the potential of television vs. the reality. It's only over the past fifteen or so years that (American) television has started cashing in on its artistic capabilities on a regular basis and routinely turning out product that's easily as strong as the best Hollywood has to offer, if not stronger. Still, the advertising mandates and seasonal structure that continue to undergird network prime time programming are semi-permanent barriers to television's full flowering as an artistic medium; so be it. The point remains that if you're going to adapt a story that took eight or ten hours to read, if you think it's worth adapting to another medium in the first place, shouldn't you want to preserve as much of it as possible? Why did the network TV miniseries die? (because they haven't done an interesting book since Roots, aside from all those late 90s classics adaptations like the Odyssey and Gulliver's Travels?) - why hasn't anyone done before now what the guy who wrote Generation Kill (a nonfiction book about Marines in Iraq) did, and spin it into, essentially, a one-season series for HBO?
...
All of this is in response to the newly available trailer for the movie adaptation of Watchmen, coming out next March:
The trailer says it's the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, and you might quibble about Maus, which after all won a damn Pulitzer, but I'll quibble back and say that Maus is to some ostensible extent nonfiction. Watchmen was also included in Time's list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, which is a grossly stupid thing to do, but I guess we're supposed to take it where we can get it. (Watchmen is, in my opinion, better than any number of great novels, but it's not a fucking novel; it's also better than any number of great paintings, movies, albums, and so forth.)
So: Watchmen is really fucking good. It's not my personal favorite work in the comics medium, but I (neophyte fan yet) haven't yet read anything that I would critically argue surpassed it. The trailer also looks pretty good; I'm not crazy about some of the aesthetic updates in the costuming, but several of the shots are ripped straight from the panels as drawn by Dave Gibbons. I'm also, a priori, impressed that they chose to keep the period setting. However, first we can turn to the author, Alan Moore, who is famously curmudgeonly about his work being turned into movies, but if you'd written V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all highly acclaimed works in the comics medium, and watched them get turned into, well, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you'd be a curmudgeon too. Moore: "You get people saying, 'Oh, yes, Watchmen is very cinematic,' when actually it's not. It's almost the exact opposite of cinematic...I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't." He's, oh, at least 95% right about that.
I should also say that if they actually manage to get the ending from the book into a major theatrical release, I'll have to tip my hat to them regardless of how shitty the movie might otherwise be. I don't believe they'll do it, but I guess I could be wrong. Supposedly the ending scripted and shot is faithful to the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if the studio "tinkered" with it between now and March. Let me put it this way, in no uncertain terms: I'm fairly certain that if they faithfully reproduce the true ending to Watchmen it will be the most unsettling, morally confounding, dark, potentially divisive conclusion to a (semi) major Hollywood film. Ever.
But anyway: Watchmen was twelve issues of 32 pages apiece. Total of 384 pages. Out of those 384 pages, 46 are primarily prose text (with some illustration), non-story elements inserted at the end of each issue which enrich the overall texture of the work and provide some background, but I guess you could skip them and not miss anything you "needed to know". So that's 338 pages of actual comic. Out of those 338 pages, roughly twelve to fifteen pages' worth tell the intertextual "Tale of the Black Freighter," which is being animated for a feature on the DVD but excised from the theatrical release. This comic-within-the-comic is thematically and aesthetically tied into the rest of the work and comments on it, but you can cut it out and, again, "not miss anything". Let's say we've got an even 320 pages of comic left. I would have guessed that it took about a minute on average to faithfully reproduce the action and/or dialogue of a page, which would leave us with 320 minutes, or 5 hours and 20 minutes, of film. However, I'm obsessive enough on this point that I've actually, on several different occasions, acted out one or more of the twelve chapters, trying to be honest to what I think it would take up if you filmed everything (and, look, in Watchmen, and really in anything of Watchmen's caliber, in my opinion, in any genre or medium, everything is important). I came up with about 20 minutes per chapter, which is a little shorter than the real content of a 30-minute program on network TV (22 minutes and [I think] change, by standard; the "hour" is canonically something like 44:20 or 44:40). That would translate to a total of 240 minutes, or 4 hours. I do think I probably short-changed what you'd need to make some of the quieter passages work effectively. But let's say 4 hours; Zack Snyder's first cut was apparently three hours, and to make the film more topical he introduced a subplot about energy resources. So we're already short of my proposed time for a faithful adaptation and yet there's been other material added. The final cut is supposedly going to be 145 minutes long. That paces out to twelve minutes per chapter. I'm really not kidding about the time it takes to do this justice.
So if Zack Snyder loooooves this material so much, why is he cutting it in half? If he wants to make a movie (and not, say, a miniseries) that reflects his love for this material, why not write and direct his own script where he touches on the things about Watchmen that are important to him? Because Hollywood wouldn't want to bankroll some newly created "superhero" movie? If everyone who's read Watchmen goes to see this movie in theaters twice it will not break even; I can't believe that a clever marketing campaign couldn't create comparable buzz for a movie with no pre-existing source material. Why not just write a fucking movie that captures what you love about this comic in a format and length that works for film? Why butcher the thing you're so in love with you just had to make it into a movie, even if that means you can't make almost HALF of it into a movie?
I've often said that films should adapt short stories rather than novels. As a matter of course, they do sometimes adapt short stories - I gather that this was more common several decades ago than it is now - and of course a very high profile recent Oscar nominee (Brokeback Mountain) was adapted from a "novella," I don't know how long. The crux of my argument is that it takes, on average, two hours to experience a film, and depending on length it might take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to experience a "short" story. A 350-page novel probably takes me about seven or eight hours to read, less if it's breezy or I've read it before, more if it's got any kind of density. You simply cannot put the contents of a novel into a film; there must be abridgements of something. I think there is a real art to adaptation (I'll come back to this in a minute) and recognizing how the strengths of one medium are not the strengths of another, and what must be done to compensate. But when "adaptation" means "cutting out at least 50% of the content" then something is wrong with your conception. Or your source material. One of my favorite movies, Fight Club, was adapted from a novel, but it's not in my estimation a very good novel. Airport books, techno thrillers, and so forth can make compelling source material because much of the content winds up being purely descriptive and/or marking time. A two-page disquisition on the merits of an Uzi vs. a H&K submachine gun may or may not be interesting in text but is ultimately best shed in the transition to film; likewise a lengthy explanation of a tactical team's deployment as they prepare to assault a warehouse/terrorist training center is effectively compressed into three seconds' worth of camerawork.
But for the most part either plot or characterization or dialogue - and the three are all caught up in each other, of course - needs to be severely compromised to make for a bearable running time. And so: why? The market for a particular book is much much smaller than the market for a movie adaptation of same. I can't imagine that Wonder Boys, one of my favorite adaptations of a novel - and yet which cut my favorite scenes from the book - and which lost money while grossing about $33 million, rose or fell based on the book's status as a bestseller (which it was). I can't at the moment find sales stats for the book (Evan? do you know where to look?) but it surely didn't gross $33 million for its publisher, which would imply that it sold well over a million copies. I have a hard time imagining that it sold as many copies as the movie sold tickets, though I could be wrong (call it around 350K tickets?). For the movie to have turned a significant profit its audience would have needed to be much larger than that of the book. So even in the best case scenario, the popularity of a book (unless we're talking about a cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter) can't really have much to do with its success as a film. What's the appeal, then?
I presume it's something like cachet. Film culture is heavily invested (mistakenly, in my opinion) in turning to prose literature for its source material, and the novel is the prestige format for prose material (who reads short stories these days outside of MFA programs? and who writes them except people who went to MFA programs? I'm exaggerating, but only so much), and so that's where the film industry turns. And why do all these books and their publishers/authors want to be turned into movies? Well, $. Excuse me: $$$. But also because the feature film that opened in a cinema was and is the prestige format for the filmed medium. I happen to think that to the extent there should be a prestige format at all vs. a recognition that different things work best in different circumstances, it *shouldn't* be the cinema, but the point isn't worth arguing. I think it should be TV, but that's based entirely on what I perceive to be the potential of television vs. the reality. It's only over the past fifteen or so years that (American) television has started cashing in on its artistic capabilities on a regular basis and routinely turning out product that's easily as strong as the best Hollywood has to offer, if not stronger. Still, the advertising mandates and seasonal structure that continue to undergird network prime time programming are semi-permanent barriers to television's full flowering as an artistic medium; so be it. The point remains that if you're going to adapt a story that took eight or ten hours to read, if you think it's worth adapting to another medium in the first place, shouldn't you want to preserve as much of it as possible? Why did the network TV miniseries die? (because they haven't done an interesting book since Roots, aside from all those late 90s classics adaptations like the Odyssey and Gulliver's Travels?) - why hasn't anyone done before now what the guy who wrote Generation Kill (a nonfiction book about Marines in Iraq) did, and spin it into, essentially, a one-season series for HBO?
...
All of this is in response to the newly available trailer for the movie adaptation of Watchmen, coming out next March:
The trailer says it's the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, and you might quibble about Maus, which after all won a damn Pulitzer, but I'll quibble back and say that Maus is to some ostensible extent nonfiction. Watchmen was also included in Time's list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, which is a grossly stupid thing to do, but I guess we're supposed to take it where we can get it. (Watchmen is, in my opinion, better than any number of great novels, but it's not a fucking novel; it's also better than any number of great paintings, movies, albums, and so forth.)
So: Watchmen is really fucking good. It's not my personal favorite work in the comics medium, but I (neophyte fan yet) haven't yet read anything that I would critically argue surpassed it. The trailer also looks pretty good; I'm not crazy about some of the aesthetic updates in the costuming, but several of the shots are ripped straight from the panels as drawn by Dave Gibbons. I'm also, a priori, impressed that they chose to keep the period setting. However, first we can turn to the author, Alan Moore, who is famously curmudgeonly about his work being turned into movies, but if you'd written V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all highly acclaimed works in the comics medium, and watched them get turned into, well, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you'd be a curmudgeon too. Moore: "You get people saying, 'Oh, yes, Watchmen is very cinematic,' when actually it's not. It's almost the exact opposite of cinematic...I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't." He's, oh, at least 95% right about that.
I should also say that if they actually manage to get the ending from the book into a major theatrical release, I'll have to tip my hat to them regardless of how shitty the movie might otherwise be. I don't believe they'll do it, but I guess I could be wrong. Supposedly the ending scripted and shot is faithful to the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if the studio "tinkered" with it between now and March. Let me put it this way, in no uncertain terms: I'm fairly certain that if they faithfully reproduce the true ending to Watchmen it will be the most unsettling, morally confounding, dark, potentially divisive conclusion to a (semi) major Hollywood film. Ever.
But anyway: Watchmen was twelve issues of 32 pages apiece. Total of 384 pages. Out of those 384 pages, 46 are primarily prose text (with some illustration), non-story elements inserted at the end of each issue which enrich the overall texture of the work and provide some background, but I guess you could skip them and not miss anything you "needed to know". So that's 338 pages of actual comic. Out of those 338 pages, roughly twelve to fifteen pages' worth tell the intertextual "Tale of the Black Freighter," which is being animated for a feature on the DVD but excised from the theatrical release. This comic-within-the-comic is thematically and aesthetically tied into the rest of the work and comments on it, but you can cut it out and, again, "not miss anything". Let's say we've got an even 320 pages of comic left. I would have guessed that it took about a minute on average to faithfully reproduce the action and/or dialogue of a page, which would leave us with 320 minutes, or 5 hours and 20 minutes, of film. However, I'm obsessive enough on this point that I've actually, on several different occasions, acted out one or more of the twelve chapters, trying to be honest to what I think it would take up if you filmed everything (and, look, in Watchmen, and really in anything of Watchmen's caliber, in my opinion, in any genre or medium, everything is important). I came up with about 20 minutes per chapter, which is a little shorter than the real content of a 30-minute program on network TV (22 minutes and [I think] change, by standard; the "hour" is canonically something like 44:20 or 44:40). That would translate to a total of 240 minutes, or 4 hours. I do think I probably short-changed what you'd need to make some of the quieter passages work effectively. But let's say 4 hours; Zack Snyder's first cut was apparently three hours, and to make the film more topical he introduced a subplot about energy resources. So we're already short of my proposed time for a faithful adaptation and yet there's been other material added. The final cut is supposedly going to be 145 minutes long. That paces out to twelve minutes per chapter. I'm really not kidding about the time it takes to do this justice.
So if Zack Snyder loooooves this material so much, why is he cutting it in half? If he wants to make a movie (and not, say, a miniseries) that reflects his love for this material, why not write and direct his own script where he touches on the things about Watchmen that are important to him? Because Hollywood wouldn't want to bankroll some newly created "superhero" movie? If everyone who's read Watchmen goes to see this movie in theaters twice it will not break even; I can't believe that a clever marketing campaign couldn't create comparable buzz for a movie with no pre-existing source material. Why not just write a fucking movie that captures what you love about this comic in a format and length that works for film? Why butcher the thing you're so in love with you just had to make it into a movie, even if that means you can't make almost HALF of it into a movie?
posted by medrawt at
18:16
<< Home