It's wrong to change the story for film, but what about Fan Fiction?

[hectorberlioz]

I think this might stir some intresting debate.

How do you justify fan fiction, but condemn the changing of the story for the films?

Not ALL, but A LOT of fan Fiction, even if it's masterly writing within it's own context, messes around with the personaes and stories of Middle Earth.

[Butterbeer]

so what?

Horses for courses.

best BB

[me9996]

The movies were ment to be the same story as LOTR, fan fiction isn't, I don't like people altering personalitys though.

[hectorberlioz]

Good so far, but a main point in my mind is the attitude of "we can write our own", and yet critisize other efforts.

[me9996]

Hmm... I personaly don't wright LOTR fan fiction but I think that those who do should stick as close to the carictars as posable, excludeing they'd never say that, it's ment to be off kilter. And silly paradys are okay to mess up the carictars. (That's the point of those)

The LOTR movies aren't ment to be paridys (they'd stink as parodys too)

[hectorberlioz]

You're right of course (and I'm just trying to get some initiative into this thread).

What bothers me is that, rather than saying to themselves, "I can only partake of Middle Earth", they end up doing "I can rewrite Middle Earth".

[Jon S.]

Originally Posted by me9996

The movies were ment to be the same story as LOTR ...

No, they were not meant to be "the same."

[me9996]

Originally Posted by Jon S.

No, they were not meant to be "the same."

What? If you change a book into a movie it's the same story, this wasn't intended to be the same story? How?

[hectorberlioz]

They were supposed to be the same story, but directors sometimes think a little tinkering is fun....I myself don't see how.

[Elfhelm]

Drama is composed entirely of dialogue. Film adds visuals. To actually read the entire story out loud would take about ten times as long as the movies. So they have to compress things. And a reader is about ten times more intell... umm... better not go there. A reader can remember things, or go back and look things up. Such that Pippin and Gandalf can be riding under the full moon to Gondor and hundreds of pages later, Sam and Frodo can look at the same moon. But in a movie, the only way to say its the same moon is to have one pair look up at it, we look at it, then we see the other pair looking at it. It's called scriptwriting, and it's different from fiction writing.

I do have a bunch of disagreements about which things to alter and which to keep. For instance, Gwaihir carrying Gandalf to Galadriel would have been great symmetry. The scouring should have been left in. Gimli should have been more serious.

But I think these disagreements are different disagreements with other people, and if I had been the one to convert the novels into screenplays, everyone would have had issues with me, too.

JRRT didn't really want it made into a movie. But I like the movies. They're fun.

If you wanted to get really picky, you could tear apart the artwork of the Hildebrandts or Alan Lee and find ways that they diverge from Tolkien, too. But they didn't make hundreds of millions of dollars doing it, so I guess they get off easy.

[Jon S.]

Originally Posted by me9996

What? If you change a book into a movie it's the same story, this wasn't intended to be the same story? How?

"To be honest, there were quite a few surprises in the movie. And the only way to pull off those surprises, really, was to alter the story."

Michael Martinez

from his 12/19/01 essay, Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Purists?

This is my point.

[Earniel]

Originally Posted by hectorberlioz

How do you justify fan fiction, but condemn the changing of the story for the films?

Not ALL, but A LOT of fan Fiction, even if it's masterly writing within it's own context, messes around with the personaes and stories of Middle Earth.

I suppose it is a matter of shades of grey. And much of the condamnation of changes in the movies is linked to personal taste.

Some fan fiction writers consider Tolkien's writings set in stone and make sure their stories adhere to it, others do not. It's the same with the film makers.

For me, it is changing the existing, already determined characters and events that will determine whether I like a particular fan fiction tale, or movie adaption. The dominion of 'canon' if you will.

If I have read the book first, I will most likely regard that story as how it should be. Changing seems disrespectful, and much like you don't want to tell the story right. There's no need to rewrite it. No one's going to go add some more paint strokes to Van Gogh's La Nuit Étoilée, so why should a written and finished story then be changed? A movie IMO must be much like a reproduction of a painting.

There's also fanfiction that barely touches on the stories which Tolkien fully elaborated or wrote in final form. Middle-earth is so vast in time and space that one can easily fit in a story that does not use any well-established LoTR-character. You'd still have the history and the spirit of Middle-earth to deal with, but I think it can be done without 'messing' around.

[brownjenkins]

I think a movie is a movie and a book is a book. The film can be changed as much as the director/writers want from the book as long as the end product is good.

The Shining is a good example of that. An excellent book, and an equally excellent movie, eventhough the movie deviated quite dramatically from the original story. By comparision, the later movie that was made to be extremely true to the book was much worse.

For LoTR, I'd give it a B (though in the genre of "scifi/fantasy movies", I give it an A, because there simply aren't that many great ones). Not because it deviated from the book, but because the deviation did not create an artistic masterpiece in it's own right. I also think it was more due to some mis-casting in LoTR than changing the story, though there were areas where the plot got a bit muddy.

In retrospect, I think that PJ should have streamlined the plot more than he did and not been so worried about sticking to the story in many areas if he wanted to make a great movie. And there are also a few areas where he could have stuck to the story better. But he did pretty well considering the task at hand. And I'm sure he won't be the last to attempt LoTR.

[Rosie Gamgee]

It seems where ever there is a writer of a book, there are many more people who read love it so much that they feel they have a certain amount of ownership of it. Out of this 'ownership' springs the 'right' to change certain details that we deem as despensible.
Why? I suppose, possibly, because we all want to think that we alone are privy to knowing exactly what an author meant and wanted to convey when he wrote his book. And so there are elements that we don't mind changing for the sake of further drama.
The truth is that only the author knows his work. Even then it's iffy. Once something is set in type, an author is bound to honour it, or else go against his own story or character or world.
But when we read a book, we almost immediately sort out (subconciously, I suppose) the things that we like about it, and the things we don't care so much about. And for the sake of perpetuating the elements we like, we may change the things that we don't care for.

This is true for movie-makers and fan-fic writers alike.

What 'allows' fan-fic writers to judge movie-makers, I think, is this:
1) We always want a movie to contain only what we liked in the book. WHY did they have to make so much of a thing I didn't care for, and completely skip my favourite part? After all, surely the author meant for that scene to be intregal to the story/character/world!
2) For me, personally, when I write a fan-fic, I allow myself to get away with things I wouldn't want a film-maker to, simply because I don't consider my work 'canon'. It's just a play on something I like, a work that will never really compare, but is mostly a work of homage to the author and the things that I liked about his world. For me, I think that when a film-maker changes something in a story, he is tampering with someone else's baby, you know? It's not his to mess with; if he's going to make a particular story for film, he's got to make that story. Not sit there and make his own. Otherwise, he might as well just go write his own book and stop pretending to be faithful to someone else's.

[Wayfarer]

Originally Posted by hectorberlioz

I think this might stir some intresting debate.

How do you justify fan fiction, but condemn the changing of the story for the films?

Not ALL, but A LOT of fan Fiction, even if it's masterly writing within it's own context, messes around with the personaes and stories of Middle Earth.

Wait, what?

Who does this? Seriously?

I disliked the LotR movies, sure. But my loathing for fanfiction of all stripes has been growing by leaps and bounds for years, to the point I won't even have anything to do with it.

I paint them both with the same brush - people who think they know better than the author and change things around to fit their whim, in the process producing a markedly inferior work. Aragorn is angsty and unsure about his destiny? Faramir is a flip-flopping psycho? Gimli as comic relief? Samwise gets freaky with Galadriel? A Mary Sue coming in to steal the spotlight? All basically the same - people changing or adding things with a net negative value. It's all garbage.

But I mean, hey, the films could be worse. Peter Jackson isn't even in the same league as, say, Uwe Boll.

[Jon S.]

I think some of us could possibly relax some. Repeat after me, "I can't control everything."

In any event, I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tolkien's Aragorn was a cool character but real life people don't have zero doubts, at least the ones I've met. I'm glad Jackson brought Aragorn into reality instead of casting him as a no-doubt Conan-alike which was fine for the epic heroic story of the books but would not have worked in the movies, as least for me.

No, I didn't like all of Jackson's changes and would have done plenty of things differently were I "King of the Movies" but "How dare you, Peter Jackson?" - that ain't me, babe.

[Earniel]

Originally Posted by Jon S.

Tolkien's Aragorn was a cool character but real life people don't have zero doubts, at least the ones I've met. I'm glad Jackson brought Aragorn into reality instead of casting him as a no-doubt Conan-alike which was fine for the epic heroic story of the books but would not have worked in the movies, as least for me.

Except that Tolkien's Aragorn was no no-doubt Conan-alike either. Aragorn doubted his own decisions over which way he had to lead the Fellowship after Gandalf fell.

Although I do agree that Jackson's Aragorn-I'm-not-sure-I-can-be-king was in any case a more realistic and preferable interpretation than a no-doubt Conan-like Aragorn.

[Butterbeer]

Originally Posted by Eärniel

Although I do agree that Jackson's Aragorn-I'm-not-sure-I-can-be-king was in any case a more realistic and preferable interpretation than a no-doubt Conan-like Aragorn.

hoooboy! this is controversial stuff!
sits down with some popcorn awaiting the wayfarer ...course now i said that he'll no appear ...

i, too am glad ...

i, too am glad that PJ's Arargorn did not go, say .... the Incredible hulk route ...

as i say, controversial and high brow ...

(best BB x )

[Jon S.]

I love that name wayfarer, BTW, sounds like someone out of WWE (World Wrestling Exhibition).

Seriously, have y'all ever read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson. There's this awesome chapter in the book where, after writing in gonzo journalistic style until then, Thompson prints (in italics even, if I remember correctly), the actual transcript of what really occurred. And it's frankly relatively banal. Then he returns to his gonzo style and it's back to hyperbole and action.

To me, the more introspective/self-doubting and humorous scenes in the movies are akin, stylistically, to a deliberate withdrawal, from the heroic/epic style to realism and then back again, similiar to what Thompson did in F&LILV. Do you have to like it? Of course not. But it ain't no crime.

[The Gaffer]

I agree on the no-Conan Aragorn thing. PJ was right to represent those aspects of Aragorn, which are barely alluded to in the text. You really need to re-read LOTR to realise Rosie's point that his seizure of the Palantir is the turning point of his internal dilemma. Shortly thereafter he gets the message from Elrond and his way forward becomes clear for the first time. To represent that in a movie you would have to make plenty of changes.

So, the idea was good, it's just that, as with the Osgiliath scene, the execution was clumsy and pointless.

Which leads back to topic: make any changes you like as long at they are not clumsy and pointless.