How come books that are the basis for the best movies ever made are never considered to be the best books ever written and vice versa?To put it simply, The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is often considered to be in the running for one of the greatest movies ever made, but Mario Puzo's novel that it's an adaptation of is hardly ever spoken of as one of the greatest books ever written. Moby Dick by Herman Melville is often lauded as one of the greatest novels ever written, but none of the adaptations receive similar praise as films. Do you get what I'm saying?
>>223437826>why is literature and film not interchangeable in terms of adaptationWhat kind of stupid question is that? Literature is a fundamentally different medium with its own strengths and weaknesses.
>>223437826I just realized Coppola’s last name sounds like the formal name for Gabagool. The Italian Americans bastardized the original name of that slice of meat. It was originally called “capocollo”We SHOULD be talking about that instead This is extremely fucking racist, saar
The answer is literally "it's complicated." It's complicated writing a book, it's complicated making a movie, and it's even more complicating transposing a story between the two mediums.In the case of the Godfather, the book sucks because it tells multiple stories, only one of which is good. That's the story that Coppola extracted and converted, so the movie ended up being good. But in the book to read the good parts you also have to slog through a disgusting liberal fantasy about a hotshot abortion doctor who fixes a woman born with a cavernous vagina. So that case is very straightforward. The book would have been brilliant if it was just the story that you saw in the film. But it also would have been less than a hundred pages long and therefore unpublishable. As for Moby Dick, that's a whole different enchilada. I think because so much of that book takes place in the narrator's head, drawing on dry exposition and historical details, that it just wouldn't translate well to the screen.
>>223437826the godfather isnt that good and most books sucks or are very difficult to adapt without constant exposition
>>223437928It's not a stupid question in the slightest and I didn't imply say they were interchangeable. Obviously what I'm getting at is the quality of *story*, which when it comes to premise and plot, could be comparable to a certain degree.
>>223437826books and movies do different things well. what Godfather does well as a film it's common for books to do well. What Finnegan's Wake does well as a book is very unusual, but would be common for a movie to do.
Cause idiots don't read and can't visualize the story in their mind.Same principle as the "Can you picture an apple? What color? Can you make it rotate?"
>>223438565The quality of the story alone is not the sole determinant of what makes a book or a film good. What makes a piece of literature good also depends on the author's technique and wordsmithing. Meanwhile a film's quality relies on the technique and skill of its director and cinematographer.
