Of George R.R, Martin, Adaptations, and Improving the Story

George R.R. Martin has taken a potshot at the adaptation process, arguing that screenwriters’ desire to improve on source material leads to a worse story outcome:

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/05/24/the-adaptation-tango/

“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.” It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it. “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”

This is, in essence, the Purist view of adaptations – that their primary role is to represent the source material in faithful fashion. Changes – especially those not forced via grim necessity – ought to be kept to a minimum.

I thoroughly disagree.

The statement “the book is the book, the film is the film” expresses a fundamental truth of adaptation, namely that page and screen are utterly different mediums. What works in one does not necessarily work in the other – as such, rather than judging a film by how closely it hews to the book, one ought to judge the film as a film, a stand-alone piece of creative art. The original author might hate the result, and see all manner of unnecessary tinkering with their story, but their story, when adapted, is now something else. And there will no doubt be further adaptions along the line.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep became Bladerunner. Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange became Stanley Kubrik’s (and as I have noted elsewhere, I actually prefer Kubrik’s version). Dracula became Nosferatu. Michael Ende and Roald Dahl thoroughly despised the respective adaptations of The Never-ending Story and The Witches, and yet both movies are seen as justified children’s classics (I actually think Ende’s book gets too cynical, and honestly, the second half of the book is unfilmable anyway). The later Harry Potter films are, to my mind, better than Rowling’s increasingly bloated books.

Then there are the adaptations that have more or less displaced their source material in popular consciousness. The Wizard of Oz. The Godfather. Howl’s Moving Castle. That is not to say that L. Frank Baum’s original Wizard of Oz is somehow bad – it isn’t, and I seriously need to read more Oz books. But the 1939 movie is one of the great cultural achievements of cinema, even as it alters the underlying story, and (gasp) makes it its own. At the risk of over-egging this particular pudding, one might also point out that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Goethe’s Faust, both manage to be adaptations – and Goethe goes so far as to ‘improve’ the story by giving his protagonist a happy ending!

Turning now to Peter Jackson and Middle-earth… the original 2001-2003 trilogy are genuinely good films, and Fellowship is an excellent one. Yet, Jackson not only makes substantial alteration to both plot and character, but at various points, he seems unable to grasp Tolkien’s themes. That doesn’t make Jackson’s effort bad by any stretch of the imagination – it just makes Jackson’s take on the story different from Tolkien’s. That is the way of adaptative art – and Jackson is far from the only such attempt on The Lord of the Rings. Bakshi’s 1978 effort, and the Soviet Khraniteli from 1991 actually represent a more Purist interpretation of the story. The former arguably suffers for it.

So what to make of Martin’s point that improvements to source material generally fall flat? Simple. The problem is not the desire to improve or tinker. The real problem is that the films in question are just Bad Films. Peter Jackson’s 2012-2014 Hobbit movies do not fail because Jackson sought to improve on Tolkien. No, they fail because they are bad movies, bloated in length, cursed with excessive CGI, and forced to replicate the tone and style of The Lord of the Rings when the underlying story did not justify it.

(The Rings of Power has a different problem. It is not an adaptation in any meaningful sense, because there are only a handful of pages to actually adapt. It is better regarded as Middle-earth fanfiction).

5 thoughts on “Of George R.R, Martin, Adaptations, and Improving the Story”

  1. Honestly, given the second half of GOT, I can’t actually blame him being cynical. A genuine trainwreck, all around, was made of that story. (I suppose one can argue had Martin finished TWOW at least, it might’ve been smoother sailing, but I also think they’d already made significant changes to tone and theme, and some rather baffling plotting/character choices, by S4-5 that there was always going to be substantial divides between book and telly, and much of that would come down to the writer’s abilities regardless: and well, y’know, *gestures at 5-8*).

    Probably the failure of the ASOIAF adaptation wasn’t direct fidelity (nobody’s making two seasons of Brienne wandering around asking for a maid of three-and-ten) but failure to adapt the good material better. What they did with stuff like Euron or Bran beggars belief. (Seriously, Bran’s stuff in the Cave, although limited, is awesome in ADWD – did they really get nothing outta that?). It descended into a juvenile mesh of shock, nihilism, incoherency and desperate spectacle to distract us all from noticing. But I don’t think many were crying out for two episodes following Nimble Dick around, or Tyrion regaling us with numerous kinds of turtle species. Ultimately, it wasn’t necessary going ‘off-book’ that wrecked it, but going off-quality and deciding essential narrative elements (consistent plot, proper character arcs) were inconveniences to shock & awe.

    I think adaptation is a tricky one and whether an adaptation works or not is probably best done on a case-by-case basis. I agree with you that Harry Potter’s an interesting example: the first two films try to xerox the books as much as possible, resulting in rather flat & mediocre films with dull pacing; POA & GOF seem somewhat stumped as to what to keep and cut; POA is overall more successful, but GOF especially comes across as a messy script. OOTP, meanwhile, did a remarkably good job of scissoring out Rowling’s bloat and making a lean & effective movie. HBP and DH also get a lot more ruthless with Rowling’s excesses and, IMO, mostly do a better job with those stories than the texts do.

    For myself, I can accept change and cuts. But I suppose my stipulation is: do they work, and do they potentially improve the text, or at least match its quality? Sean Bean’s Boromir does add new layers to his character. Film Denethor does not and deprives us of better material. Cutting Tom Bombadil is understandable for pacing, expanding the Hornburg beyond its station and infusing it with confusing and ill-thought-out drama doesn’t work for me. The Harry Potter films, I felt, made big improvements to Horace Slughorn: he’s more troubled and sympathetic as played by Jim Broadbent unlike the pathetic obese caricature Rowling offers up.

    Perhaps the best counters to GRRM’s rule of “stick close” are adaptations like Jaws. Spielberg and his screenwriter take a rubbish book, see the potential in the core idea, and rework an engaging film around it. Similarly his Jurassic Park adaptation is a lot more memorable IME than Crichton’s novel (which is entertaining itself, admittedly). Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis is another one: crap book, good film. Veering more faithfully to those novels would have been… a choice. Let alone the infamous vagina subplot in The Godfather book. It’s actually quite fascinating how Coppola wrought such an elegant film out of such a schlocky text.

    How adaptations of complex books turn out likely come down to the adapters interests in the text, and focusing in on what they feel the most compelling elements to structure a new interpretation around. For Jaws, Spielberg built it around the suspense of unlikely heroes trying to save their community & survive the elements, no Mafia and affair nonsense. For Jackson, much of the LOTR appeal was clearly built around spectacle and bellicose war scenes, not thematic musing; he may have done that well, but is fundamentally a very different thing from what JRRT was doing (which always makes Jackson heralded as a Faithful Adapter very weird to me).

    I recall the OOTP director, David Yates, discussing why he cut so much from an 800 page book. He explained, to him, the most engaging element is Harry’s isolation and feeling lost in the place he once called home – most of the other subplots felt irrelevant to that. GOT evidently thought it was the shocking elements that most appealed – Ned’s beheading, the Red Wedding, Jon’s assassination – and gave the story wings. The more out-left-field the better seemed to be the later seasons mantra… I suppose how much an adaptation appeals to a reader can come down to how much the adapters interests align what that readers.

    As for ROP, I honestly think its fan-fic like nature is why I’m kind of lukewarm to it all. Season One had changes I knew I ought to gnash my teeth at, but eh, it’s a poor choice in a story based around a few pages in the appendices. It was always going to come down to the abilities of its showrunners and it’s not exactly like there’s a several-hundred page masterpiece of the Second Age out there one can easily compare it to – as you can with LOTR proper.

    As for the Hobbit… I think it’s much like the recent Hunt for Gollum announcement. Peter Jackson has long, long forgotten what is narratively relevant and seems to operate on a ‘if it sounds kewl I should put it in!’ basis. Hence, he damages Bilbo’s story and makes him almost a tertiary character… in a series called The Hobbit.

    Bringing it all back to the source, one can perhaps wonder if GRRM has maybe fallen into this trap with ASOIAF. Has Martin perhaps forgotten, as he once knew so well, what to show and what to keep off-screen, what to summarise and what to detail? It’s hard to ignore that in AGOT he details what is Important on Ned’s journey to King’s Landing and summarises the rest in a paragraph or two, whereas in ADWD he takes about 2 whole chapters of people just travelling. In AGOT-ASOS, “I must needs go to X!” says a character at the end of one chapter and when we next meet them they’re arriving at the gates of the city. “I must needs meet with his Aegon!” says Arienne nowadays, and we get 40 pages of her travelling to Aegon.

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  3. The problem with Rings of Power is that it doesn´t even adapt in purity the few pages to which they are supposed to have rights, just look at how they directly put the forging of the rings during the reign of Ar-Pharazon, the drastic change in death of Finrod (with Beren not being even mentioned) and a long list of other things. Everything is compressed so hammered that it makes no sense. We should have had two simultaneous timelines, the Elf Arc (Forge of the Rings) and the Human Arc (Akallabeth) and you can play with the mystery that not even the Numenoreans know anything about the Rings of Power so as not to “spoil” to the audience what happened with the story of Sauron deceiving the Elves.

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