act No. 1: My 16-year-old son is one of the greatest fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy the world has ever known. Fact No. 2: My son, who from that first fact you might think would therefore have been at the head of the line to see the first chapter of Peter Jackson's cinematic adaptation of same, is instead snubbing the film.
Well, to be honest, "snubbing" is probably too tame a word for his actions—consider it more of a boycott. He's refused to go to the movies for months, on the off-chance that the Rings trailer might be playing. He has avoided fast-food resturants that might be selling Rings-inspired toys, so he won't accidentally see an actor's visage staring back at him from a mug. He had us rip the cover (and accompanying articles) from TV Guide before he would read that magazine's Rings-themed issue, and I've been instructed to warn him to steer clear when there were articles in such magazines as Entertainment Weekly. When a commcercial would appear on TV, he'd wince, slam his eyes shut, cover his ears and run screaming from the room.
He has his own vision of Frodo, Gollum, Gandalf and the others, and he doesn't want those portraits erased. He feels that one glimpse of the new film's actors, and those fragile visions, built from numerous readings, will be overlayed by the mass-market vision of the story, and his original, independent casting—which we all do when reading a book—will be gone, never to return.
Once actors take up residence in your head, do they every truly leave?
Strangers in our strange minds
I can understand his plight, thanks to a situation of my own. I, too, have spent years boycotting a movie adpatation. It was a decision that stunned my friends, because they knew that the film I'd decided to hide from is based on the works of one of my favorite authors, Raymond Carver.
After reading an interview with director Robert Altman about the alterations he intended to make to Carver's work in order to create the film Short Cuts, I was revolted. Not only did Altman intend to change the plot points of the stories, he had tinkered with the nature of the characters themselves, choosing to tell the story that he wanted to tell, and not the tales that the stories themselves demanded. I felt at the time that it would have been better had the film never been made.
Though Short Cuts came out in 1993, and I have reread Carver's short-story collections many times since, I have continued to avoid the movie, an act which still puzzles friends. But the reality is that I, too, just like my son, did not want a director's image to usurp my own. I was afraid that if I let the movie in my skull, I'd never get it out again.
Many great SF novels and short stories have been optioned, and then failed to make it to the screen. There have been no filmed versions of The Stars My Destination or Childhood's End or Camp Concentration or—to name one of the novels most bandied about for adaptation—Stranger in a Strange Land. And as much as I'd like to see those stories told to a wider audience, a part of me feels—I know what Valentine Michael Smith looks like. I have a vision of his face in my own mind. I built that image through many readings. He does not look like Tom Hanks or Peter Fonda, just two of the many actors whose names have come up in the press over the years.
And I know what Bester's Gully Foyle looks like, and Clarke's Overlords and Disch's Louis Sachetti, too. And while there would be much gained by seeing them on the screen, there would be much lost, too. Can anyone read Gone with the Wind today without seeing Clark Cable?
I am sure that there are probably a few others out there like me and my son. Are we literary Luddites? No. I just think we each want to hold a few special characters in our heads, not willing in every case to yield the job of casting director to Hollywood.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. A collection of his short fiction, These Words Are Haunted, has just been published by Wildside Press.
