The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: film

  • Covers

    Johnny Cash covers NIN. Hurt is the best cover of the last 20 years.
    Johnny Cash covers NIN. Hurt is the best cover of the last 20 years.

    There’s a tradition in rock music of learning your favorite songs note for note and then playing them for money in a bar band. Freebird. Smoke on the Water. Johnny B. Goode. I learned ‘em all. Smoke was the one I liked playing best and these were the tip of the iceberg for me as a bass player learning my instrument. I loved Sting, Geddy Lee, Chris Squire, Paul McCartney and I tried to learn from all of them and more.

    I learned a lot of songs. All the ‘standards’ of rock music. I got pretty good at playing the bass guitar in a number of different styles. I wasn’t on par with any of my heroes, but I was okay. Later, after years of playing I wrote songs and my bands played them. We even played them in popular venues alongside the covers. One band did a whole set of covers at an open mic night, closing with Werewolves of London much to the amusement and consternation of the hipsters in the audience. That was fun but it didn’t win us any fans. Didn’t matter.

    As a writer of prose, that kind of ‘covering’ of someone else’s material is called plagiarism. It’s frowned upon.

    So where do writers get the same kind of training and trials by fire as musicians?

    Fan fiction is a start. And that got me wondering if there were professional ‘covers’ like Rob Zombie doing We’re an American Band or Johnny Cash doing Hurt and making it his own?

    Stephen King covered himself by approaching the same story as himself and as his alter ego, Richard Bachman. (I preferred the Bachman story, by the way.) And retellings of origin stories are commonplace in comic books. Marvel Comics even relaunched their entire universe as Ultimates which spawned their current slate of very, very popular films. Essentially these are ‘covers’. So are remakes of films.

    But the writer of prose doesn’t get to do this. Why? Wouldn’t it be interesting, say, to have an entire collection of short stories where various writers retell selected short stories of Ray Bradbury?

    Probably not. See I think readers are more protective of their prose than any other artist or creator. Well maybe not as protective as the fine art world where those who ‘cover’ a painting are called forgers. Anyway, you see the point?

    It’s impossible for writers of prose to learn in the same way that rock musicians do, except for fan fiction. Maybe. Can you think of a popular example in fan fiction?

    How about Fifty Shades of Grey? Fan fiction cover. Completely.

    There’s no begrudging here, there’s no sour grapes over any of this. I’m asking questions, looking for answers. I’m talking about the differences between the arts. Comedians are allowed impressions, actors channel other actors who’ve played the role before but writers aren’t supposed to cover stories that have inspired them. At least not in public.

    Is that fair?

    No, it isn’t. But that’s part of what makes writing so much fun, the challenges that we have to overcome to tell the story we want to tell.

  • Out of the Box

    I’ve never been one to go with what’s necessarily popular or even mainstream. I like my entertainments to challenge me a little bit, to be outside my comfort zone.

    Monsters and mutants! How can you go wrong with that? Art by John Byrne. Copyright owned by Marvel.

    That’s weird, I think. At least it’s weird to the thinking of the rest of the world.

    Well, that and the fact that I want to be a full-time writer sooner or later.

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  • What’s Your Favorite Book To Film Adaptation?

    The Confabulators go to the movies the same as the rest of you. We read a book, envision characters and places and hear the characters’ voices in our heads. You might think this makes us a harder audience to please than normal, but that’s not necessarily true. We can set our ideas aside and sit in the darkened theater alongside everyone else who’s read a book and appreciate it for what it is: a film. This week we challenged the Confabulators to tell us about their favorite adaptations.

    R.L. Naquin

    Disney’s version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I waited my whole life to see that done right on the big screen. I read the book a million times. I had a map of Narnia on my wall next to my bed. I was the White Witch in a fourth-grade musical production we wrote ourselves. When the opening credits started to roll on the film, I was already crying. It was done so well, even down to keeping some of the dialogue from the book. Cried like a baby all through it.

     

    Kevin Wohler:

    When adapting a book to film which is more important, a faithful adaptation or making something even greater than the original text? Take, for example, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This visually stunning movie is more than an adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Between the great performances, special effects, and the soundtrack by Vangelis, the film transcends the novel on which it is loosely based. After seeing the film, I read the book. And while the book is strong in its own right, I feel the film is even better.

     

    Angela Kordahl:

    My favorite book to film adaptation is undoubtably Fight Club.  IMHO, the book had a lot of unrealized potential that the movie tapped into, and turned a sketch into a fully realized world.  The movie did what film can do best, creating indelible images and dramatizing big action, without undermining the integrity of the book’s ideology.

     

    Muriel Green:

    Eat, Pray, Love because the things that were changed made sense cinematically and yet stayed true to the spirit of the book.

     

    Jason Arnett:

    Adapting books into film is very, very tricky and often if something’s not right it’s because the fans were too invested in the book to see the film as being it’s own thing, separate from the book. I really like The Silence of the Lambs as an adaptation even though it’s slightly different from the novel. The film is so good one can’t really complain. The other adaptation that is something you maybe haven’t seen or read and that’s Firebreather. It was a comic book then adapted as a Cartoon Network animated feature. Both are very good for different reasons and aimed at very different audiences.

  • Input/Output

    Just as writers get ideas from all around us, we also are influenced by everything we come into contact with. I dedicated a portion of my own personal blog entries to this phenomenon, which I affectionately call the Input/Output modes. Anything we take in inevitably affects what comes out.

    As a writer, I talk a lot about other writers and books that influence me, but sometimes I forget how much the other categories of art inspire me, as well.

    Music is a powerful one. When I listen to instrumental music, new worlds unfold inside my mind, and I envision scenes to fit with that music. When I was a kid, I used to lie in bed listening to my favorite movie soundtracks and make up new stories to go with them. Hell, I still do that sometimes. For some novels, I’ll create a Pandora station based around certain songs or bands for a certain mood. For others, I will pick one specific instrumental movie soundtrack and listen to it over and over, which shapes my story quite a bit, inspiring scenes I wouldn’t have otherwise fathomed.

    Visual arts – paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs – also trigger stories in me. I have always struggled with setting and description. I have a vague idea of what a person or place looks like, but the details are usually missing in my writing. Visual representations help me really consider the details.  Sometimes a picture will really speak to me and I’ll be driven to write a story that fits the scene. I’ll want to tell the story of how that domed city on the cliff came to be, or why the sky has inexplicable green miasma in it, or where that dragon got all of those books. Then characters will start to wander around inside the images to answer all of these questions for me.

    The arts aren’t the only other medium that influence my writing, however.

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