By now it should come as no surprise to anyone that Terry Brook’s The Elfstones of Shannara was adapted into a television show, The Shannara Chronicles, by MTV, to much acclaim. Yet in spite of the praise its received, the show has also carved an all too familiar rent in the fan base for Terry Brooks, dividing it between those who love the adaptation, and those who feel it strayed too far from the books. Yet Brooks himself has a much different take on adaptations than many other writers and even many of his own fans, which begs the question; can an adaptation be too true to its source material?
According to many readers the answer to this is an avid and resounding “NO”! If I had a dollar for every Facebook post on my news feed that reads something like the following I’d be writing this post from my own tropical island while being fed grapes and fanned with palm fronds:
Wait, you mean you expect me to sit through a 14 hour movie just because its an exact adaptation of the novel, with all the original dialogue and nothing left out or changed? Why are we still standing here, go get the popcorn!
The desire for a completely accurate recreation of a book onto the screen is totally understandable, and I’ve wished for the very same myself more times than I can count. Who doesn’t want to have an exact replica of the epic experience that a favorite writer painted in their mind brought to life in vivid color and sound right in front of them?
Most people, according to Terry Brooks, whether they realize it or not. His take is that the adaptation needs to diverge from the source material at least a little bit, otherwise you’re telling the exact same story which people have already read, and that will just bore them. Which is why Terry, who also serves as an executive producer and writer on the show, approved some changes to the Elfstones story for the Shannara Chronicles that many fans weren’t particularly happy about. Even though Terry himself has said that many of the changes are things he himself would have done in the book had he thought of them at the time. Some changes, such as the sexual tension throughout the series, Terry has even said would have been included in the book had the climate in publishing been different at the time Elfstones went to print.
And really, when you stop and think about it, Terry Brooks has a point. Trying to be too exact in an homage to source material limits the creative freedom of the new medium and can make the whole thing feel stilted and forced. Case in point: Watchmen.
Watchmen was a 2009 adaptation of a graphic novel series of the same name, which focused greatly in its advertising on how true the film remained to the comic. Yet, when the movie came out, one of the loudest and most frequent criticisms leveled at the film by critics and fans alike was that its attempt to recreate moments from the book so perfectly resulted in awkwardly boxing in the actors, limited the ability of the film to explore its own settings, and made the storytelling feel perfunctory.
We all know, of course, that if Watchmen had been too different from the graphic novels it would have gotten just as harsh a reaction. Filmmakers do not have an easy job when it comes to satisfying fans.
Though I’ve never written a screenplay several years back I adapted an old short story of mine into a stage play that was produced here in Wyoming. I realized right away that there were certain scenes that simply couldn’t be included in the script because there would be no way to recreate them for live theater. No matter how hard I tried to write them, there just wasn’t a way to make them work. The original story was also written in the first person perspective, and obviously that couldn’t happen in a stage play. I also realized that I would have to add some new characters and scenes building up to the main story from the original in order for the audience to understand the significance of everything that was happening in the second act. A character who never appeared in the original story and was only remembered had to be fleshed out so his death would have meaning.
Through that experience I learned that Terry Brooks is right. A perfect adaptation is not only virtually impossible in most cases, but simply wouldn’t work as a piece of art. And that’s a good thing. Because, when done well, adaptations can explore new ground within the same material in a way that makes the story fresh and stays true to the spirit and meaning of the original. I understand the excitement Terry probably felt bringing those new ideas into the televised version his work as he wrote for the show. Not only was his work being brought to film, but it was growing and expanding from the foundation he built in the book. And there’s a very special brand of magic in seeing that happen.
Have you ever felt that an adaptation followed the source material too closely? When did a movie diverge from the book so bad you couldn’t even finish it? Discuss!
