Film the Book

When you buy an audio book you have choices... you either buy the abridged, or the unabridged version...

When you go to see a feature film you get to pick from the theatrical release... or wait for the director's cut...

When you buy a film on DVD you can choose different formats and from different cuts, like the director's cut, the editors cut etcetera.

How long before a company starts to make the unabridged version of films from their books?

A film which faithfully follows the books layout and plot... Peter Jackson and his editorial team, as well as his technical team at Weta, are quite good at this, but even they had to cut and chop and splice LOTR together...

So how long before a director/writer/editor team dare to use their budget to make a film as it was written?

How many times have you heard someone say "Oh the book was better"... there's a reason for this, the book (usually) contains a better narrative, more plot rounding (not jarring cuts) and we don't chop and change focus of the readers mind's eye... that is called "grip" in the filmmakers vocabulary... and many films really lose their grip.

All this comes to me because last night I watched Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows part 2... now having read the books, and watched the films, it's obvious they cut thousands of pages from the books out of the films.  The films are, at times, nothing but mere shadowy approximations of the books and in some cases you could even call the official franchised film non-canon in comparison with the book it is trying to illustrate.

So, it got me thinking, firstly could anyone ever film a book to the letter?  Probably not, time constraints and the limited appeal of such a mammoth length film would never allow it to reach the audience, let alone get past the ever budget mindful studio boss... But, would such a filming titan have an audience... in today's always connected digital fingertip world... I think it would very definitely have an audience... would it be a money maker, probably not with current filmography budgets and revenue streams.  But alternative revenue streams for such an endeavour exist... with a large enough film franchise - like the Potter series you could almost rely on the promise of a faithful film edition to fund itself through advertising on the support material or pre-orders alone...

 But, let's just assume it will get past all the people & cost red tape... could it be physically achieved?  I think it could, in fact I think the precedence was set nearly 90 years ago.  The film "Greed" of 1924 aimed to be over ten hours long, it was originally a faithful reproduction of the 1899 novel by Frank Norris... but ultimately this mammoth production was cut to just under two and a half hours... but the full ten were filmed!

Maybe before 2024 someone needs to take the same spirit from that production and film the lot, like for like, one for one... there are no limits to filming... digital costs so little... The question really is, what will be the first franchise to try this task then?  Something old? Something new? Something clearly which has the gravitas... Maybe Harry Potter could have had that gravitas, certainly the later more mature films... But now Harry will forever be Mr Radcliff... and he's too old to play his childhood self once more...