Books2Movies Club discussion

Hi my name is Yvonne and I am a new member in the group. Glad to join and I can't tell you how excited I am to find this group!

I love movies and I realized almost all good movies are made out of a book. In other words, those movies came straight out of script with no original "book" has a smaller chance, for me personally, to be enjoyable.

However when you find a book you like, it takes so long until the dream seeing it as a movie can come true.

Therefore I want to ask if anyone knows how a book is usually discovered & made into a movie? Do directors happen to read fictions as a routine? By book agents? Net working?

Thank you for your help!

Yvonne

The most I know is that often it starts with a book's film rights are sold to studios and then a whole process goes about with some writer writing the screenplay, selection of a Director and crew and the casting process. All of which takes months or years to get done before the actual filming process. After filming it's all editing and marketing.

I think most of the time it's not that the directors are reading fictions though that can happen but more that producers and certain agents discover a book and put in bids for the rights. There may even be cases where screenwriters discover a book, write a screenplay and get people to buy the rights based on their 'treatment'. In some cases writers also get to have a say on how the book is adapted (for instance Rowling with Harry Potter).

I'd say the case with Rowling wasn't the most common, though. With both her and George R. R. Martin, they began filming a series that was not yet complete, so needed the author's imput to know if certain plot points were going to be especially relevant later on, so they'd know whether they could cut certain things out or add things in.

Thank you Jonathan and Alana! The movie industry is like a black box but there is a way to penetrate through. My feeling is the book must be sold very well and has a group of "fans" already so the movie will have guranteed audiences. In that case producers will be more interested to make it into a movie..

I agree, I am waiting for the day that a John Green novel gets made into a movie, because they are all so popular and have an outstanding fan base.

A lot of the time, though, the book becomes popular after people realize a movie is being made.

From what I understand Oliver Stone bought the rights to Don Winslow's Savages before it was even released. I think it all depends on who sees the book and if the book grabs them.

Alana wrote: "A lot of the time, though, the book becomes popular after people realize a movie is being made."

Both things tend to happen. There are lots of times where popular books become movies to appease the fans. There are lots of times where books that look like they could be movies are bought so that the studio can make an attempt.

It's all about a 'balance' between artistic direction and making cash for a studio. Studios are always looking for the next big movie to pull in the millions or billions. For every film that saves a studio another can sink it so often studios appear to resort to already popular books for ideas. In the case of The Hunger Games, it had a big fan base so it was all about Lionsgate getting the rights and making a movie that people would see no matter how bad it turned out.

Hello my name is Aisha
Surprisingly those recent years ,the majority of film being made in hollywood are book based. I am wondering why that?

I don't know for sure, but I would suggest that starting with a book provides for some test-marketing of the plot and the characters, so the financial risk is reduced.

Yes, risk is reduced, but not always, unfortunately. John Carter failed miserably at box office, not only because promotion was really awful, but because many weren't familiar at all with Burroughs' Princess of Mars.

However, for contemporary authors the risk indeed is minimal! Although I still like to think that filmmakers who pick books to adapt really like the source material beforehand. Cloud Atlas seemed unfilmable at time, many producers weren't showing interest for it, yet Wachowskis and Tykwer didn't want to give up on it, because they really liked it that much :)

On the other hand, relying too much on already available source material, meaning books, may lead to impoverishment of the original ideas in the industry. I mean, sometimes it is nice to see something really new and challenging, something not already seen or read somewhere else.