2/23/23
Newsletter 256
The Crack of Dawn
For many years, when seeing a movie based on a book, a very common phrase was, “It’s not as good as the book,” to which someone would often reply, “The movie is never as good as the book.” For the most part, this is true; the movie is never as good as the book.
Of course there are exceptions. My buddy Andy and I have spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the film The Last Detail (1973), which we both love and feel couldn’t be improved in any way. Andy kept asking if I’d read the book by Daryl Ponicsan, and I kept saying I hadn’t, but Andy never said, “The movie’s not as good as the book.” He finally sent me the book and it’s awful. Almost everything he and I like so much about the movie isn’t in the book. The reason he had me read the book was to illustrate just how good of a screenplay the screenwriter, Robert Towne, had written. But this is an extreme exception and certainly not the rule.
The author who was probably treated the worst by the movies, and was profoundly bitter about it, was Ernest Hemingway. His first book to be made into a movie was Farewell to Arms (1932), and it was a big hit. It’s a top-notch Paramount production with their biggest stars, Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, and it was nominated for Best Picture, and won the Oscar for Best Cinematography. But it’s a creaky early talkie, both actors are wooden, and there isn’t a hint of chemistry between coop and Helen Hayes in what is supposed to be a bittersweet love story. Hemingway hated it, and rightly so, even though the material was given the A-treatment.
But now Hemingway was hot stuff and Hollywood swooped in and bought the rights to everything he'd ever written, in perpetuity. Authors fought this ridiculous clause and mostly got rid of it by WWII. Sadly for Ernest Hemingway, however, it was the early 1930s and the “in perpetuity” clause was in effect. There was also a the Great Depression occurring, and Hemingway was a young man with a growing family. And so he sold off the movie rights to all of his books for what was very good money then. How could he know that he would just get more popular throughout the rest of his life, and not only would all of his books, and some of his short stories, be made into movies, but many of them would get remade several times. And because he sold the rights “in perpetuity,” he didn’t get a cent for any of the remakes.
This is a famous Hollywood story. Hemingway and director Howard Hawks were fishing in the early 1940s and Hemingway was complaining about how bad the movies were of his books. Hawks said, “Tell me what your worst book is, and I’ll make your best movie.” Without hesitation, Hemingway said, “To Have and To Have Not.” A couple of years later Hawks made To Have and To Have Not (1944), and it could very well be the best movie made of a Hemingway book. But the studio got to remake it two more times for free. The second version, which I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Hemingway never bothered to watch, is The Breaking Point (1950), with John Garfield and Patricia Neal, directed by the great Michael Curtiz. It’s exactly the same story, but dead serious, and it’s good. The third version is the low-budget film, The Gun Runners (1958) with Audie Murphy, directed by the very capable, Don Siegel, and it’s crap. Hemingway probably didn’t see it, and that’s all for the best.
I contend that David O. Selznick’s last two movies, The Sun Also Rises (1957) and Farewell to Arms (1957), both based on Hemingway novels, both gigantic, overblown pieces of widescreen junk, are more than a small part of what caused Ernest Hemingway to kill himself. And that he didn’t get a penny for Farewell to Arms, this time with Rock Hudson and Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones, was a particular annoyance. There was even less chemistry between the leads then back in 1932.
However, the author who was treated the best by Hollywood, right from the beginning of his young career, was Larry McMurtry. Being precocious as hell from a tiny town in Texas, McMurtry wrote and published his first book, Horseman, Pass By, at the age of twenty-five. It’s a well-written, vivid, short book, that was taken very seriously by the literary world, the movie rights were quickly sold to Hollywood, and it immediately went into production. The film, Hud (1963), with Paul Newman and Patricia Neal (who won the Supporting Actress Oscar for it), was a smash success.
Young Larry McMurtry did not go to Hollywood to be a screenwriter (they hadn’t let him write the screenplay of Hud) and went back to writing books, one of which was The Last Picture Show in 1966. It’s a really good book and got terrific reviews. And McMurtry kept writing books.
In 1971 all of the stars in heaven lined up, and Peter Bogdanovich made a movie out of McMurtry’s book The Last Picture Show – McMurtry and Bogdanovich (with Polly Platt) wrote the script, and stuck directly to the book. And it’s great. Larry McMurtry went on record saying that as rare as it was, he liked the movie better than his book.
Then Larry McMurtry’s book, Terms of Endearment, that he wrote in 1975, was made into a movie in 1983, and won all the Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, director, screenplay, the works.
Then Larry McMurtry’s 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove – one of the best books I’ve ever read – became a four-part TV mini-series starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. I don’t know about you, but that was one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV.
Then, Larry McMurtry, that son of a gun, won an Oscar in 2006 (with Diana Ossana) for Best Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain.
Larry McMurtry died in 2021 at the age of 84. He and the movies were made for each other.
And a new day dawns.