Baking Soda and the Art of Book-to-Film Adaptations

So this is something I’ve been thinking about writing for a long time. At least a year. Maybe longer. Probably longer. And I’ve decided to write this now because John Green’s PAPER TOWNS opens this weekend, and I’m extremely excited for John and about the movie. Also because the “John Green Hollywood experience” has been on my mind a lot lately.

It never ceases to amaze me how much the book-to-film process both captures the public’s fascination and confuses the heck out of people.

If you write a book – any book – you will hear every day that “you should make a movie out of your book!”

The truth is, most authors dearly want a movie based on their books.

Sometimes because we love movies, but usually because we love money. And there is no greater way of increasing book sales and overall brand awareness than a movie being made and then advertised around the world.

I’ve gotten this question so many times that several years ago I wrote this post that describes how the book-to-film process works. Sure, it’s a few years old now, but it’s just as true today as it was then. So if you’re confused or just interested to see how and why books get turned into films, go read that first.

If there is one thing that authors hear more than “you should make your book into a movie” it is “you should make sure that, if your book becomes a movie, they don’t ruin it.”

Setting aside the fact that no film adaptation has ever changed one word of a novel–that the novel is and will always be the same– today I’m going to try to address a far more delicate topic: not how movies are made, but how GOOD movies are made.

 

Disclaimer: everything is relative

The first thing that makes this difficult, of course, is that “good” is a relative term. There are movies that I hated that other people loved. And vice versa.

Another factor is that sometimes movies are good because they stayed true to the book. Sometimes they’re bad for that same reason. Sometimes the result is a movie that isn’t true to the book but is good anyway—it’s just a different kind of good than the book is.

 

Newsflash: Books and movies are different

Overall, the first thing that everyone needs to know and remember and remind themselves of daily is that BOOKS AND MOVIES ARE DIFFERENT CREATIVE MEDIUMS.

Someone (I don’t know who) once said that “making a movie out of a book is like making a song out of a painting”. It’s not exactly that. But it’s pretty darn close.

So they’re going to be different.

– Books are longer and can cover more ground.
– Books can go into a character’s head.
– Books have unlimited budgets.

And what is, in my opinion, the biggest difference of all:

– Books only have to please two people: the author and the editor.

But because movies are so incredibly expensive (THE FAULT IN OUR STARS was considered a bargain with a pricetag of $12 million), there are a lot of people keeping tabs on that money. So there are a lot of people you have to please. And that makes the process more difficult. It just does.

Now, not a lot of readers get that. And, furthermore, not all authors get that. But most of us do.

I know that watching a movie won’t be like reading the audiobook—I’m not going to be able to open to page one and read along. That would make for a terrible movie.

But I think that when Hollywood adaptations go off the rails it is because this point – this “books and films are by their very definition different” point – gets misconstrued.

Because if there is one thing that anyone who pays attention to film adaptations will tell you, it’s that not all changes are equal.

 

Baking soda is not baking powder

I love to cook and, especially, to bake. I was raised by perhaps the World’s Best Cook. (It’s true. Everybody says so.)

And growing up out in the country thirty miles from the nearest Wal-Mart my mother taught me early on that you’re not always going to have what you need in the pantry.

If a cookie recipe calls for pecans and all you have is walnuts? Fine! If it calls for M&Ms and you’ve got chocolate chips? Well, that might work.

But only a fool would substitute baking soda for baking powder.

Why? Because that changes the chemistry and will throw the whole thing off whack and out of balance.

Good book-to-film adaptations know the difference between Baking Soda Changes and Walnut Changes. They know better than to mess with the chemistry.

I’ve probably discussed this with at least fifty authors.  (I wouldn’t be surprised if the number is closer to 100.) And I’ve worked with some of the smartest people in Hollywood. And without a doubt the hardest part of adapting a novel is watching out for the Baking Soda Changes. (Not that anyone else uses that term. Yet.)

 

What is a Baking Soda Change?

This is where it gets hard, folks.

I wish I could say that the chemistry of a story is based entirely on, for example, character, and any change to anything about a character will be a Baking Soda Change.

Except… that’s not true.

It’s not a secret that when HEIST SOCIETY was under option at Warner Brothers they intended to age the characters up from their teens into their early twenties. (Read a full post on that topic here.)

In my opinion, for those characters and that story, that was a Walnut Change.

Why? Because Kat was always an old soul inside a teenager’s body. Her character arc wasn’t going to be affected by that change. If anything, it might have been a little more poignant, because I remember being 22 or 23 and having everyone still treat me like a kid – sometimes still feeling like a kid. But I knew that I wasn’t, and so I was straddling two worlds in that way.

Now, am I saying that I think aging characters up is always a Walnut Change? NO. No. N-O.

I mean, seriously, I do not think that. At all.

In fact, in most cases I do think it’s probably a Baking Soda change, especially the younger the characters are in the book.

After all, a sixteen-year-old is in many ways far more similar to the person they are going to be at twenty-one than the person they were at eleven. Plus, oftentimes the plots of the books don’t make sense if a tween is involved vs. a teen vs. a twenty-something.

For example, I can forgive eleven-year-old Harry Potter for going after Professor Quirrell and not telling a teacher what was up far more easily than I could forgive a sixteen-year-old Harry for making that same call.

I guess the key question is this: “Will this change impact other aspects of the story?”

Will this change the chemistry?

“We found a great young actress for Hermione but she doesn’t need braces.”
—Walnut Change

“We decided to set Hogwarts in Ireland instead of Scotland.”
–Walnut Change (an unnecessary change, but a Walnut Change nonetheless)

“We decided to give Harry a spunky kid brother because there was a kid brother in Jurassic World and everyone loves a kid brother.”
–Baking Soda Change

 

Why Baking Soda Changes Happen

In most instances, people don’t know they’re making a Baking Soda change. And no one – I do mean no one – sets out to make a bad movie.

I think that mostly they are honest mistakes made by well-intentioned people who just don’t foresee the consequences.

There is a domino effect to Baking Soda Changes. That is actually their defining factor. Baking Soda Changes multiply and carry on, and people often don’t see it until it’s too late.

This is why I think the first rule of book-to-film adaptations should be simple: first, do no harm.

One of the most sought-after screenwriting teams in Hollywood right now is Michael Weber & Scott Neustadter who did the adaptations of Fault and Paper Towns. Now, I don’t know them—have never met them. But I’m going to guess that this rule is pretty important to them (and also the producers and studio execs who are giving them notes on John’s projects), and that is why those adaptations are incredibly good. Not just true to the book—but good.

Make no mistake, there are a lot of cooks in a movie’s kitchen. Everyone gives notes. Everyone wants to see their idea make it onto the screen. And that makes for a lot of potential places where the chemistry can get way out of whack.

 

So Why Do Authors Let This Happen?!

Power.

Clearly, all of the examples here are ludicrous because no one was ever going to mess with Harry Potter in any of those ways. Why? Because it was Harry-Freaking-Potter.

It had the largest fandom the world had ever known, and that meant two things.

1. We don’t want to tick them off.
2. Millions of people are obsessed with this. Something here might be working.

But no book franchise will ever have power like that again. Few even come close.

Those who do – those mega franchises like Twilight, Hunger Games, and the John Green novels – result in film adaptations that are likely to follow the books fairly closely because studios are afraid of what will happen if they don’t. But at any given time there are maybe ten authors on the planet with that kind of power.

So what about authors/books that don’t have that kind of power?

Some will be fortunate enough to work with people who want to hear what the creator has to say, to get feedback from the people who know that readers are essentially a focus group that has been going on for years and sometimes include millions of fans.

Some will not be that fortunate.

All an author can do is carefully choose who we get into bed with and hope that they really, truly get the story and the characters and the world and how all of these things work with each other — that they understand the book’s chemistry.

After all, books and films are different.

But, ultimately, it is the kind of different that matters.