Good movies made from bad novels and vice versa

Legend has it that the director Howard Hawks challenged Ernest Hemingway that he could make a great movie out of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s least worthy stuff.

“What’s my worst story?” Mr. Hemingway asked, while the two were on a fishing trip. “That bunch of junk called ‘To Have and To Have Not,’” said Mr. Hawks.

Hemingway: “You can’t make anything out of that.”

Hawks: “Yes I can. You’ve got the character of Harry Morgan; I think I can give you the wife. All you have to do is make a story about how they met.”

“That bunch of junk” — minus the extra “To” that Hawks mistakenly added to the title — became the 1944 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, one of the great romance movies of all time.

“Under Hawks’ supervision,” writes Purdue University historian Ed Krzemienski in the August 1999 Bright Lights Film Journal, “the movie changed the novel so much as to make it unrecognizable.”

Now, Ernest Hemingway at his worst was better than most scribblers at their best. And it didn’t hurt that the Hawks adaptation was written with help from another Nobel-winning novelist: William Faulkner.

But the lesson stands: Film adaptation, like alchemy, can transmute lead into gold.

Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972), for example, was infinitely better than Mario Puzo’s pulpy novel of the same name.

Though it sold more copies than any book besides the Bible, Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” is no contender for the Great American Novel title; but Victor Fleming’s 1939 film is surely a Great American Movie.

The reverse alchemy theorem, of course, is equally true. Screenwriter Michael Cristofer’s adaptation and Brian De Palma’s cartoonish direction of Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1990) was an unmitigated disaster.

These are extreme cases, though; it’s the mass-market genre fiction that has provided the richest seam of raw materials for the letters-to-celluloid assembly line, as with “Runaway Jury,” yet another adaptation from legal novelist John Grisham, out in theaters today.

Along with Mr. Grisham, writers such as Tom Clancy, Stephen King and Anne Rice have seen their works translated into movie scripts or teleplays almost as a matter of course.

There’s also that come-from-nowhere writer, J.K. Rowling, whose “Harry Potter” books have transformed children’s literature.

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