My Bouchercon panels — I Got Carter: What movie adaptations can and cannot do

OK, so Get Carter was too good to read slowly; I finished it in one evening, and that spurred one more observation about books and movies, namely the rather obvious one that the page is a better place for getting inside a character's head than is the screen.

Mike Hodges, who directed the celebrated 1971 movie adaptation of Get Carter, explains in a foreword to the new Syndicate Books edition some of the changes he made from Ted Lewis' novel. (The book was published originally as Jack's Return Home, should you find an old copy.)  Hodges explained that he wanted to include locations in the north of England that had opened his eyes to poverty and social inequality during his naval service. He also wanted a more visually interesting location for a key confrontation in the novel.

Not from Get Carter, the book
or the movie. This is one of
my own.

But he does not explain his most obvious and, arguably, most sensible choice: not to attempt a straightforward transcription of Carter's thoughts, mostly about the brother whose death he has come to avenge and that make up a large part of the novel. The movie gives us less than the book does about the dead Frank Carter, less of Jack's mix of fondness and embarrassment about his brother, almost none of the latter. That makes the movie feel less personal than the book. This is no argument for book over movie or vice versa. In this case, both are excellent. It's just a recognition that each form can do some things better than the other can.

Now it's your turn. What do books do better than movies? Movies better than books? (Read Detective Beyond Borders posts on Why books are better than television.)

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Jordan Foster will discuss Get Carter author Ted Lewis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m., and there is still time to register for the convention. Trust me: It's fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Why books are better than TV, Part II

I copy-edited a review this week of a new television show about killers whose work "is frequently horrific beyond anything any normal TV writer would ever think up."

"Thankfully," the reviewer wrote, "we don’t see [the murderer] killing the tykes, just their remains, unearthed along with the poor dead kids’ dollies. We do get to spend quality time, however, with the lunatic, as he torments some of his still-living 8-year-old victims."

"Disgusting," he concludes, and I'm apt to agree. But that's not the point. Rather, the point is that his review sounds like a rerun of the torture-porn debate that has cropped up in discussions of crime fiction for a few years now. Once again, television follows where crime fiction has already trod.

Where else has it done so? Think of The Wire. What inevitably capped the litanies of praise for that much-praised show, with its large cast and season-long story arcs? "It's just like a novel!"

Why is fiction the standard by which dramatic television is judged? Does TV inevitably follow trends rather than set them? If so, why? Has any critic ever said that a novel is "just like television!"? Was this meant as praise?

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My paper's critic also wrote that the show's investigator-protagonists "will pursue the evildoers, constantly explaining to each other, and to an audience that apparently abhors ambiguity, exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it."

Here's part of what I wrote two years ago in my original "Why books are better than television" post:

"That shortcoming is especially noticeable in shows about forensic investigation, where characters will recite aloud to one another lines like "In some respects, he meets the typical profile: White male, 30 to 35 years old, lives alone, good job, some graduate school. You know, I bet he tends not to have many friends and has trouble forming relationships with women." Real investigators would know this stuff and would not need to spout it to each other. The actors' delivery is invariably wooden, and the scenes destroy the suspension of disbelief that is necessary for drama or fiction to work. In fiction, this sort of thing is called an information dump. In television, it's called Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

"We'll be back on the air when we know anything," or why books are better than television

I don't spend much time around the flashy new medium of television, but when I do, the viewing seems disproportionately often to be Law and Order or one of its numerous offshoots. Tonight the tedium was relieved only by something even worse: an American network's election-night coverage. But more on that, as a portentous anchorperson might say, later.

My beefs with Law and Order are the (faux?) handheld camerawork and the humorless deadpan batting back and forth of sound bites about Important Issues. The former may have been edgy in the late 1960s and seemed edgy in early music videos, but now it's an annoying cliché. The latter is an unsuccessful attempt to get around something that books can do better than television: convey factual information.

That shortcoming is especially noticeable in shows about forensic investigation, where characters will recite aloud to one another lines like "In some respects, he meets the typical profile: White male, 30 to 35 years old, lives alone, good job, some graduate school. You know, I bet he tends not to have many friends and has trouble forming relationships with women." Real investigators would know this stuff and would not need to spout it to each other. The actors' delivery is invariably wooden, and the scenes destroy the suspension of disbelief that is necessary for drama or fiction to work. In fiction, this sort of thing is called an information dump. In television, it's called Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

I watched part of an episode tonight over pizza, interrupted occasionally by NBC's cut-ins about the New Hampshire presidential primaries. These are terrible, because even a short cut-in tries to stretch about four seconds of information ("With 57 percent of the vote counted, Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama, 36 percent to 32 percent.") over several minutes of air time. So you get television "journalists" who try to make the obvious sound profound ("Jim, I think what we'll see here is that if he gets just 3 percent of the vote in this critical early state, you may see him change his strategy."), and you get panicked commentators who fill dead air with annoying verbal tics, like the guy tonight who said "if you will" four times.

But the evening was not a total waste. NBC's Brian Williams, no doubt wanting to convey the immediacy of the occasion, implied more than he intended when he told viewers as he signed off that "We'll be back on the air when we know anything."

And now, readers, over to you. In what other ways do books tell stories better than television? What advantages does television have as a medium for telling stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008