Sometimes the Movie's Better

The Deep End #24

It’s Memorial Day! This weekend has always been huge for blockbuster movie releases, so what better way to start what may be the first of many editions to a series of stabbings I take on movies that beat their book counterparts? What can I say, The Deep End is light on ideas of late. The idea for this post came to me from, you guessed it—Thinking Man’s latest book club pick: The Name of the Rose! (Hint, you were supposed to read that in a voice similar to a game show host revealing the new car you just won. Hint #2, you didn’t win a new car.)

Anyway. After finishing the book on Saturday, I went into my usual deep dive on the internet, trying to see what others had to say about Eco’s book. The main takeaway I found was that there are quite a few humans who believe it to be a masterpiece, and that the movie based on it was great, too! Some went as far as saying the movie was even better! I had to indulge myself, much to Melissa’s dismay.

With an all-star cast featuring Sean Connery, a young/steamy (not my words) Christian Slater, and F. Murray Abraham playing the second Italian in as many programs as I’ve seen him act (see White Lotus Season 2), I figured these internet folk must be right.

Wrong. I should’ve known better not to listen to anyone on the internet.

The movie was fine. I couldn’t imagine anyone following along that clearly without having read the book, and I was left with a similar feeling of dissatisfaction once it was over. Also, just like in real life, Melissa only got through half of it before giving up and going to sleep. This wouldn’t have been that shocking to me had I not read the hundreds of positive things being said about the movie and how much better it was than the book. Which got me thinking:

What movies actually are better than the books they’re based on? For this piece I’ll go with the first few that come to mind:

Jaws, Dune Parts 1 & 2 (2020-2024), and honorable mention They Live.

I’ll go in reverse order here. First off, They Live is an awesome movie. It’s based on a short story by Ray Nelson called Eight O’Clock in the Morning. You should read it. Here’s a link to the story. Nelson was a friend of Philip K. Dick, who I wrote about last week. I’m feeling link-happy today, so here’s another one to read that post on PKD. Nelson and Dick teamed up to write The Ganymede Takeover in 1967. The inclusion of They Live on this list is to get some of you to give Mr. Nelson some credit. He died in 2022 and was an important member of the sci-fi community, but likely won’t be remembered outside of being the writer of this short story. A fun fact about him, which he also said was his best bet at being remembered: he claimed to have invented the propeller beanie as a 10^th grader. Hats off to him.

Said beanie.

Shameless second plug of our book club aside, Dune the novel was not our thing. However, the two new movies based on it were absolutely incredible. The cinematography was outstanding and squashed any hope I had of still being able to be halfway decent as filmmaker and editor (I used to do that in a different era, now lost).

I won’t spend much time here, either. Final consensus on this, the new Dune movies are awesome, the book isn’t, and the David Lynch film from the 80s is sooooooo bad we tried to watch it four times and still haven’t been able to get through more than fifteen minutes of it at a clip. I don’t think we’ll ever finish watching it. How was that from the same guy who created Twin Peaks?

This brings me to the final punching bag of the day:

Jaws.

When I was growing up, Jaws was far and away my all-time favorite movie. I watched the film hundreds of times. My first email address even had the name Hooper in it as an homage to my favorite character in it. I was like eleven, give me a break. I was a diehard fan. You name it, I had it. DVD’s of all the squeak-quels, video/board games, and any nonfiction shark education books in existence.

Basically, I did everything there was to do as a Jaws fan—outside of reading the book the movie was based on!

I’ve wanted to be an author for as far back as I can remember, really. It’s in my eighth-grade yearbook for god’s sake! So, for me, Peter Benchley was a legend. His name graced the opening credits twice, as the author of the book and for the screenplay. Benchley wrote the initial script for the film—which was then rewritten about a hundred times and worked on by Howard Sackler before finally being changed almost entirely again by Carl Gottlieb. 

For whatever reason, even at the height of my fandom, I never read the book. I guess I knew that it wouldn’t have been appreciated by my still developing brain. So, I decided to wait until semi-adulthood before giving it a proper reading.

The time to finally read it came a few years ago. To put it politely, I was horrified. None of the camaraderie of the men aboard the Orca was a thing. In a book chock-ful-o unlikeable characters, Hooper (my aforementioned favorite character) was the most unlikeable character in the entire book! Woe was my old email rolling in its grave at the discovery of this. Half of the book was Hooper banging Brody’s wife behind his back. Thank God that storyline was abandoned for the movie.

In other words, I did not like the book at all.

Whether or not I liked the book, I still saw why Spielberg and co. thought it could be a blockbuster. The story of a killer shark wreaking havoc on a New England town has been timeless. In preparation for beach szn starting in a few days, what better way to ring it in than reminding everyone that sharks exist and not to go in the water unless you want to be a buffet for them.

Since reading the book I haven’t even been able to rewatch the movie. Hopefully that day will come again. I did get a chance to see The Shark is Broken on Broadway this past year, which was a great play.

So, yeah. That’s what I have for today. I might expand on this list further. Another fun one could be me discussing what movies based on books were ruined by the fact that I saw the movies first, only to read the book, find it amazing, and then have that completely ruin the experience of the movie I once loved after seeing what could have been. Jurassic Park anyone?

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For your viewing pleasure, here’s some AI images Dall-E created when I asked it to create a movie poster combining Jaws and The Name of the Rose. Enjoy.