Novelizations 101

The Industry Episode 38

Novelizations 101

Dan Delgado: For some random reason, an old memory popped into my head. That happens from time to time. I'm sure it happens to you as well. This was from the 6th grade, and me, not being exactly the best student, was looking for a way to entertain myself rather than pay attention in math class. That's when I was offered a book to read by a friend of mine to pass the time.

Dan Delgado: And not just any book, mind you. It was a brand new movie to go along with it. It was Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives.

Dan Delgado: And in case you can't remember, This is the one where Jason is resurrected from the dead by a bolt of lightning and immediately kills Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter. Really. But this was the book version. This is what's piqued my interest today. I knew, even at 12 years old, that Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives was not adapted from some novel.

Dan Delgado: This book that I had read was created from the movie. The opposite of how we think these things should happen. It was a movie tie in or a novelization. And novelizations weren't new in 1986. They'd been going on for a long time by then. You can find novelizations going all the way back to the silent era of film.

Dan Delgado: But then there was one novelization from a talkie that really had an impact.

Paxton Holley: First big pop culture one was Marion Cooper commissioned a novelization for King Kong in the 30s. And that one was the first really big one. It's always the earliest one I've ever seen. And it is based on this Kong script and even has a couple sequences that were cut from the movie.

Paxton Holley: That's the first big one in pop culture that came around.

Dan Delgado: This is Paxton Holly. Paxton is a movie novelization enthusiast and hosts a podcast about them called I Read Movies, which is really good, by the way. I got in touch with him because I wanted to learn more about this sort of odd niche that's existed in the industry that's been around almost as long as the industry itself.

Dan Delgado: Naturally, when speaking with Paxton, I had a very obvious question. Alright, so, first of all... Paxton, can you explain, for those who are not familiar, what is a movie novelization and why is it different than a movie that's based on a book?

Paxton Holley: A movie novelization is a book that is post movie production, so it is typically based on the finished script and maybe a lot of times not even the finished script, but a version of the script, whether it's an early draft, a later draft, the script is given to an author.

Paxton Holley: The author kind of adapts that into prose novel. And, uh, it's, it's done for marketing purposes. Um, and originally back in the day when they first started doing it, it was actually done for prestige purposes because the studios wanted, always thought like, oh, if they see there's a book about this movie, , it kind of elevates the prestige of the movie a little bit. It's like, oh, it was a book, but starting around about the seventies, eighties and nineties, it became more of a marketing thing just to have something else out there that someone could buy. And, uh, it's like before home video, you could read these novelizations instead of revisiting VHS.

Dan Delgado: My name is Dan Delgado. And in this episode, we're taking a look at the small slice of the big movie pie that's known as the movie novelization. Welcome to the industry.

Dan Delgado: Novelizations are one of those things that I think most movie fans are certainly aware of, especially if you're of a certain age. From the 1970s to the 90s, if you went into a Walden Books or a B. Dalton bookseller at the mall, you would see one on display for whatever movie was coming out that week.

Paxton Holley: The end of the 70s and the 80s and 90s. Um, mostly genre pictures and stuff like that would get, and they were, that was kind of the heyday of novelizations. You'll still get some now, and, but really that's when the heyday was.

Dan Delgado: But maybe you're like me, and you never paid that much attention. Which made me wonder, how does one become a novelization enthusiast or fan?

Dan Delgado: Alright, so, now, I would love to know when... And what was the root cause for you to become so interested in novelizations? There must have been a novelization somewhere that sparked this for you?

Paxton Holley: And I would say my freshman year in high school, summer of 1989, Batman is about to come out that summer. In May of 1989, about a month before the movie comes out, the Craig Shaw Gardner novelization comes out, and it's put out in, like you said, Waldenbooks, I go to the mall, Waldenbooks, it's front and center, they got a big display of Batman stuff, and it's right there in front, and uh, so I found it, and I, and, I don't know, for some reason in my head, I remember, it's like, oh, this is the movie that's coming out, I, I don't know if I knew that, it clicked those like, ‘Oh, these exist’.

Paxton Holley: They make books of movies. I just thought, Oh, it's a book of the movie. Awesome. I bought it. I read it. And this was like four weeks before the movie came out. And that was the first novelization I did that same year. I also picked up back to the future to, um, also actually by Craigshaw Gardner. So those two that year in 1989 were my intro to novelizations. And I just kind of picked it up from there. Yeah.

Dan Delgado: And the thing with novelizations is that while they are in most cases based on the screenplay, but since they aren't actually working off the shooting script, you might find some interesting differences between the movie. So for example, there's Jaws the Revenge.

Paxton Holley: I really dislike that movie. Really. It's not a good movie and I and I hate it but I'd heard things about the novelization. Someone sent it to me, I've had several donated, and that one just happened to be donated to me because I couldn't find it and I was like “You know what? I'll watch the movie again, and then I'm just gonna read the novelization I'm going to see if that that helps does that help at all,” and I read it and like that one is one that I hold up is like one of the ones that surprised me the most on any of the novelizations I've read just because like if you watch the movie there's like maybe one shark attacks, one or two shark attacks, and it's really kind of boring for the rest of it.

Paxton Holley: The book amps everything up. They add, like, they added pirates, there's drug running, like, Hoagie's a drug runner for part of it. There's a lot more shark attacks. The shark actually attacks the pirates that I was just talking about. There's these drug running pirates. Like, it just amps everything up. And then, of course, there's voodoo.

Paxton Holley: They, they talk about the voodoo, but that's what I always heard about. It was like, Oh, there's voodoo in it. I'm like, how does that even work? That's in there. There's a voodoo priestess. There's a voodoo priest. They voodoo the shark. That's how the shark is attacking people. It's bananas in the kind of the best way possible.

Dan Delgado: Wait, is the shark attacking people because of the voodoo?

Paxton Holley: Yes, yes, it is. And that's what they were in, you know, the shark. It starts off in Amity and like follows the family down to the Bahamas, but that's all due to the voodoo, is that's why he follows them.

Dan Delgado: So as you can see, there is definitely some fun to be had in reading novelizations, especially if voodoo affected sharks are involved.

Dan Delgado: But what does it take to write one?

Tim Waggoner: The deadline's super short, it could be just a few weeks. Probably like a month, three weeks to a month, is about how long you have to write them. It helps because you already have a script. So you already have like a story, you know, outline. You've got a lot of dialogue already written for you and the plots there. So you can write it faster.

Dan Delgado: This is Tim Wagner. He's an author in his own right and an occasional novelization writer as well. And Tim is a guy who actually grew up reading novelizations.

Tim Waggoner: It would be cool because you know what people were thinking. You'd get to see the extra scenes that weren't in the movie, but you could go ahead and re-experience the movie.

Tim Waggoner: Cause otherwise, you know, like today you just watched the movie again. But back then, it was a lot of fun to read those.

Dan Delgado: So getting the occasional novelization gig is very cool for him. But what I've learned is that while there are certainly a number of similarities in each job, there's also a ton of differences.

Dan Delgado: For example, there was a time Tim was working on the novelization for the Kingsman sequel, The Golden Circle.

Tim Waggoner: They gave me one script. And they gave my editor a different script, and we didn't know that. Uh, and that one I think was one where I only had access to the script for three days, and I had to reapply.

Tim Waggoner: And they didn't tell me that would happen. So I freaked out after the first time I got locked out. So I wrote a whole draft and then my editor's like, what the hell is this? And that's when we figured out we had different scripts. So, um, I think she sent me hers, I think, and we combined them. And then, so we sent it off to the, you know, the studio and this.

Tim Waggoner: Honestly, it never, ever happens in the world of tie ins, but it did to me. The director's like, Oh, he has to come see the movie so he can put all that stuff in there. They flew me out to, you know, Fox studios and it was on a Friday. Nobody was there. It was deserted pretty much. But, the gentleman that was in charge of licensing stuff, you know, so everything, books, toys, uh, whatever, you know, he watched the movie with me, but I wasn't allowed to use a computer.

Tim Waggoner: I had to take all my notes by hand and the director insisted I write down every line of dialogue that showed up in the movie in every event. So it took like six hours or more because they kept stopping the movie and rewinding it. So I made sure to get everything. And so it was a strange way to watch this film.

Dan Delgado: And there's also an element of filling in the blanks that a screenplay is maybe missing for whatever reason.

Tim Waggoner: The four that I've done, each process was different because the studio treats the script differently. Um, very first one I did was for, um, Resident Evil, the final chapter, and I just got a photocopy of the script.

Tim Waggoner: Um, and they didn't have any notes and I added because the movie before the final chapter ends in this giant cliffhanger where everybody's going to have this giant battle at the White House against all these monsters. And then the next movie opens up with Alice just climbing out of a manhole or sewer or whatever, and we never know what happens.

Tim Waggoner: And so I'm like, okay, fine, I'm going to write half a book in between and do this battle. And I just did it and I didn't ask permission because I thought, well, they don't like it. They'll cut it out, but I'm going to do it. They left it in. They let me do whatever I wanted. They didn't, they were happy.

Dan Delgado: And filling in those blanks or adding some details that they don't have time to address in a movie can have some unintended consequences. And I'm not referring to a negative consequence right here.

Tim Waggoner: Usually, it's positive. I had just at random in the that sort of extra half a book I wrote at the beginning, I had a character who had a Spanish surname and I had a was a webzine website in Spain where they wanted to interview me about that because they thought it was so cool that that person was represented in the book and I'm like, well, that's so awesome.

Tim Waggoner: I just, I just did it, you know, to kind of mix up the names and things make it a little more diverse. But I never occurred to me that that would be some kind of like, You know, a really big representation that would mean something to people. So that was awesome.

Dan Delgado: And like with anything else, there are some novelization authors of significance.

Dan Delgado: As Paxton Holly explained to me, there are two who really stand out. First there's Peter David. And if you're a comic book nerd, then you are probably already familiar with Peter David.

Paxton Holley: But he's also written a bunch of novels, and he's written a bunch of movie novelizations. And, uh, one of the big ones he had was Return of the Swamp Thing.

Paxton Holley: And that, according to him, that script was like not even done when he got it, and he had to write an ending for it. And so, like, a lot of that was just him trying to connect the dots, and trying to finish the story for that. It's like, so the ending is a little bit different in the movie, just because... What he was given didn't have the ending.

Paxton Holley: So, so yeah, Peter Davis is the big one that I think of that I pretty much enjoyed every single one of his novelizations to get written. And he's written a ton, obviously a bunch of the superhero ones, like all of the same Raimi Spider Mans, the Fantastic Fours. He's written a bunch of those because he's got that comic background.

Dan Delgado: And then there's Alan Dean Foster. The Dean of Novelizations. Okay, I did just make up that nickname. But it has a certain ring to it.

Paxton Holley: He was like, one of the, one of the first like, big, modern ones. He ghostwrote the Star Wars novelization for George Lucas. And he's also his own really prolific author. He's written a bunch of sci fi and a bunch of horror stuff, but uh, he's also written a ton of novelizations.

Dan Delgado: And Alan Dean Foster was definitely someone that I wanted to speak with. I mean, if anybody could give a proper understanding of novelizations and what it is to write them, it would be him.

Dan Delgado: All right. So is this a lucrative business to be in?

Alan Dean Foster: No, it's not. It never, it never was. I probably did better than a lot of people.

Dan Delgado: This is Alan Dean Foster.

Alan Dean Foster: What I would tell people is why you take a book like Ben Hur and you have two guys make a screenplay out of it, out of this huge bestselling book, and they get Academy awards for adapted screenplay, but there's no reverse of that. Nobody takes a novelization, which is much harder to write a novelization of a screenplay than it is to get a screenplay out of a book and say, this is a great work of literature.

Alan Dean Foster: And I'm not claiming it is. I'm just saying it doesn't make any sense that it's all one way. And all one way or the other, and I've always felt that way.

Dan Delgado: Alan was already a published author when an offer came in to do his first novelization. It was for an Italian movie called Luanna, also known as Luanna, The Girl Tarzan.

Dan Delgado: A guy by the name of Sal Fried had gotten a hold of the distribution rights and set up a screening for Alan to come and watch the movie. They didn't have the screenplay for him to work off of. It was in a small room inside a three story walk up, so MGM, this was not. So Alan sits in the small room with the projectionist, the movie starts, and Alan immediately notices that the movie is in Italian, but with no subtitles. And this was just the start of the problem.

Alan Dean Foster: And it was atrocious. It was awful. It encapsulated all the worst aspects of Italian filmmaking. Bad Italian filmmaking. So I went home, and I thought, what am I going to do? Well... Freed's young PR advertising guy was a fan, not of me, but he was a fan, science fiction, fantasy, and he'd have the good sense to hire Frank Frazetta to do two advertising posters for the film, both of which appear on the book, one on the cover, one on the back cover, uh, the one on the back covers are rough, and I thought, well, that's my idea of a female Tarzan, what Frazetta would do, so I ended up novelizing the film poster.

Dan Delgado: And so, by novelizing a poster, Alan starts his career of turning movies into books. Yes, that's right. A career which includes ghostwriting the Star Wars novelization, that became a success even before the movie was released in 1977. The book was released in November of 76 under the title, Star Wars from the Adventures of Luke Skywalker.

Dan Delgado: And by February of 77, it had already sold out of its initial 500,000 book printing. And that's still four months before the movie is released. Three months later, it was up to 3. 5 million books sold.

Alan Dean Foster: The book went nuts. Nobody, it was just like the film went nuts. Nobody could believe anything connected with this Star Wars phenomenon.

Alan Dean Foster: So when the film came, the book went crazy. It came out six months before the film and there was obviously something there. Word got around very quickly. Wait a minute. This is real science fiction or prefer preferable term science fantasy. Everybody said science fiction. This is gonna be on the screen? I can't believe this.

Alan Dean Foster: You have to read this. And people would tell their friends and neighbors and everybody else. You have to read this if this is gonna be on the screen. I felt the same thing when I was writing the novelization. I thought, they're never gonna get this on the screen the way it's written. But if they do... It's going to be something else.

Alan Dean Foster: And in addition to being able to go to a cast and crew screening of the film, I went to the first public screening of the film. I think it was 10 and 10 in the morning at Grohmann's Chinese theater in Hollywood, and I sat in the back of the theater and watched the audience. And when the Star Cruiser came over, the audience went nuts.

Alan Dean Foster: It was the first time in my life I ever heard a round of spontaneous applause practically before the movie had even gotten started. And at that point, I knew this was going to be something extra special.

Dan Delgado: Alan wasn't just hired to write the novelization, which is credited to George Lucas. He was also part of a sort of contingency plan that Lucas had.

Dan Delgado: If Star Wars wasn't a success, he at least wanted to be able to do a low budget sequel to it. Alan was tasked with writing that sequel, which became a book called Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

Alan Dean Foster: It was a two book contract. The idea being to, well, to write the book version of the film and to write a sequel novel, and the only restriction that was put on me with the sequel novel, and I could do anything I want, which I did, was that it had to be filmable on a low budget.

Alan Dean Foster: George's idea with contracting for a sequel novel was One, to have more Star Wars material out there until he could put out another film, which he would hopefully be able to do. And two, if the first film was not a huge success, or a complete failure, and he wanted to make a sequel film, he wanted to be able to reuse as many of the props and costumes.

Alan Dean Foster: And technical stuff as he could because he would have a much lower budget. So he's thinking ahead there. So it's a two book contract. And of course, Splinter was finished before Star Wars came out. Once the film came out and suddenly started making a dollar or two, it became clear to everybody concerned that George could make anything he wanted to.

Alan Dean Foster: And he obviously, I'm sure, had other ideas in mind while I was writing Splinter that were expensive to do. And in fact, Splinter, the original manuscript, opens, there's a whole chapter at the beginning. Which opens with a fairly complicated battle in space, which explains why Luke and Leia are forced down on Mimba, on this jungle planet.

Alan Dean Foster: And George said you need to take that out, because it would have been too expensive to film. Not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with it. So actually, Splinter starts with Chapter 2, basically.

Dan Delgado: But as we all well know, Star Wars became a huge hit, and Splinter was pushed aside for The Empire Strikes Back.

Dan Delgado: Dealing with studios and major franchises is all part of the job for Alan Dean Foster. And getting back to how this job works, Alan does a great job of breaking it down. And just like Tim Waggoner told us…

Alan Dean Foster:, First of all, you have no time.

Alan Dean Foster: They want it yesterday. This is because the studios, Somebody doesn't seem to realize that it takes longer to put out a printed book than it does to release a film. The film's already done. Generally, or in progress. So they want it yesterday. The deadline is almost always hard. There are exceptions. But by exceptions I mean, well, we'll give you another week.

Alan Dean Foster: That kind of exception. What I do is, what I used to do, is I would have typewriter, now computer. In front of me, and then to my left on a stand, I would have a screenplay. And I learned very early on that I generally need to get three pages of manuscript from one page of screenplay, assuming it's a standard 120 page screenplay.

Alan Dean Foster: That will translate, I know, from experience to 360 pages of text, which will be around 65, 70, 000 words with the font I use. If it's a shorter screenplay, I know I need to get more pages per page of

Dan Delgado: screenplay. And yes, this is a very sort of technical way of looking at it, but if you don't have that proper attitude,

Alan Dean Foster: You'll get to page 20 in the screenplay and realize you only have 30 pages of book, and there's no way you're gonna end up with a book.

Alan Dean Foster: So you have that in mind, you have to expand as you go. Now, a couple of the last films that I novelized, take the two Star Trek films, for example, I was actually able to put the screenplay up on one side of my screen, because it was emailed, and the movie itself on the left side, and unspool the film as I was reading the screenplay.

Alan Dean Foster: Then I would put the screenplay, take a printed version of screenplay, put it off to the left, have my manuscript up there, and switch them all around so I'd have three different things up at any one time. The screenplay, my manuscript, and the film itself. But they're very careful with sending anybody the film.

Alan Dean Foster: Not everybody will do that. So they sent it in seven parts. One of them anyway. And when I was finished with part one, I had to eliminate it from my computer. Then they would send me part two. Wow. I mean this is... We're talking CIA level encryption. But I understand that, I understand that, uh, and it didn't bother me.

Alan Dean Foster: As long as I have the screenplay to work with, I'm fine. If I can get pre production drawings, if I can get particularly shots from the set so I see what the actual... Uh, backgrounds look like, or, or weapons, or machines, and of course the actors, which who I want to describe accurately in the book, so that when you're reading about Captain Johnston, who is a six foot tall black man with an American accent, I don't write Captain Johnston as a three foot, six inch tall Nordic Dwarf, you know, you, people want these things to correlate when they're reading the book.

Alan Dean Foster: So that's helpful. Sometimes I get a little more, sometimes I get a little less. With Alien Covenant, I had a fair amount of material. With Star Wars, I had very little.

Dan Delgado: And so, when you have very little, do you, do you end up just kind of creating, like, your own world? Or do you end up just being as vague as the screenplay because maybe you don't want to venture too far off?

Dan Delgado: Like, how much leeway do you have? To go in your own direction, especially considering that you, sir, are an accomplished author on your own. You're not simply a transcriber.

Alan Dean Foster: I have a lot of leeway. I assume when I start that I have a lot of leeway. If there's something wrong, I know that it will be corrected or taken out.

Alan Dean Foster: Where it will be, they will ask me to revise it, to conform to whatever the finished film is. Uh, for example, The Thing, novelization of The Thing. All I had was the screenplay. I had no production drawings or anything. And it wasn't even the finished, it wasn't even the final draft of the screenplay. Which is why there are a number of things in the novelization from the finished film, particularly the ending, which is actually better in the version that I was able to novelize, not because John Carpenter thought it was better necessarily, but they're running out of money is the way I heard it. And the ending in the version I had screenplay, I had would have been much more expensive to shoot.

Alan Dean Foster: I do have a lot of, a lot of leeway, particularly now that people know people in publisher, the studio. Know that I know what I'm doing. And that they're, they're going to get a

Dan Delgado: proper novel. And since I'm sure you want to know, I did ask this. Alright, so tell me, what was the ending of The Thing? Because I don't know.

Alan Dean Foster: There's a huge battle between, I think the character's name is MacReady. Yes. And The Thing, and MacReady has a bulldozer. Uh huh. And it's, it's uh, out on the ice in Antarctica. It's very impressive. It's very well written by Bill Lancaster, and it would have made a nice ending, but it would have been extremely expensive to shoot.

Dan Delgado: When it comes to novelizations, one other thing to consider is that there are different types of novelizations.

Paxton Holley: There's, uh, novelizations that are based on the script of a movie, and the movie is actually based on a previous novel. So or

Dan Delgado: Can you give me, I need an example of this, please.

Paxton Holley: Yes. So there are several examples.

Paxton Holley: So one I would say is Roger Rabbit. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? originally based on a book by Gary Wolfe called Who Censored Roger Rabbit? There was a novelization written on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? by, uh, Martin Noble. And, uh, so, and I covered that on the show. So it's a separate novelization for this movie that was also based on a book.

Paxton Holley: There's several others. If you remember, Francis Ford Coppola did his Dracula, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's supposed to be based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, you know, mileage may vary on that one, but they did do a novelization based on the script by Fred Saberhagen. So it's a separate novelization. It's always funny to see Bram Stoker's Dracula by Fred Saberhagen based on Francis Ford Coppola's movie.

Dan Delgado: And there's one more type of novelization I'd like to explore. This is the novelization that comes from the screenwriter or the filmmaker himself. For example, Novelist Elmore Leonard took the screenplay that he wrote for the Charles Bronson film, Mr. Majestic, and turned it into a book. Ian Fleming also, somewhat infamously, turned the Thunderball screenplay that he had written with other writers, including Kevin McClory, and did the same thing.

Dan Delgado: Though that one did have some legal consequences to go along with it. And in 2020, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino turned his movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, into a novel. How do we categorize those? What do you think of those?

Paxton Holley: That's hard because, I mean, especially the Tarantino one is just, it's almost an exercise.

Paxton Holley: It's not really a novelization. It's more an exercise in expanding the story than it is really just kind of an adaptation of the movie. Those are interesting in just that it's, I mean, I guess you get the original filmmakers vision for it. And that's, that's always good. I mean, I like, I like to know what it's supposed to be originally, but I also like when it gets kind of wacky where it's like some other person's interpretation of what's supposed to be going on.

Paxton Holley: So having the, but having the filmmakers, it's always. That's always a, not always, but it can be a good thing just because you're getting what it should be.

Dan Delgado: So I definitely wanted to talk to a filmmaker who had done just this.

Whit Stillman: Yeah, Quentin, Quentin followed me again. He copied me yet again. First it was indie films, now it's, uh, self novelization.

Dan Delgado: This is writer, director, and raconteur Whit Stillman. And Whit is the only filmmaker I know of who has novelized two of his movies. The Last Days of Disco based on his own screenplay. And Love and Friendship, which was already based on a story by Jane Austen. Now, Last Days of Disco is Whit's third movie.

Dan Delgado: It was released in 1998, but the idea for a novelization didn't start there. The idea started

Whit Stillman: with Metropolitan.

Dan Delgado: Metropolitan from 1990 is Whit's first movie.

Whit Stillman: I always wanted to write a novel and was intimidated by the whole Size of the project, you know, getting a story and all that. And when I had a descriptive Metropolitan before I knew how to make Metropolitan, I thought, Hey, this is the basis for a novel.

Whit Stillman: I should send it to an agent. I know because I bought this novel that she was agenting and I thought she was friendly and I sent it to her and she was not interested at all. Send it right back. I hadn't made Metropolitan yet. So I was even more of an identity. And then I made it. Metropolitan did super well, uh, sort of Cinderella story after the usual rejection and ignominy.

Whit Stillman: It finally clicked and a, uh, I still, the idea of doing the novel and a publisher was interested, a very good editor, but I really had to write the Barcelona novelization.

Whit Stillman: And I didn't really have any really interesting idea for how to do it. So, with all his pressure, I said, well, maybe it's best we just cancel the contract and he, he, that's what he wanted. So I canceled that, but it lived on, on Amazon because he had put it in his catalog. And once something is in a publisher's catalog, even if the book is never written, it can have a life on the internet.

Whit Stillman: So Amazon thought I'd written a novel for Metropolitan for many years.

Dan Delgado: But Whit's novel writing ambition did eventually take place as Last Days of Disco was ramping up for its release in 1998.

Whit Stillman: And then when Disco was coming out, I actually had an agent by this point, and they sent it around, and everyone said there's not enough time.

Whit Stillman: All these, like, not very distinguished, normal publishers said, oh, there's not enough time to get it out before the film, in time for the film. But then this very literary publisher... and editor of Jonathan Glossier at Forrest Strauss, he said, “Oh, no, take your time on the novel, have it come out afterwards. Just do the best novel you can write.” And in this case, I think I had a clever idea of how to do it. And it turned out an interesting experiment. But again, he put it in in his catalog before. Finished it and then there's the hassle of, Oh, you have to finish it now because if we lose this sales period, we'll lose all these orders and won't get them back and you have to finish it.

Whit Stillman: And so, uh, it was the usual rush at the end, but, and also it was a terrible career move because I think the two years after you make a movie is the time you have to scramble to get your next project going. And so I really took this novel seriously and took a lot of time and it kind of killed me as far as career momentum.

Whit Stillman: Although Disco had already killed me a little bit because it wasn't considered a success.

Dan Delgado: And that's a shame because honestly, I love Last Days of Disco, but despite that negative story you just heard. Whit had no problem doing it again. And really, the idea of a Jane Austen story, turning it into a movie and then expanding it into a novel, is kind of a gutsier move.

Whit Stillman: As with the first novelization, just to do a straight up he said, she said of the film dialogue and that kind of stuff, I just thought would be just too boring for the reader and for the writer. And I sort of had the idea of continuing things from the film, certain themes in the film, but it would be new, so it would be a lot of new material and new point of view of an old, old postures.

Whit Stillman: And so there are sort of two dominant interesting characters in the movie story, which is Lady Susan Vernon. On the one side, played by Kate Beckinsale in the movie, this really amazing character, total dominating woman who sort of can change reality through her brilliant conversation. She just talks people around to seeing things differently and, and to totally dominating the world around her.

Whit Stillman: And then this fellow who's a total fool, but kind of a triumphant idiot. Sir James Martin, who also kind of conquers in his own way. And the idea is that his nephew, so he has loved the idiotic characteristics of, of the uncle, is devoted to his aunt because Sir James Martin marries Lady Susan, and. He defends, he writes a long defense of his aunt, that everyone has gotten everything wrong, and that Jane Austen is a spinster authoress, is just a resentful social climber, who's doing the bidding of the hateful de Corsis.

Whit Stillman: And, um, it allowed me to get into a lot of things of interest, such as the use of the semicolon. There's quite a bit about punctuation.

Dan Delgado: So, how did it go for Whit the second time around?

Whit Stillman: Well, both the novels were, were well received critically, so the problem was it's very hard to get them reviewed because people say it's just a novelization of a film, and they don't assign it, or they assign it to the guy who writes reviews of five novels.

Whit Stillman: In the Sunday paper, so they have, you know, fiction in brief or something like that, and you're sort of doomed commercially. Even if they love it in fiction and brief, it doesn't really impact the public. So they're well received critically. And, you know, I'm glad they're done and out there. And if I read a novel from scratch, it'll be kind of fun because it'll be a tiny little bookshelf of three books.

Whit Stillman: There's also a book version of the book. Metropolitan and Barcelona screenplays. So there'll be a fourth book.

Dan Delgado: Let's sum all of this up. Here are the basics of what we've learned today. Reading novelizations can be fun. It's another way to own a piece of a movie you love and novelizations can differ from the movie that they're based on quite a bit. And a movie you hate might have a book that you'll love. You also may find out some things about the original ideas that didn't end up in the movie, like voodoo sharks.

Dan Delgado: If you're a novelization author, be prepared for a short deadline and be ready to fill in whatever gaps the screenplay may have. And those gaps can have a real effect on fans. And finally... If you're a filmmaker, writing your own novelization can help you expand your story and go in areas you weren't able to explore in your film.

Dan Delgado: But make sure it doesn't take so much of your time that it delays your next potential project.

Dan Delgado: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Industry, presented by Movie Maker. Visit MovieMaker. com for more great podcasts, articles, and information about movies. If you love movies, want to make them, or are already a movie maker yourself, there's something for you at MovieMaker. com. This episode was written, edited, and hosted by me, Dan Delgado.

Dan Delgado: Special thanks to my guests this week, Paxton Holley, authors Tim Wagner and Alan Dean Foster, and filmmaker Whit Stillman. Paxton's podcast, I Read Movies, can be found in the Cult Film Club podcast feed. There's a link to it in the show description. Alan Dean Foster has also written a book about his extensive experience writing novelizations in which he goes into detail about all of the novelizations he's done.

Dan Delgado: It's highly recommended. And there's also a link to that in the show description as well. Music in this episode is from Epidemic Sound and links to all sources used for this episode and anything else that I could think is relevant can be found at my website, industrypodcast. org. While you're there, you can leave me a voicemail and if you're so inclined, you can even buy me a coffee, which I would maybe use to actually buy some coffee.

Dan Delgado: If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to leave a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or wherever else that you can leave a review. It may or may not help with discoverability, but it will leave a warm, glowing feeling within my soul. If you'd like to contact me, you can. You can email me. I'm dan at moviemaker.

Dan Delgado: com. I'm also on TWhiter. At the industry 13 Instagram at industry underscore podcast and Facebook at the industry pod. I'm also on the repot app, which is a great way to not only to listen to podcasts, but to also interact with hosts like myself, download it in your app store and come look for me. Thanks again for listening.

Dan Delgado: And I'll be back again soon with another story of the things that went on in the industry. Be good.