Everything You Never Knew About Movie Novelizations

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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2021

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Write a great book and you're a genius. Turn a book into a great film and you're a visionary. Turn a great film into a book...that's another story.

Novelizations of films are regular best-sellers with cult followings -- some are even more beloved than the films that spawned them -- but respected they are not. Instead, they're assumed to be the literary equivalent of merchandise: a way for the movie studios to make a few extra bucks, and a job for writers who aren't good enough to do anything else. But the people who write them beg to differ.

Back in 2016, former OTM producer Jesse Brenneman went inside the world of novelizations; featuring authors Max Allan Collins, Alan Dean Foster, Elizabeth Hand, and Lee Goldberg.

Songs:

"The Blue Danube Waltz" by Johann Strauss

"The Throne Room and End Title" by John Williams (from the film "Star Wars")

*Correction: In the piece it is stated that the Star Wars novelization begins, "Another time, another galaxy." In fact it begins, "Another galaxy, another time."

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is on the Media's Midweek podcast, Unbrak Gladstone.
0:05.0	Well, we've arrived at the year's end and we know it awaits us, a blizzard of 2021 best
0:12.4	of lists, best albums, best books, best movies, best books that became movies.
0:18.8	That list includes House of Gucci, Nomadland, and Doom.
0:24.1	And after a thorough search, we couldn't find a best of list for movies turned into books.
0:30.5	Movie novelizations may be the red-headed stepchild of literature, but for some, it's a beloved
0:36.3	genre.
0:37.3	A few years back, then OTM producer Jesse Brennan reported this piece about his favorite
0:43.5	kind of books.
0:45.6	You know the experience.
0:47.2	You're standing in an airport or the grocery store checkout lane, and you notice a glossy
0:51.0	paperback titled, say, Batman vs Superman.
0:55.2	And you think, I didn't know that was a book first, and then you see the dreaded words,
1:00.4	adapted from the screenplay.
1:03.0	And you think, oh, and you keep moving.
1:08.0	No, there's not much respect for the film novelization, and nobody knows it better than
1:12.3	the people who write them.
1:13.9	But it seems to be the only thing that people recognize.
1:16.6	So I usually say novelization and then in parentheses, say, dreaded term.
1:21.7	Max Allen Collins is author of over 30 novelizations, including saving private Ryan, the mummy trilogy,
1:27.5	and water world.
1:28.8	Like many authors, he's worked his entire professional life to get out from under our
	...

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