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What if other adaptations got the "hobbit" treatment?
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<blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 6059009" data-attributes="member: 32740"><p>Movies and books are different mediums of communication and entertainment. While they share many tenets they are not entirely interchangeable. Most books are simply not written in such a way as to be able to just port directly to a screenplay. They require <em>adaptation</em>. What a book may take pages to describe may amount to a fleeting few seconds on screen. What a book can say in a sentence may take a great deal of time to visually demonstrate on screen. Movies have slightly different and well-established conventions of narrative structure that a book can handle very differently. What a book must often state openly a movie can suggest with changes in lighting, choices of costume or editing. An excellent example is Dune, a book where great quantities of information and characterization is imparted by what characters are THINKING. That can be handled on film by giving the expostion over to a narrator, providing a voiceover of characters thoughts, or by actually undertaking substantial rewrites to make internal, mental activities into external statements and actions - and that has substantial implications for tone, mood, and on and on.</p><p></p><p>One of the reasons Hamlet actually adapts well to the screen is that stage plays DO adapt much more readily to film as they share a great many more conventions. However even stage productions of Hamlet are typically slashed from the volume of the original play because you're exactly right - nobody wants to sit in a theater seat for 4 hours listening to Hamlet <em>talk about </em>his troubles. 8 decades or so of motion pictures has given us a preference for being SHOWN Hamlets troubles rather than just having them verbalized at us.</p><p></p><p>As for how The Hobbit is going to be spread across three films my understanding is that it will be demonstrating a lot of the appendectical (?) material. There was a lot of things happening during the time when the narrative of The Hobbit was taking place which did not appear directly in The Hobbit, much of it having to do, IIRC, with assembling troops to chase the mysterious dark force (Sauron) out of the fortress at the south of Mirkwood.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Man in the Funny Hat, post: 6059009, member: 32740"] Movies and books are different mediums of communication and entertainment. While they share many tenets they are not entirely interchangeable. Most books are simply not written in such a way as to be able to just port directly to a screenplay. They require [I]adaptation[/I]. What a book may take pages to describe may amount to a fleeting few seconds on screen. What a book can say in a sentence may take a great deal of time to visually demonstrate on screen. Movies have slightly different and well-established conventions of narrative structure that a book can handle very differently. What a book must often state openly a movie can suggest with changes in lighting, choices of costume or editing. An excellent example is Dune, a book where great quantities of information and characterization is imparted by what characters are THINKING. That can be handled on film by giving the expostion over to a narrator, providing a voiceover of characters thoughts, or by actually undertaking substantial rewrites to make internal, mental activities into external statements and actions - and that has substantial implications for tone, mood, and on and on. One of the reasons Hamlet actually adapts well to the screen is that stage plays DO adapt much more readily to film as they share a great many more conventions. However even stage productions of Hamlet are typically slashed from the volume of the original play because you're exactly right - nobody wants to sit in a theater seat for 4 hours listening to Hamlet [I]talk about [/I]his troubles. 8 decades or so of motion pictures has given us a preference for being SHOWN Hamlets troubles rather than just having them verbalized at us. As for how The Hobbit is going to be spread across three films my understanding is that it will be demonstrating a lot of the appendectical (?) material. There was a lot of things happening during the time when the narrative of The Hobbit was taking place which did not appear directly in The Hobbit, much of it having to do, IIRC, with assembling troops to chase the mysterious dark force (Sauron) out of the fortress at the south of Mirkwood. [/QUOTE]
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What if other adaptations got the "hobbit" treatment?
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