Shawshank Redemption... A great movie that was based on the short story, 'Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption' by: Stephen King![/caption]One thing I am sure that you have noticed is that there are some truly great big screen adaptions of novels, and there are some truly depolorable big screen adaptions of novels... But no matter if they are good, or if they are bad, they are never as good as the original novel!
My thoughts on this is that it is almost impossible to properly squeeze a 500 -1,000 page story in to a 1 hr 30 min movie... As a matter of fact I think this maybe the reason why, 'The Stand' ended up being about a 3 hour mini-series, (for those of you who don't know, 'The Stand' was a large novel that was written by: Stephen King.)
So the question becomes... Well, if a movie is never as good as the novel that it is based off of, then what could be done to make a truly great movie based on a story in a book? Well there are various ways... But I think universally that you would get dramatically closer with movies that are based on short stories...
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A great novel on this very topic![/caption]The reason that I say this is that short stories generally tend to have a significantly less amount of information to try and figure out how to turn in to a movie from the original written story.
A great example of this is, Secret Window (2004)... This movie which stars, Johnny Depp (A Nightmare On Elm Street) tells the story of a writer who after discovering that his wife is cheating on him, ends up having a nervous breakdown... And months after the incident... It is still occurring...
That movie is freaking awesome! I mean I really enjoyed that film, and I would say that it is pretty close to being on par with the original Stephen King short story, 'Secret Window Secret Garden'... A short story from a book of short stories basically called, 'Four Past Midnight'.
In then end, I don't know if I have convinced you guys yet, but if I haven't then give it a try... I think that you will find an interesting turn of events with this one!
