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What makes a good book-to-film adaptation? We have thoughts (and favorites)
Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet in 2019’s Little Women, written and directed by Greta Gerwig.
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“Wuthering Heights” is in theaters, so we’re thinking about the best book to film adaptations of all time.
What’s your favorite movie that started life as a book — and what makes for a great book-to-film adaptation, anyway? Do you want filmmakers to stay as rigorously true to the book as possible? Or are you okay with bold departures, big swings, out-of-left-field choices that evoke the essence of the book, if not every last detail?
“Wuthering Heights,” for example, takes a middle road. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s film keeps the familiar plot beats firmly in place, and casts actors who embody all the stuff that fans of the book need them to, but steeps them in the delirious hormones of a teenage fever-dream. Thus, Margot Robbie’s Cathy is headstrong, impetuous … and horny, while Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff is broody, Byronic … and horny. The two spend most of the movie trading lusty looks in the soaking rain as peals of thunder roll over the moors. Every set, every costume is styled to the gods. It’s a breathlessly over-the-top take that’s divided critics and is about to do the same for audiences this weekend.
We’ve got four examples of other beloved books that made the transition to the big screen. Here’s why we think each of them works, and why we believe they’re the best of all time.
Little Women (2019)
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This movie version of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 story about the March sisters is adapted and directed by Greta Gerwig. Gerwig does the impossible task of contemporizing the story while staying so faithful to the book. She does two things that haven’t worked in any other Little Women adaptations: She makes me tolerate the love story between Laurie and Amy. (I still have PTSD from the 1994 version.) And Gerwig allows for Jo — the protagonist, a liberated author who is writing her own story along the way — to have her cake and eat it too.
In the 19th century approach to this story, the woman has to have a man at the end. That’s just a given for these kinds of books and for these kinds of adaptations. But Gerwig made a decision that the writing of the book is essential to the plot line, and that within the book, Jo’s character ends up with a man — a scholar named Bhaer. But in reality, the book is the man — getting her first book published is the win — and that is her love. It’s so rich and smart. I just love it. — B.A. Parker, host of NPR’s Code Switch podcast
Nickel Boys (2024)
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Nickel Boys was originally Colson Whitehead’s book about a boy wrongly sent to an abusive boys school in Florida during the Jim Crow era. It becomes a story about his friendship with another boy there. Within five minutes of watching the movie, I was hooked and felt like I was seeing something really new. Not just new in that it was different from the book, which I really respect. But because the whole thing is told from this immersive camera point of view — and because you are in the head, really in the head of the person experiencing it, it is somehow more immersive even than the book. Sometimes, watching narratives that have descriptions of truly awful things — like Boys Don’t Cry and 12 Years a Slave — I find myself covering my eyes. But because of the point of view in Nickel Boys, I couldn’t. It not only showed me what it was, it showed me what it felt.
Director RaMell Ross is saying something about the experience of reading about these two boys being so badly abused in Jim Crow-era Florida. He’s also saying something about the way that we view it. He is saying something about how anyone who wants to see these things on screen should really think about how we have them in our heads, how they are portrayed to us, and how we react to that portrayal. It’s stunning, and I was absolutely jaw dropped about it. — Barrie Hardymon, editor, NPR investigations
Blade Runner (1982)
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Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became the 1982 film Blade Runner. Both the movie and the book are set in a future where androids are used as slave labor. Six androids escape, and a cop named Rick Deckard — how’s that for a perfect, hard-nosed, noirish name? — has to hunt them down.
Look, there are book people and there are movie people. I’ve visited the Reddit threads; I know that a lot of book people/Philip K. Dick fans hate this movie. But I would argue that the book does what books do well, and the film does what films do well. When you read a book, you live inside it — you’re intellectually and emotionally invested, because you create its world in your mind. And in this book, the author dutifully outfits you with absolutely everything you need to know, and somehow more: You learn about the nuclear war that left big areas of the planet uninhabitable. You learn about this fallout called dust. You learn a lot about how class and status works, and why people are headed to off-world colonies. There is also a tremendous lot about a religion called Mercerism, which is founded on the notion of empathy as the highest human attribute.
The movie carves out the thinnest possible slice of the book — the action, the hunting androids part. And while it pays deference to some of the book’s big ideas, it doesn’t concern itself with all that weighty lore and backstory. It doesn’t need to, that’s not what it’s for. After all, you’re not living in this dystopian future, as you are when you read the book. You’re just visiting it for a couple hours. Androids builds the world, but Blade Runner trots you nimbly through it, doing what films do: Swapping out all those blocks of prose for the fluid visual language of cinematic mood, action and performance. — Glen Weldon, critic and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast
Starship Troopers (1997)
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My pick is a movie in which the director, Paul Verhoeven, straight up hates the source material, detests it and makes fun of it: 1997’s Starship Troopers. The 1959 book by Robert Heinlein is about space cadets and a guy named Johnny Rico going through cadet school and learning the philosophies of being in the military, and why it’s cool to live in a society in which only people who fight in the military can vote. The movie takes that premise and says — this idea: kind of fascist, right? It’s a hilarious parody of Heinlein’s book.
And yet, if you are a mouth breather, not fully understanding how it’s working on a metatextual level, the movie itself kind of rocks as propaganda, as a piece of action filmmaking. It feels like I’m watching Top Gun. Everybody’s extraordinarily good looking. It came out in the late nineties, but I first watched it on TV, and have always thought of it as a post-9/11 movie, in the context of being in school where people were trying to recruit us to join the military. It feels like an extension of Verhoeven’s RoboCop in a lot of ways, how everybody is acting not quite stiff, but extra. Everybody’s got a little asterisks on all of their lines. — Andrew Limbong, culture reporter and host of NPR’s Book of the Day podcast
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
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In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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