I trace my purist tendencies back to my childhood. Because our mother loved musical comedy, my sister and I grew up knowing all the lsongs from the original cast LP recordings of such favorites as My Fair Lady, The King and I, South Pacific, West Side Story and Funny Girl along with such less well known Broadway chestnuts as I Do I Do and Milk and Honey (Molly Picon, anybody?). Whenever any of these show were adapted for the movies I would become indignant over the fact that somebody had messed with them; songs were added, deleted or switched around from the order that I was familiar with from the original cast recordings. I never once considered the movie version to be an improvement over the original production.
It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that I developed into an adult who gets very cranky whenever a book I love gets made into a movie and becomes distorted in the process, all in the name of trying to attract more people to the box office. Does this mean that the people who make movies consider the people who choose only to see the movie version somehow less inellectually capable than the people who choose to read the book? If so, where does this leave people like me who want to read the book AND see the movie?
So what, you might ask, does this digression back to my childhood have to do with matters pertaining to Dead Guy?
In fact, these musings were prompted by my viewing this evening of the amazing last episode of season three of the FX television show Justified which is based on Elmore Leonard's short story "Fire in the Hole." Although season 1 didn't do all that much for me, I became a huge fan during season 2 and while waiting for season 3 to commence, I happily jumped at the chance to listen to the audiobook version of Raylan, a newly released novel by Leonard which continues the story more or less where season 2 left off.
But here is where things got tricky for me. First off, although certain similarities existed between Raylon and the goings on in Justified, not all of the characters were the same and the plot lines did not always follow the same paths. Since I was reading Raylon at the same time that I was watch the first few episodes of Justified season 3 this caused me some degree of confusion and I did not like the feeling that I was simultaneously experiencing two different versions of what I had expected was going to be the same story. However, this problem more or less resolved itself; since it took me only a couple of weeks to listen to Raylan while season 3 extended for 13 weeks, I forgot many of the details that I had read in Raylan and was subsequently able to sit back and enjoy the rest of Justified without any problem.
Like the chicken and the egg, I am not quite sure which came first in the minds of the creators: seasons 2 & 3 of Justified or Raylan. Further complicating matters for me is the fact that a persual of the Justified Wikipedia entry indicates that no fewer than 14 different people have been involved in the writing of the 39 episodes that have aired so far, with no one person getting a credit for more than three episodes per season. Because the show is so beautifully written and the episodes move so seamlessly from one to the next, I can only marvel at this. It pretty much shatters whatever I had -previously thought about book adaptations.
What I've gotten out of all of this is the realization that my preconceived notions aren't all that useful, at least not anymore. If, as is the case with Justified, the final product is excellent, I don't care if it was written by one person or a team of multiple writers. And if the outcome is excellent, it also no longer matters to me if the adaptation is an exact replica of the original story.
Bottom line, I'm really looking forward to season 4 and will also at some point be checking out some more stuff by Elmore Leonard from the library.
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