The Audience Is Listening
May. 2nd, 2008 01:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoI was reading one of my favorite SF writers, Steven Gould, defend some of the compromises made in the transition of his novel Jumper to a movie. I think he's wrong in several respects, and I think he knows it (he has a later post showing a t-shirt: "Don't judge a book by its movie."). But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about.
Along the way, he characterizes the novel as, "...a first person, mostly interior, novel. I’m not sure how you would adapt it exactly without some sort of moronic voice-over or guy who talks to himself."
So. My questions are these: Are all voice-overs inherently moronic? Or is the current aversion to voice-overs as much a question of transient taste as neoclassical adherence to the "three unities" -- and just as likely to be forgotten in a few decades?
(I also think Gould is wrong on the face of it. Jumper is a novel. As such, it's too long compared to the usual ideal length for movie adaptation, the novella. I think there's easily a novella's worth of non-interior action in Jumper to have been teased out in a good screenplay, rather than the one that got this piece of wholly justified snark.)
Along the way, he characterizes the novel as, "...a first person, mostly interior, novel. I’m not sure how you would adapt it exactly without some sort of moronic voice-over or guy who talks to himself."
So. My questions are these: Are all voice-overs inherently moronic? Or is the current aversion to voice-overs as much a question of transient taste as neoclassical adherence to the "three unities" -- and just as likely to be forgotten in a few decades?
(I also think Gould is wrong on the face of it. Jumper is a novel. As such, it's too long compared to the usual ideal length for movie adaptation, the novella. I think there's easily a novella's worth of non-interior action in Jumper to have been teased out in a good screenplay, rather than the one that got this piece of wholly justified snark.)
