> a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation
https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams
Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.
On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.
Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
Makes you wonder what else you're missing.
Oops.
I scored 100% at 500+ WPM for a couple non-fiction samples which felt like my usual reading speed if I’m not reading carefully. I read books at 200-300 WPM.
Hard to judge that based on just five questions though.
Edited to add: we must have followed different links though, mine only had three questions obviously.
Mine was a paragraph about small loans to poor populations, and had five questions.
Reading fast means you can take in more info per unit of time. It can be a useful ability, if tedious at times.
But almost all of the shot film was accidentally damaged beyond repair by the Soviet lab — they were using specially imported Kodak film stock that apparently the lab was unfamiliar with — and Tarkovsky had to go back to the Soviet film board and negotiate more money to reshoot the film.
Tarkovsky had been unhappy with the film as he shot it, and during these months of downtime, he repeatedly workshopped the script together with the Strugatskys. Long story short, Arkady Strugatsky proposed that Tarkovsky strip down the story; he wrote a treatment that reduced the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt sci-fi elements. Tarkovsky essentially wrote everything around that new core, much of it apparently also written during the second shoot.
I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, which has a whole chapter on Stalker and the difficulties of making that film.
In my opinion, Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece, and I would have loved to see a faithful adaptation of it. Stalker, as it ended up, is not really an adaptation of it.
Paramount optioned the novel while Mario Puzo was still writing it. They heard about an early 60-page draft of the book from a literary scout. Mario Puzo was deep in gambling debt and took the option deal because he was desperate for cash. There's a chance Puzo couldn't have finished the book without the deal, because he got a $12,500 advance and would get another $80k if the movie got made.
Paramount announced the option deal in March 1967, two years before the book was published. After it was published they put the movie into production.
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola are the credited screenwriters for the movie. Puzo wrote drafts, Coppola revised them. It was Coppola's idea to start the movie with the line "I believe in America", to highlight what he felt was one of the story's core themes. In the book that scene happens a few chapters in.
So yeah, the book was kinda pulpy and schlocky. But it may never have been published without Hollywood backing. And its author was also half-responsible for turning it into a near-universally acclaimed, Oscar-winning screenplay.
The movie does not miss anything about the difficulties of communication because that is not what the movie is about: it is about motherhood/parenthood, love, grief.
The archetype in blockbuster cinema has to be Spielberg's 'Jaws'. I'd also give 'Barry Lyndon' a huge commendation.
Those who contend that 'Starship Troopers' is a better adaptation than the book simply don't understand Heinlein or his aims. A fantastic movie and a darkly cynical piece of social commentary on jingoistic nationalism and 'bootcamp' movies as seen through the lense of a highschool ensemble. The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
I could also go into a long and varied debate about Michael Crichton and Stephen King properties which span both sides of this fence, but that's for another post I feel!
Standalone (and keeping the "this whole thing is a propaganda movie" thing in the back of your head), Starship Troopers is a great film. But it's not a good book adaptation.
One of my favorites as a teen, and it holds up reasonably well for me decades later. I didn't see it as insights into fascism so much as a meditation into what it would take to keep a global, and later interstellar, society functioning. Yes, there was emphasis on duty, but not to an excess (ISTM), and not a surprise considering Heinlein's U.S. Naval Academy background and subsequent service.
Plenty of great books would make terrible movies for this reason, and plenty of pretty terrible books can actually make good movies.
(I am forever salty about Max Payne, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, etc. Max Payne could've worked with 1/10th of its budget (no CGI or famous actors necessary).
There is a reason most underlying film stories are so short, or feel tenuously connected from major scene to scene. There just isn't room to express much complexity through imagery and dialogue in 120ish minutes, unless you are also overtly narrating or exposition dumping. And a core rule of modern fiction is "show, don't tell" no matter the medium.