In early 2015, Paula Hawkins published her second book under her real name. She’d written a few others using the pseudonym Amy Silver, lightweight comic romances that hadn’t gone anywhere; her first as Hawkins was a book of financial advice for women that she “wouldn’t urge anyone to go out and buy” according to an interview with the New York Times. But “The Girl on the Train” was different. It went straight to the number one slot on the NYT bestsellers list and stayed there for 13 weeks. It stayed atop the hardcover charts in the UK, where the story is set, for longer than any other book ever. It has sold an estimated 11 million copies worldwide in just over eighteen months — for context, it took that slacker Dante Alighieri eight centuries to sell an equivalent number of copies of his salacious pageturner “The Divine Comedy,” and Hawkins isn’t even on the lit syllabus. As sure as day follows night, a film has been duly made, starring Emily Blunt, and it opens this weekend.
So not only has the runaway success of her novel gifted journos and critics with a plethora of train puns, it predestined a film adaptation — in fact, DreamWorks acquired the rights in 2014, when the book was still idling in the station, before it took the express route to bestseller status, and before Hawkins’ ticket was punched as the latest celebrity thriller writer along the lines of Gillian Flynn, Stieg Larsson, Dan Brown etc. This is a chicken/egg situation in which the sale of the film rights is as much part of the package of what makes a book a “phenomenon” as anything else: we can expect the sales of the book to get another bump (after its January 2016 resurgence which saw it go back to the top of the NYT charts for a fortnight) after the film opens. And it more or less guarantees healthy sales for her next novel. And, provided it’s in roughly the same territory, and she doesn’t go wholly off the rails, that will probably be made into a film too.
This is an unavoidable fact of the way the filmmaking and publishing industries work these days, and yet, certainly from the point of view of the film audience, it is fraught with pitfalls. The refrain “the book is so much better!” is so common that we might wonder why there is a continued demand for film adaptations at all. While obviously a film’s producers hope the movie will reach a far larger number of people than the book did, the “core” audience is indeed those millions of readers, and satisfying or disappointing them in terms of the liberties you take when translating a beloved book to screen is one of the many matrices on which the film will be judged.
We can of course default to the “Hollywood is out of original ideas” argument as an explanation for the seeming explosion in bestseller-to-blockbuster adaptations that has happened of late. But there’s quite a historical precedent too: while the whole notion that there will with some regularity be a “publishing phenomenon” has been helped along by the echo chamber of the internet in which advance buzz can be amplified to deafening levels, Hollywood has always looked to the arable soils of literature for inspiration. Let’s exclude from the conversation the Shakespeare, Austen, Bronte, Melville, Dickens et al classics, which sold copies over a longer period of time and which considerably pre-existed the emergence of cinema as an art form at all. Even so, long before we had GoodReads or the ‘Recommended’ section in Barnes & Noble, we had the likes of “Peyton Place,” published to extraordinary success in 1956 and made quickly into a 1957 film starring Lana Turner. That film was itself the subject of one of the first backlashes due to sanitization — an issue that has plagued many book-to-film adaptations — by which many of the novel’s seedier and more provocative aspects were softened or erased to meet the demands of the wider moviegoing audience. In fact, it took the extraordinary real-life drama of the murder of Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend by her own 14-year-old daughter to turn the film into a hit.
But the classic-era movie that best represents the earlier incarnation of this trend is undoubtedly 1939’s “Gone With The Wind.” The process by which Margaret Mitchell’s massive book became an even more massive film itself became part of the story: the merry-go-round of directors, the controlling influence of powerhouse producer David O. Selznick and most of all the highly publicized “search for Scarlett” in which, reportedly, 1400 unknown hopefuls around the country were auditioned for the role-of-a-lifetime, all fed into the mythos long before the lengthy, Oscar-laden technicolor extravaganza even opened. And here, as with “Peyton Place,” the rights had been bought a mere month after the book had been published, so a case could be made even back then that the relationship between the book’s success and the Hollywood adaptation was more symbiotic than it might at first appear. Without wishing to get too overblown, there is a sense in which the essential filmability of these properties might have contributed to their success as books.
The ’60s and ’70s saw more stellar examples – and of course for every one of those cases there are ten or twelve films that took on bestselling sources and went nowhere: nothing in Hollywood was ever a sure bet, but it’s always been a place where people will try to replicate anomalous success even when failure is statistically much more probable. But Boris Pasternak‘s “Dr. Zhivago,” William Peter Blatty‘s “The Exorcist,” Mario Puzo‘s “The Godfather” and, most game-changingly, Peter Benchley‘s “Jaws” all topped bestseller lists and then went on to become movies that in most of those cases were actually better than the source, and all became part of the gold standard for this approach. Still today these films among are the most frequently cited as defenses for the whole practice of adapting buzzed-about books into movies, despite all the compromise and interpretational issues that must necessarily follow.