The Weird and Wild World of Novelizations

“It’s always amusing to me, you take a book, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, throw away three quarters of it and win an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, but if you take a screenplay and add three quarters of original material to it — which is a much, much more difficult piece of writing — well, that’s by definition ‘hackwork.’ And it’s much harder, having done both, to take a screenplay and make a book out of it than [to] take a terrific book and make a screenplay out of it.”

Alan Dean Foster

“The term generally refers to cheap mass market paperbacks based on TV shows, video games, and especially movies. Instead of turning trashy books into films, it’s a matter of turning films into trashy books. Today, novelizations are an all but lost art (if it can be called that), but, in their heyday, they were part and parcel of mass movie culture.

The novelization as a form, even as an idea, has long been denigrated by literary critics and the general reading public alike as a disposable gutter genre, written at a sixth-grade level by desperate hacks on the skids who were likely too ashamed to admit they’d sunk so low as to churn them out. Even the term “novelization” itself implies they aren’t real novels. They are simulacra at best, products, empty marketing tools, the result of a crude mechanical operation inflicted upon a legitimate art form. There’s some truth in that assessment, but I would hesitate before dismissing the entire genre with a derisive snort. Atrocious as most are in literary terms, the form and purpose of novelizations remain a more complex cultural artifact than one might expect.”

-          Jim Knipfel, Film Quarterly, “The Art and History of Movie Novelizations”

While the heyday of the novelization has long sense come and gone, new examples are still being written today. Quentin Tarantino somewhat recently released a novelization for his own film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (he actually released two versions, a version based on the film, and a director’s cut version of the novel), and modern movies like David Gordon Green’s Halloween Trilogy, Kong: Skull Island, and Cabin in the Woods have all been given the novelization treatment.

During the golden age, it was rare for a blockbuster genre film to not have some kind of book tie-in. Things such as Back to the Future, Bad News Bears, The Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween franchises, The Omen, Mad Max, Planet of the Apes, Blazing Saddles, Space Balls, The Fog, Splash, My Science Project, X-Files, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural and others have all had novels written based on or inspired by their respective film and television properties.

Even video games have received the novelization treatment.

The idea of the novelization might even be older than you think, dating back to the silent era of film in the early 1900s with movies like Les Vampires and London After Midnight, according to Wikipedia. There was also an early novelization of 1933’s King Kong.

Novelizations are often seen as works for hire, or, to put it more bluntly, hackwork. Works created solely for a paycheck, or a cynical way for the movie studio to bilk a sucker out of a dollar. But I don’t look at it that way, after all, the great works of pulp fiction that many of us still enjoy today were in fact written as a kind of disposable form of entertainment. Working authors need to make money, and writing a novelization is a great way to keep food on the table and a roof over a head in between more personal, and artistic projects. I think that’s a good thing – it’s almost always a positive thing to have more outlets for more authors to make a living, and some novelizations are quite good, with a few being even better than the things they are based on.

In the days before massive home video libraries, novelizations could be seen as “little souvenirs,” as written by Rikki Tremblay in their article “In Defense of Movie Novelizations,” as ways to memorialize the experience of having seen the movie in a theater, or to experience the movie vicariously on the printed page. Often, these books would include behind the scenes photographs or still images from some of the film’s most exciting moments stuck in the middle of the books. These elements allowed the reader to revisit cherished movies in different ways.

 Novelizations were often written before the movie or television show was finished, before being shown to the public. Thus, they were often based on early versions of the screen and teleplays and would feature different scenes and characters. Famously Alan Dean Foster, the king of the novelization, had to write the Alien novel without even knowing how the finished design of the Xenomorph. His version of the Alien was his alone.

Once released, they also helped to keep the film in the public’s eyes. Remember, this golden age was long before the advent of the internet – there were no forums, social media, or video essays available for people to watch after having seen the film. The novelization was a way for the property to generate more revenue, while the fans waited for months or years for a home video release, and a way to keep interest, to build out the greater cinematic universes that so many genre fans expect these days.

There are also the totally weird examples like Total Recall, a movie based on a short story, which was then turned into a novel based on the film. Or what about John Carpenter’s The Thing? That’s a remake of a movie, based on a short story that was later written as a novel. Or movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was based on a short story, and developed into a standalone novel while the movie was being made (with input from the film’s director), which then spawned film and book sequels. And it wasn’t just the big, genre blockbusters getting the treatment! Films like The Elephant Man, based on a work of non-fiction, was also released as a dramatized novelization!

I enjoy collecting and reading novelizations for a few reasons. It’s a somewhat unusual thing to collect, and some of them can be quite valuable. My personal holy grail is the Halloween III: Season of the Witch novelization. I’ve heard it’s very well written, it’s quite rare, and it’s very expensive, often sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars. Beyond the collector’s value, I also like them for nostalgic reasons. They remind me of my childhood, and I enjoy buying those based on cherished movies. Additionally, some of them are simply great books. As an example, James Kahn’s Poltergeist is brilliant. Poltergeist is my favorite movie of all time, but the book is even better because it contains interesting elements not found in the movie, things that make the story even more exciting.

Things I enjoy most about novelizations.

-          Often based on the original, non-working version of the screenplay, so they contain more scenes that had to be cut for various reasons.

-          More introspection into the characters’ personal thoughts, motivations and personalities.

-          They can focus on different elements that would be difficult to film.

-          The special effects are only limited by my imagination.

-          They were a way for me to revisit movies when I couldn’t revisit them in the theater or by renting them.

Sources consulted.

https://thespellbindingshelf.blog/2021/08/15/in-defense-of-movie-novelizations/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelization

https://litreactor.com/columns/movie-novelizations

https://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-split/78/4/27/212048/The-Art-and-History-of-Movie-Novelizations

https://www.marshmyers.com/movie-novelizations.html