The Trials of Adapting a Book to a Movie

The LA Times relays the difficulties screenwriters face when making a movie out of a novel.

From the story...

"BLINDNESS," Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's 1997 allegorical novel about an epidemic of sightlessness that threatens to destroy society, is told in a stream-of-consciousness style that reads like a fever dream. Not exactly " Harry Potter," straight-to-the-big-screen material.

Yet, Don McKellar saw in it a screenplay and Fernando Meirelles ("City of God") saw in that screenplay a film he could direct. And the fact that "Blindness" is now multiplex fodder, with the film opening Friday, is a testament to the willingness of moviemakers to tackle -- sometimes against great odds -- some of the toughest literary works.

"The more successful the work of art is in the medium for which it was originally created, the more it's going to resist a translation into another medium," says writer-director Nicholas Meyer, whose adaptation of the Philip Roth novel "The Dying Animal" was recently filmed as the Ben Kingsley movie "Elegy."