There’s a relatively new trend among teachers – English teachers, at least – that I’ve grown quite fond of: the “What am I reading?” board. There aren’t enough kids out there who read just for the pleasure of it, and it seems like that number dwindles every day. Sure, talking about books all day is one of the best parts of my job, but I think kids get the idea that I spend all my time marinating in Shakespeare or F. Scott Fitzgerald. And while I certainly enjoy many things about both of those authors, that ain’t what I read for fun. So teachers have started making signs or bulletins that declare that we’re reading for our own recreation in the hopes of stirring some conversation. I never draw attention to the board, or let them know when I’m changing it up, but in the past year or so that I’ve kept the board in my room it has spurred a few questions like, “How many books DO you read?” and “Why do you draw that little star next to so many of them?”
It’s a Starfleet delta, you heathens.
Anyway, another thing that this board has been good for is keeping me reading at a relatively brisk pace. The last thing I want is a kid asking me why I’ve spent the last month and a half on the novelization of Spaceballs. So I carve out a little time to read each day, usually before I go to bed, and I keep that board updated as often as possible. It’s been really helpful to me, giving me an impetus to read more often, and I thought today it may be fun to look back on a few recent reads that I’ve enjoyed.
A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Dawidziak
I picked this book up at Barnes and Noble on my birthday, part of my Rear Window date night with my wife, and I finished reading it a couple of days ago while riding out Hurricane Francine. I like to think Edgar Allan Poe would have approved. This is a great biography of Poe, with an emphasis on the unsolved mystery surrounding his death, found wandering the streets of Baltimore in a haze, drunk, possibly rabid, and dying a few days later crying out for an unknown person called “Reynolds.”
Or so the reports say.
Dawidziak alternates chapters between telling the story of Poe’s life and the story of Poe’s death, and in both cases he spends a lot of time unraveling a lot of the scandalous tales that have plagued the widest-read author in American history ever since his death. Was he actually an opium addict? (No.) Was he an alcoholic? (He had his troubles with alcohol, but at the time of his death he had taken – and adhered to – a temperance pledge.) Did he die of rabies? (The water he drank on his deathbed seems to rule that out.) Granted, I haven’t read a LOT of books about Poe’s life, but Dawidziak definitely paints the most balanced portrayal of the man that I’ve ever read. There’s a clear admiration of Poe in his words as well. This is obviously the work of an author who holds Poe in high regard, so it’s not surprising how much work he does to rehabilitate Poe’s reputation. At the same time, though, the writing is clear and engaging, and the book left me feeling like I know much more about the man who we all imagine hunched over a shadowed writing desk, an ominous raven perched on his shoulder. If you’re at all a fan of Poe, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s the perfect way to pregame for Spooky Season
A Nightmare in Oz is set in the modern day, 120 years after Dorothy Gale’s first journey to Oz and almost as long since she and her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry came to Oz to live permanently (which happened in Baum’s sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, in case you didn’t know). But in Oz, nobody ages or dies, so Dorothy is still a young girl here in the 21st century. The story begins with Dorothy having a nightmare – her first since coming to Oz over 100 years ago. As she seeks an answer to her dark visions, she discovers that many of the residents of Oz that, like her, originally came from the non-fairy world are having nightmares of their own: Em, Henry, the Wizard of Oz (who also came back – really people, read the original books) and even her little dog Toto. The mystery of where the nightmare comes from brings back an ancient threat and opens up the doors for an engaging new fantasy series.
Since the Oz books went into public domain, dozens of authors (maybe even hundreds) have tried to put their own stamp on the world of Baum’s creations. Some, like Eric Shanower, do their best to create a world that seems like it could have spilled from the pen of L. Frank Baum himself. Others, such as Gregory Maguire of Wicked fame, use the skeleton of Oz to do something quite different that doesn’t strictly fit in with anything that Baum has done or would have done with his stories.
But Keyes has found a marvelous balance between these two extremes. He is taking Baum’s works as canon, and Dorothy and the other characters have the same inherent goodness and sweetness that readers of the Famous Forty would find familiar and comforting. But by bouncing the action forward a century, he also adds a layer of modernity and sophistication that many contemporary writers don’t attempt. It’s the same old Dorothy, but she’s got a century of experiences that are belied by her childlike exterior. The danger in this book feels more real and more layered than most of the old stories, while not going to the extreme of some other modern writers. I really enjoyed this book, and I’m looking forward to digging into the rest of the books in this series.
The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov
But this accelerated reading schedule isn’t only reserved for new books. I’ve taken advantage of it to dive back into some old favorites as well, such as Isaac Asimov’s robot series. Most recently I read the second book in the series, The Naked Sun. In a future in which the citizens of Earth are limited to lives in huge, domed cities without ever facing the outside world, Detective Elijah Baley is summoned by an old partner – Robot Daneel Olivaw – to help solve a murder on a distant planet where the sky is open to all, but is so sparsely populated that people live solitary lives without ever seeing one another in person.
Asimov was renowned as a science fiction master, and the world-building in this series has always impressed me. We’re all familiar with the Three Laws of Robotics and all the stories that have been written trying to thwart them, but that’s just the beginning. The projected future of the human race and how Earth is made subservient to its own colonies is fascinating, as are the different types of worlds explored throughout these stories. But I don’t know that people give Asimov enough credit for how good he was as a mysterywriter. This is by no means the only mystery novel Asimov wrote, and not even the only mystery/sci-fi hybrid, but the unique circumstances of the world in which the story takes place adds an additional level of complexity to the mystery that makes this one a joy to unravel.
Of course, not every book that I’ve read in the year since I started keeping my board has been a winner, but as I always do with this column, I’m doing my best to focus on those things that I love. You’re not going to hear about the clunkers. At any rate, these are just a few of the stories that I’ve dug into lately that have helped me jumpstart my love of the written word. Hopefully, you’ve been having fun with books lately too.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. The toughest thing about Blake’s new reading routine? Figuring out what book to read NEXT. There’s a…sizable list of candidates.
I know, it’s unusual for me to kick off one of these columns with something so overtly political, but bear with me here.
Holes, which came out in 2003, is an adaptation of Louis Sachar’s young adult novel of the same name. The story is about a kid named Stanley Yelnats who is falsely accused of stealing a pair of very expensive celebrity shoes from a charity auction and sentenced to 18 months at a juvenile detention facility called Camp Green Lake. As it turns out there’s nothing green about the camp, nor is there a lake there anymore – just the desert remains of a dried lakebed where the detainees are forced to dig five-foot holes day after day in an effort to “build their character.” The film bounces around three different timelines: Stanley’s story is intercut with that of his great-great-grandfather, who accidentally brought a curse down on five generations of his family, and the origin story of a brutal outlaw named “Kissin’” Kate Barlow, who terrorized the Green Lake community a century ago.
Trigger warning: may offend people with holes.
I remembered enjoying the movie when it first came out, but a few days ago I watched it for the first time in several years and I was really impressed by how tightly plotted the film is. Even with juggling three timelines there is virtually no fat in the plot. Everything in the story turns out to be significant in the end, either to revealing the truth about the two timelines that take place in the past or to bringing the storyline of the present day to a satisfying conclusion. It’s a really good movie, and I’m not even kidding when I say that screenwriters could do worse than to study it when it comes to learning how to put a story together.
Part of the reason for the tightness of the story, I think, is because the screenplay was written by Louis Sachar himself, adapting his own novel. True, sometimes when this happens the original writer can be a tad too precious about keeping their favorite bits or not understand the necessities of adaptation, but Sachar did a stellar job. However, as I often do when I watch a movie I really enjoy, I spent a little time online afterwards looking into the history of the film and learned something I hadn’t known before: Sachar’s script was NOT the first attempt to adapt the book. The first attempt at adapting the story was written by Richard Kelly, who is probably best known as the writer and director of Donnie Darko, which film scholars among you will recognize as being one of the last movies one would think about when drawing comparisons to Holes. Furthermore, that Kelly script – as it turns out – is freely available online, and I clicked on it to take a look.
The beloved children’s classic reimagined by…this guy.
Kelly’s version begins with a narrator described as an “elderly voice” saying – and I swear, I am transcribing this verbatim: “Once…when it was still early in the twenty-first century…there existed a prison in a sea of sand.”
Holy crap.
It continues.
“All signs of life in this place had been destroyed by something terrible…and that something had dried up into the earth…and the earth was a prison for all mankind.”
HOLY.
CRAP.
Had Kelly even read the book?
Incidentally, the ellipses you’re seeing in these passages were there originally, I didn’t omit anything. This is HOW IT IS WRITTEN.
At this point I saved the link so I could go back and read it later, because something this completely bonkers has to be examined slowly, carefully. When Stanley “Kramer” shows up later on the page, the narrator continues by telling us “He did not feel sorry for what he had done…but feeling sorrow is not adequate punishment for such a crime. Feeling sorrow does not absolve the crime from the memory of the victims…if the victims are still breathing.”
Was Kelly even aware of the fact that there is a book?
Adaptations are not a new art form, guys. The Greeks borrowed from existing myths and legends when they invented modern theater. Virtually all of Shakespeare’s most famous plays are based on history, mythology, or earlier poetry that he expanded in his own way. The Lego Movie was based on the works of Eudora Welty. So it’s not that I have any objection to adapting a work from one medium to another. But at SOME point, it seems like someone has to ask the question: if I’m changing the story this much, is it even still really an adaptation?
Change is inevitable when changing from one medium to another, and for any of a thousand reasons. In The Hunger Games, for instance, the novel is written from the first-person point of view of Katniss Everdeen and is heavily loaded with her internal monologue. This is difficult to do well in a movie, and thus the information we learn in monologue – whether it’s plot-driven or character-driven – has to be imparted to the audience in a different way. Sometimes the changes are pragmatic. Back to Holes for a moment – in the novel, Stanley begins the story as a fat boy who gradually loses weight due to the physical labor he’s forced to undergo. The filmmakers decided to drop this and cast the relatively slim Shia LaBoeuf under the reasoning that it would be too difficult to make a 14-year-old actor gain and lose weight so drastically over the course of filming, not to mention potentially dangerous to his health. That is a 100 percent acceptable change.
Sometimes changes are just a matter of understanding what the audience can handle. I’ll give you two examples from Stephen King. Cujo is a book about a mother and her child trapped in an increasingly hot car by a violent and rabid St. Bernard. In the book – spoiler alert here for a 43-year-old novel – the child dies of heatstroke. But in the movie, the filmmakers let the kid live, thinking his death would be too much for the audience. There’s a similar change in the film version of Misery, about a writer who gets in a terrible car accident and is rescued by his “biggest fan,” who turns out to be a deranged lunatic. In the book, to prevent Paul Sheldon from escaping, the insane Annie Wilkes cuts off his feet. If that sentence shocked you it’s probably because you are more familiar with the famous scene in the movie, where she “only” hobbles him by breaking his ankles with a sledgehammer. Reportedly, the producers felt like audiences would never forgive the actress, Kathy Bates, if she went so far as to actually cut his feet off. And if you think that audiences are smart enough to know the difference between the actor and the behavior of their character, look up the way “fans” treated Anna Gunn for the things Skyler White did on Breaking Bad.
If social media had existed in 1990, Kathy Bates might still be in hiding for this.
When it comes to these changes, the filmmakers chose to lessen the tragedy of the book. I don’t think that we’re saying that book readers are more accepting of gore or death than people who watch movies, though. I think the lesson here is that it is more difficult – more disturbing – to watch certain tragedies than to read about them. On the other hand, there’s the adaptation of King’s novella The Mist, which is a book with an ambiguous ending. The film, however, goes in the OPPOSITE direction, making the ending OVERTLY tragic. In this case, though, making the ending far worse than the original actually works. Stephen King himself has reportedly said he prefers the ending of the movie to the that of the story he wrote.
Time is also a big factor when it comes to adaptation. If you’re adapting a doorstopper novel, especially into a film intended for theatrical distribution, it’s virtually impossible to squeeze in everything. Lord of the Rings fans have elevated the absence of Tom Bombadil from the film version of the beloved trilogy to meme status. To a lesser degree, the same is true for the Scouring of the Shire. As much as I appreciate those sequences in the book, though, when we’re talking about movies that already have a running time that’s longer than the first marriages of certain people I went to college with, I can forgive Peter Jackson for laying those pieces aside.
Changes from one medium to another are a necessity, because no two types of storytelling have exactly the same requirements or demands. I don’t mind changes, provided that making the change does not alter or pervert the spirit or intent of the original work, and here’s where I’m going to piss some people off, because Starship Troopers. It’s one of those movies that flopped when it came out but has grown a devoted following in recent years. That seems to happen a lot – something people disliked when it came out is rediscovered years later and lauded or, conversely, something that was once popular is hit with backlash and people suddenly declare that they never thought it was that good in the first place and they only saw it in the theaters 27 times “ironically.” I don’t do that a lot, honestly. I’ve certainly reevaluated movies after the fact, sometimes enjoying them more, sometimes less, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a complete 180 on a film. Which brings us back to Starship Troopers.
My friends, I’m here to tell ya that I thought it sucked then and I think it sucks now.
I’m going to pause here so the type of person who writes angry responses without bothering to read my point can write an angry response without bothering to read my point.
Fans of the movie praise Paul Verhoeven for making a witty sci-fi anti-war satire, a movie in which the entire human military is thinly painted as Nazis in training. However, none of this is applicable to the book, which is most certainly not anti-war, nor is it in the practice of making the humans into the bad guys. In fact, the book – which I should admit I was already a fan of before the movie was made – isn’t really plot-driven at all, but is more of an examination of the life of a soldier in a hypothetical science fiction future. The war against the insectoid aliens is there, but it’s more of a backdrop, a way of examining the world that author Robert Heinlein created. It’s no surprise, then, to find out that Verhoeven admittedly never even finished reading the book, finding it too “boring” and “militaristic.”
Sir, I must say this: if you can’t even finish reading the source material of an adaptation, I submit that you are not the right person to adapt it.
Here’s the thing, folks: I have no objection to Verhoeven making an anti-war movie, or a satire, or a movie in which humans are thinly-disguised bad guys. This is his right as a filmmaker, and there are plenty of good movies that do just this. I do, however, have a strong objection to him doing so by trading in on a novel by Robert Heinlein which is none of those things. I simply don’t think it’s fair, either to readers of the novel or to Heinlein himself, and in disputes of this nature I’m pretty much always going to side with the original author’s intent. If Verhoven had made a virtually identical movie, changing the names and calling it something like Spaceship Soldiers instead, we would not be having this conversation right now…but it’s also possible that we wouldn’t be talking about the movie AT ALL, that without the connection to Heinlein, the film would have been forgotten entirely.
It’s not a question of which of these men I agree with more, it’s a question of whether it is ethically right of Verhoven to use Heinlein’s story to espouse views that Heinlein’s story clearly disagreed with. Personally, I don’t think it is. I know that this is an area in which a lot of people will disagree with me. Hell, maybe Heinlein himself would disagree with me. But I ask you this: Arlo Guthrie’s 18-minute song “Alice’s Restaurant,” which was essentially a protest against the Vietnam war, was made into a similarly anti-war film. Had Guthrie not been involved in the film, but rather it was made by somebody else who painted Guthrie’s character as a fool and his protest against the war as misguided, would that have been fair to Guthrie?
What I’m getting at, friends, is this: if you’re a fan of Starship Troopers, is your acceptance of the adaptation process based on which political viewpoint you agree with? If that’s the case, I’m afraid that we will not be able to meet halfway on this one, and I hope that we can still be friends and that you’ll still come back next week when I’m writing about how awesome the theme from DuckTales is or something.
Adapting a story from one medium to another should be done for one of two reasons. First, if it is an exceptionally good story and you want to retell it for a different audience. Great! Do it! But if it IS an exceptionally good story, then why do you want to change it?
The second, more cynical reason, is because the story is popular, and you’re hoping to make money by appealing to the pre-existing audience. Okay, I can live with that. But if the story IS already popular and has a pre-existing audience, WHY DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE IT?
The answer, by the way, is because writers can be a vain bunch (yes, I am including myself in that number) and a good number cannot resist the urge to put their own stamp on something. This is what Richard Kelly did (remember him?) in his Holes adaptation. He wasn’t writing an adaptation of Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, he was writing a Richard Kelly movie that was vaguely suggested by a novel by Louis Sachar. And for a fan of Louis Sachar’s novel, that would have been MASSIVELY disappointing.
But writers do this anyway, because for some people it’s more important that something is “theirs” than it is that they treat the source material faithfully. Sometimes that means they’ve created a brand-new breakout character, like the people who gave us Scrappy Doo. Sometimes that means “updating” a story for a whole new audience, the way the smash hit film Barb Wire “updated” the story of Casablanca to become beloved by the ages. And sometimes it’s because the author is just trying to trade on somebody else’s work to spread their own message to the masses, which makes me wonder how strong a storyteller you actually are if you can’t get your message out without borrowing somebody else’s name.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to do a complete re-imagining of a work and do it well. The Netflix miniseries Fall of the House of Usher is an excellent example. Writer/director Mike Flanagan didn’t even TRY to do a straight adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. Instead, what he did was grab bits and pieces of dozens of DIFFERENT Poe stories and reassemble them into something totally original and unique. It was as if he had gotten his hands on ten different Edgar Allan Poe Lego kits, threw away the instructions, and used the bricks to create his own thing. It was fantastic, and is one of the projects I point to when I say that Flanagan is, in fact, the right man to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower if anyone ever has the guts to give him the money to do it. But he didn’t do it by twisting or changing Poe’s work into something unrecognizable. Quite the opposite – he did something that was totally his and slipped in recognizable elements to help us see the larger picture.
Definitely the weirdest Lego movie.
Then there’s the wild movie that actually gets its name from the process we’re talking about, Adaptation, which is ostensibly an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief. The book is a portrait of a horticulturalist who was arrested for poaching flowers, but that’s not the movie screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wrote. Instead, he wrote a movie about how he (Kaufman himself, as a character in the movie) struggled with adapting the book. He fictionalizes Orlean and John Leroche, the subject of the book, and creates a fictional twin brother for himself – both Charlie and “Donald” Kaufman are played by Nicolas Cage in one of those movies that earns him his reputation of doing kind of insane movies. Orlean herself was understandably taken aback when she read the script, but in more recent interviews has said she’s come around and now loves the movie, which was in no way a literal adaptation of her work but still successfully communicated the book’s themes of longing and obsession. Also there’s a car chase.
Most adaptations, I think, usually fall somewhere in-between the highly faithful Holes and the bonkers left turns of Adaptation. I always point to The Wizard of Oz here – most people’s version of Oz is the one we saw in 1939, the Judy Garland movie that has become a legitimate cultural classic. It’s a lovely movie, it’s beautifully filmed, and the music is timeless. As an adaptation, though, it’s mid. The film leaves out lots of sequences from the book, compresses two good witches into one (making Glinda seem like kind of a jerk for not telling Dorothy that the Ruby Slippers could send her home at the beginning, whereas in the original book those are two entirely different witches and the first apparently doesn’t know), and changes a few things – most egregiously the ending, which implies that Dorothy’s journey to Oz was just a dream. This is not at all suggested by the book, but the ending of the film has become so iconic that it’s inspired a thousand other “all just a dream” endings, which – speaking as a writer – is a crime I consider only slightly worse than lighting an orphanage full of puppies on fire and chaining the doors on your way out. But even then, the sense of wonder and awe that the film gives us DOES successfully communicate the wonder and awe of the book, and for that reason I can still love it.
A good adaptation has the potential to breathe new life into an existing work. A bad one, though, has the power to choke a work to death. If it ever comes down to a choice between one or the other, I know which side I’m going to be on.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s not kidding about the theme from DuckTales, you know. As TV themes go, he dares you to name more of a banger.
Summer reading. The phrase calls up different memories, different emotions, depending on how old you are. If you’re my age (or you’ve seen the memes), it may bring you back to those halcyon days when you were tracking each book you read in the pursuit of a free personal pan pizza. Depending on what school you went to, it may cause you to recall those last few hours before a new school year began, binging A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Of Mice and Men, even though you had two months with virtually no responsibilities in which to get it done. For a lot of people, it brings to mind the beach or the pool, where you set up on a towel or a chair and pull out a romance novel, a potboiler mystery, a spy thriller, or whatever it is that you connect to. Whatever the specifics of your personal relationship with books, it seems very curious to me that people have settled on the summer as the time to read.
And we can blame teachers and Pizza Hut all we want, but there’s something that makes us all reach for that to-be-read pile during the summer months. Any book lover will tell you that we add to that pile constantly, most of us have stacks and shelves (or files bursting with digital downloads) of books that we know we have no hope of finishing in our lifetime, barring one of those Twilight Zone scenarios and minus the poor eyesight. That doesn’t stop us from piling new books on, of course, as we constantly tell ourselves and our partners that we need to be grateful it’s books and not, for example, meth. As that pile gets bigger and bigger, summertime is the only time where it seems to dip a little (or at least grow more slowly).
Me on June 1.
This is even true for those of us who, through a terrible confluence of biology and neurochemistry, happen to love both books and our own children. In my entire life, there has never been a single event that slowed down my reading more than the birth of my son. And he’s worth it, of course. I love him to death, and I make sure to tell him that every time I look at the 17 books Stephen King has published since his last haircut that I haven’t gotten around to consuming yet.
The good news, parents, is that kids get older, and eventually they do reach a point that makes it a little easier to start reading again, and this summer seems to have finally gotten my family to that sweet spot. Of course, we did need a little help. Our local public library, as they always do, has issued a “summer reading challenge” to its patrons, both children and adults. There are prizes (no pizza, sadly), and of course, bragging rights, and the weird thing is that having this carrot dangling in front of us has really worked for my family.
Not quite as well as this, of course.
The St. Charles Parish Public Library is affiliated with a reading app called “Beanstack,” which allows you to track your reading time, track books you’ve read, even track the number of pages read (although I personally have not taken advantage of this feature, as most of the books I read these days are eBooks, and tracking the pages isn’t always easy). You can write reviews as well, and share your reading with others. You earn points and badges. I got a free umbrella. It’s kind of goofy that a grown ass adult (or whatever I am) would need to treat reading books like accumulating a high score on a video game, but by God, it worked.
My summer ends next week, when the teachers at my school report back for a few days of professional development in advance of the avalanche of students the week after, but when it comes to reading, I’ve really taken advantage of this summer. Since school let out in May, I’ve recorded 80 different reading sessions, 20 different books, and a whopping 2578 minutes of reading time, most of that at night before bed, because knowing I don’t have to wake up at 5 am makes me feel a little more free to stay up late with a book like I did when I was a kid. My wife – who is not a teacher and thus does not have the summer away from work – hasn’t quite matched my numbers, but she’s also found herself reading more thanks to the use of the app. There’s something oddly communal about the experience, knowing that other people in the system are reading as well, trying to stack up their numbers, and having fun doing it.
Um…just ignore that second stat.
The communal aspect, I think, is one of the things that makes it work. I can see how many reading minutes everybody signed up for the Library system has accumulated over the summer (currently hovering at about 2.1 million, which means some of you people have been slacking), and there’s something about knowing that other people are reaching for the same goal as you are at the same time that makes it a little bit easier and a little bit more exciting. It’s the same reason people share their steps from a Fitbit, the same reason so many of us jump into NaNoWriMo every November. You’re aiming for a goal that you always have on some level. It’s easier to go after that goal when you know you’re not doing it alone.
Those 20 books that I’ve dug into, by the way, are also in pursuit of various smaller goals. Most of them are in series or by authors I enjoy, but that I’ve never gotten around to finishing. I’ve started a re-read of all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels (in case you were wondering why I wrote about that back at the beginning of summer) with the intention of continuing on and reading the other books in the “Famous Forty” that weren’t written by him, most of which I’ve never read before. I’ve read a few Star Trek novels. I’ve read books in George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series and Hugh Howey’s Silo saga. I’ve even tackled two of those Stephen King books that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. He wrote four more in the time that it took me, but baby steps.
If you can think of a better way to spend the summer, I’d love to hear what it is.
The only problem I’ve got with Beanstack is that I don’t think you can add friends from outside your own library system, so I don’t know that all of you fine folks out there could link up with me there – although if anybody knows of a similar app that’s not geographically-locked, by all means let me know. And while you’re at it, let me know how your own summer reading has gone. What have you read on the beach, what books have finally escaped your-to-read pile, and do you too feel like you read more when the heat is on?
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Blake is also considering doing a total read-through of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson universe, but that dang Stephen King keeps adding other books he need to get to first.
No matter what your particular fandom is, there are many different strains of Geekery – the Viewer just watches the movies or shows, the Shipper is obsessed with who is (or should be) hooking up with who, the Collector wants the merch, the Debater just likes to argue – and all of them are perfectly valid. One of the more difficult ones to be, though, is the Completionist. The Completionist is someone who wants to read, watch, or play every incarnation of their favorite franchise, no matter what. (When you cross this with the Collector, you wind up with someone who can open a museum.) Being a Completionist can be time-consuming or all-encompassing if you allow it to be, which is why I try to restrain myself, because I definitely have Completionist tendencies. I can refrain from reading every Star Trek novel ever written, but I definitely want to watch every movie and TV series in the franchise, even the one I don’t like. (Yes, that’s singular.)
Completionism is more difficult with some properties than others, of course. Fans of modern franchises like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter have it relatively easy – the number of books, movies, and TV shows is comparatively small and all of them are easily available for anyone who wants them. A George R.R. Martin Completionist’s fear is that the series will never be finished, not that they won’t be able to find it. But it gets much more difficult if you’re a Completionist for an older property, especially one that has lapsed into the public domain. For example, I’m a big fan of L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz, and if I really wanted to, I could spend the rest of my life trying to complete my experience in that world and never have a chance of success. When Oz is mentioned, the average person usually thinks of The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film starring Judy Garland and absolutely zero suicidal Munchkins, no matter what Freddy Campbell told you in sixth grade. The movie is, of course, a legitimate classic, and everybody has seen it. Fewer people have read the novel it’s based on, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, although most people are probably at least vaguely aware that it exists. What even fewer people understand, though, is just HOW MUCH Oz content exists in the wild.
Wait a second, I think Google Image Search may have screwed something up here…
Baum himself wrote 14 novels about Oz, plus assorted short stories, some stage plays, and even a couple of silent movies. After he passed away, his position of “Royal Historian of Oz” was passed on by the publisher to Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote even more books than Baum before the title got passed along again. All in all, the “original” Oz series consisted of FORTY different books by seven different authors before it was retired in 1963. Not that the authors retired, though. Many of them wrote other Oz books later in life, although those are not usually counted among the “Famous Forty,” as they are known to Ozites.
But this is only the beginning. In addition to the seven official “Royal Historians,” other people started to put out their own versions of Oz, even before the earliest books started to slip into the public domain. W.W. Denslow, the illustrator of the original Wizard of Oz, tried doing his own Oz stories without Baum after the two had a falling-out, although they didn’t enjoy the staying power of his collaborator. Some of Baum’s own children wrote Oz books that wound up getting squelched when they were sued by their father’s publisher for violating their copyright. But once the Baum books went into Public Domain, things exploded.
A quick explanation of Public Domain, just in case there’s anyone who doesn’t know what that means: when someone makes a creative work, they (or their employer, if it’s a work-for-hire) automatically own the copyright to that work. Copyright can be sold, transferred, or licensed, but only the copyright owner has the legal right to profit off that specific work in any way. Eventually, some time after the creator’s death, copyright expires and these creative works lapse into what is called Public Domain, which means that nobody owns the rights any longer and anybody is free to create their own derivative work based upon it. It’s the reason why so many people do their own versions of Shakespeare’s plays and why there are ten billion different versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – you don’t have to pay anybody to use the story, but you still get to trade on the public opinion of the name to build your audience. Copyright laws have changed over the years, mostly due to the efforts of the lobbyists working for the major IP holders (Disney in particular) trying to get it extended over and over again, but eventually it does end. It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens when Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, finally enters public domain next year.
Another masterpiece brought to you courtesy of Public Domain.
Having said that: a work can be in public domain, but the derivative works can still be copyrighted. The Baum Oz novels are in public domain, but the MGM movie is not, so you cannot use any elements specific to the film in your own work without paying up. The best example of this came with Return to Oz, the 1985 Disney film that you may remember as giving you nightmares when you were seven years old. The movie was based on the second and third Baum books, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, and they were free to use those elements, but they also wanted one of the most iconic symbols of Oz: the Ruby Slippers. The problem is that in Baum’s books, Dorothy’s magic shoes were silver. MGM changed them to Ruby to better show off their Technicolor process, and they still owned the copyright on Ruby Slippers, so Disney had to pay them for the right to use Ruby Slippers in the film. Crazy, right?
This one shot cost Disney seven times your annual income.
Anyway, once the copyright finally ended on the earliest Oz books, the ones by Baum, it became legal for anybody to tell their own versions of or use elements from that story as they wished. From SyFy’s Tin Man miniseries to the classic musical The Wiz, the public domain nature of Oz has led to hundreds if not thousands of derivative works. And here’s where it gets hard to be a completionist: not only is there simply too much stuff out there to read or watch it all, it’s almost impossible to even create a comprehensive list.
A while back, I decided to try to compile a list of Oz books and short stories, but even with the help of websites like The Royal Timeline of Oz or their sister website, Wikipedia, it became apparent that the sheer volume of what I was attempting to do made it nearly impossible. I started putting together a Google Sheet with all of the different Oz books I could find, a list that as of this writing is breezing past 400 different works and still going. That’s to say nothing of the hundreds of Oz comic books (a few of them are on my Sheet, but not nearly all) or countless movies and shorts that have been built around Baum’s universe. By the way, I invite anyone interested to take a look at my sheet and let me know what I’m missing – I may never finish the list but I’ll never stop adding to it either. It’s the Completionist in me.
You see, in addition to the “official” works, dozens of other publishers have taken it upon themselves to continue the stories, both in ways that are faithful to Baum’s original works and others in ways that Baum may never have considered or even approved of. That’s another aspect of Public Domain: the fact that anybody can make a derivative work can often draw upon people who are doing so not out of love for the original property, but in an attempt to subvert it. Earlier this year, for example, we saw the release of the film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, which takes A.A. Milne’s beloved icons of childhood joy and innocence and turns them into bloodthirsty horror movie slashers. Give me a break.
Oh, bother.
Look, I like horror movies. I like slasher movies. I like goofy slasher movies. But I don’t care for people who take a crap on precious childhood memories. Characters like Pooh and Tigger are beloved by children all over the world – do they really need to see Pooh gutting somebody with a chainsaw? Full disclaimer here: I have not seen Blood and Honey, nor do I intend to, because it’s the concept itself I dislike. (Quick note to mention that it’s the original Milne books that are in public domain, not the more well-known Disney version of Winnie the Pooh. Man, it always seems to come back to Disney, doesn’t it?)
That doesn’t mean that there’s no room for a dark derivative of an old story, of course. Let’s run down the Yellow Brick Road again to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, a novel of Oz that tells the life story of the Wicked Witch of the West. Like the original Wizard of Oz, Wicked is a fine novel that has been somewhat overshadowed by its own musical adaptation, but no matter which version of the story of Elphaba you’re enjoying, it’s definitely a more mature version of Oz than Baum ever wrote. With Wicked, though, Gregory Maguire was using Baum’s backdrop to tell an intriguing story, something with interesting social commentary, something that had a point. I have no problem with that whatsoever. What bothers me is when someone twists an icon of childhood without a good reason to do so, when somebody creates something shocking just for the sake of being shocking. I don’t care for that. I don’t respect it. And everything I’ve seen of Blood and Honey makes me feel like that’s what the movie does. If I’m wrong, by all means, let me know.
Anyway, the point is that with all of the Oz out there, it seems impossible that I’ll ever get through it all. I’ve read all of the Oz books Baum himself wrote, but I haven’t made it through the rest of the Famous Forty yet. I’ve enjoyed Eric Shanower’s original graphic novels and I loved the adaptations of the Baum originals he did with Skottie Young for Marvel Comics, but Zenescope Comics’ Grimm Fairy Tales has a whole Oz spinoff line that I’ve barely touched upon. I’ve still got three out of four Wicked Years books to read, and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the series by later authors like March Laumer or Baum’s own great-grandson Roger S. Baum. And this is to say nothing of the “official” productions that are still coming out! The International Wizard of Oz club produces an annual magazine, Oziana, which always includes new short stories (and sometimes even short novels) set in Baum’s world. And as they had the utter temerity to begin publishing Oziana back in 1971, before I was even born, it seems quite unlikely that I’ll ever be able to track down every piece of Oz media that exists.
Slow down! I’ve got twelve decades of IP to catch up on!
But that isn’t going to stop me from trying, is it?
Completionism is a fool’s game, my friends, and it’s a game that most of us are doomed to lose. But even so, it can still be an awful lot of fun to play.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He is most definitely not writing this column just to give people ideas for what to get him for Father’s Day, his Birthday, Christmas, or International Oz Completionist Day.
Blake M. Petit 