POP FICTION'S MOST DISREPUTABLE GENRE
Last month Quillette published an essay I wrote about movie novelizations and TV tie-in books. The essay’s publication coincided with the release of Quentin Tarantino’s book Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a novelization of his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood (the ellipses are missing from the book’s title). But that 5,000 word essay was cut from a much larger 14,000 piece on novelizations. Much good stuff had to be cut in order to make Quillette’s word count. I am going to attempt to arrange the unused 9,000-words into a separate essay here. I don’t want to duplicate the parts that Quillette used, because I’d be violating their exclusive right to publish that material. So forgive me if this piece seems a bit disjointed at times. It consists, primarily, of the original 14,000-word essay minus the parts Quillette published. Although there may be a few sections that appear in both.
Not mentioned in my Quillette piece is the fact that Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood wasn’t the first of his films that Tarantino considered novelizing. He came close to producing a tie-in novel once before. His 2015 film The Hateful Eight was originally conceived as a novelized sequel to his 2012 film Django Unchained. Tarantino planned to call this novelization Django in White Hell. But eventually it morphed into something else entirely.
Movie novelizations have been around since filmdom’s Silent Era but they probably enjoyed their greatest cultural prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Baby Boomers (like Tarantino and myself) were young and ravenous for all sorts of pop cultural products. We were the first generation raised in homes with televisions in them. There were no DVD players or videocassette players or streaming services back then. If we wanted to enjoy a pop cultural product such as a TV franchise or a film on demand, our only option was to purchase a TV tie-in book or movie novelization. TV shows like Mannix or Ironside or Dark Shadows or The Mod Squad couldn’t be taped and could only be viewed on television when some network (or its local affiliate) was broadcasting it. Novelizations and tie-in books gave us a chance to sit down and enjoy the characters from, say, Alias Smith and Jones any time we wanted. What’s more, although theaters wouldn’t allow people under 16 to see an R-rated film without parental accompaniment, bookstores had no such restrictions. You could buy the novelization of an R-rated movie without the book clerk asking to see your I.D. My parents wouldn’t take me to see Dirty Harry in 1971 when I was only 13. Undeterred, I went down to the local supermarket and bought a copy of Phillip Rock’s novelization of the book for 75 cents (my weekly allowance was 50 cents). I read the book in secret, at night, after my parents had gone to sleep. NBC’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. inspired a 24-book series of novels, all of them published between 1965 and 1968, and some of them penned by pop-fictioneers with plenty of original novels to their credit, men like Michael Avallone, Harry Whittington (reputed to have once written seven novels in a month), J. Hunter Holly, and others. The beauty of the U.N.C.L.E. novelizations is that they were a bit darker and more intense than NBC’s censors allowed the TV episodes to be. It’s harder to imagine the appeal of the Partridge Family novelizations, since the two best things the show had going for it, in my opinion – the snappy tunes and Susan Dey’s beauty – couldn’t be captured in a paperback book.
If you think that the genre is ephemeral, well, visit Amazon.com and look up Trick Shot, a 1976 book, written by Brian Fox, as a tie-in to the TV series Alias Smith and Jones (which was essentially a rip-off of the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and “created” by Glen A. Larson, whose nickname in the industry was Glen A. Larceny). The program’s final episode aired in January of 1973. But more than forty years later, superfan M.A. DeNeve wrote an angry reader review for Amazon in which he denounced the many ways that Fox’s book contradicts the known back stories of the program’s two main characters. And M.A. DeNeve isn’t alone. Visit Goodreads.com and other online sites where anyone can post a book review and you’ll find readers who are passionate about the long out-of-print novelizations of long-cancelled TV shows. Fans of the genre like to point out that 34 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays were derived from pre-existing material (histories, myths, etc.). No doubt, had Shakespeare been alive in the 1970s, he’d have been writing novelizations of Barney Miller and Charlie’s Angels.
Until the late 1960s, the Screenwriters Guild prohibited TV production companies in the U.S. from novelizing actual TV scripts. The Guild believed this would be an infringement on the rights of the scriptwriter. Publishers looking to produce a series of books based on a TV series had to find writers who were willing to come up with original stories based on existing characters and premises. The rules didn’t apply to scriptwriters who novelized their own scripts. Thus Rod Serling’s Stories From the Twilight Zone, a 1960 book that contained short stories derived from his own Twilight Zone scripts, became one of the first big commercial successes of the TV tie-in genre. It spawned two additional Stories From the Twilight Zone books. These sold well because they faithfully reproduced actual episodes of the Twilight Zone, and back before VHS recorders existed, fans of the series had no other way of re-experiencing the thrills provided by watching those episodes. The Writers Guild of Britain didn’t have a prohibition against one writer novelizing another writer’s TV script, and so most of the TV tie-in books of mid-century British programs were novelizations of actual episodes.
Some movie novelizations were much better than the films they were based on. Often this occurred because the novelizations were based upon the original screenplay. In Hollywood original screenplays regularly get altered for the worse once a famous director gets signed on to make the film. He may want to bring aboard a few of his favorite actors. Those actors may refuse to work on the film unless their roles are rewritten to make their characters more prominent, or more sympathetic, or much younger than they are in the original script. A situation like this inspired the writing of Thomas Rickman’s novelization of W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. He was so disgusted with what star Burt Reynolds and director John G. Avildsen did to his screenplay when they made a film of it that he insisted upon being allowed to write a novelization in order to get his original vision of the story into the public record. Quentin Tarantino credits Rickman’s novelization with inspiring his interest in writing. In 2003, he told the New York Times, “I found out later that Thomas Rickman was so disgusted with what they did with his movie that he asked to write the novelization, so that one person out there would know what it was that he intended. I’m 40 now, and I still read W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings every three years. I’m that one person. When I saw the movie, though, a few years after I’d first read the book, I was like, What the hell is this? I mean, I was offended. I was literally offended. The novelization was pure. But this was Hollywood garbage. So that’s why I was so outraged.”
Carol DeChellis Hill’s novelization of Paul Mazursky’s 1978 film An Unmarried Woman is mostly faithful to the source material. There is one small but important difference between the two, however. Unlike Paul Mazursky, Ms. Hill, a New Yorker and a respected novelist (Henry James’ Midnight Song, The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, etc.), had first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be an unmarried woman living in New York. She herself was divorced from noted N.A.A.C.P. labor director Herbert Hill. Mazursky’s film pays little attention to the financial situation of its main character, divorcee Erica Benton (Jill Clayburgh). According to D.H. Sayer, a blogger and Carol DeChellis Hill superfan, Hill’s novelization is more realistic about the financial prospects of an underemployed woman whose marriage suddenly dissolves. He writes:
There are some key differences between the movie and book. The book has characters in it that were either cut from the movie or never made it past the early script phase. One of these characters is Erica’s mom, who doesn’t play a significant role in the story but her short scenes make sense because of course you’d call your mom if your marriage broke up. Another character who appears only in the book is Erica’s boss, and his only purpose seems to be so Erica can ask him for a raise because she’s worried about money now that her bread-winning husband is out of the picture (he is a stock broker and they were one of those vaguely wealthy Manhattanite families that populate virtually every movie that takes place in NYC). This is another major difference between the two: in the movie, Erica seems hardly to care about money at all, acting like her financial situation will remain unchanged even though she works as an underling at a not very upscale art gallery. My guess is that while having the character worry about money is certainly more realistic, it is not what Mazursky wanted the movie to be about, so he opted not to have the character express any concern at all. In the book Erica finds herself thinking about money every few pages in a very believable fashion.
Occasionally, a TV or movie tie-in book will contain hidden gems that are available only to the superfans who devour such books, and not to the casual viewer of the TV show or the film. A case in point is Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, a cheap mass-market paperback published in 1971 by Bantam Books. The book contains prose treatments of five episodes of the TV series Night Gallery, a horror anthology that ran on NBC from late 1970 to mid 1973, each installment of which was introduced by Rod Serling. But the book also contains a sixth tale – Does the Name Grimsby Do Anything To You? – which was never filmed for the series. The tale has a curious history. According to one fan who runs a Night Gallery blog online (Shadow & Substance) and identifies himself only as “Paul,” Serling became fascinated by space travel in the early 1960s when the Apollo program was first announced. He wanted to do more Twilight Zone episodes about space travel but the series was cancelled before he could get around to it. Grimsby is an alternative history of the first Apollo moon landing (with a startling twist, of course). It seems likely that Serling wrote it for the Twilight Zone but never had a chance to bring it into production. On Night Gallery, Serling was more of a hired hand than a majordomo. He introduced all the episodes and wrote many of them, but producer Jack Laird was the man in charge of the program. He may have nixed Grimsby simply because it was a science fiction story rather than a supernatural tale or a horror story (or maybe because it would have been prohibitively expensive to dramatize).
An even more curious book is The Season to Be Wary, also written by Rod Serling. It contains three long tales, two of which – Escape Route and Eyes – were dramatized in the pilot episode of Night Gallery and are officially segments two and three of the 98 that comprised that series. (Eyes, starring Joan Crawford, was Steven Spielberg’s first professional directing job.) The third story in the book, Color Scheme, is a coruscating attack on Southern racism that is full of f-bombs and n-words. It tells the story of racist demagogue King Connacher – a character probably inspired by arch-segregationist Bull Conner and Huey “The Kingfish” Long (who was a populist Southern demagogue but not particularly racist) – who travels from one Southern town to another, stirring up racism and inspiring murderous violence against innocent Black people. One day, while attempting to leave a town in which he has whipped up trouble, Connacher crashes his white Cadillac into a tree, knocking himself unconscious. When he awakens, he discovers that he has been transformed into a Black man. He hurries back into town seeking help only to be greeted with a taste of his own virulent racism. Curiously, the book containing these stories was published in September of 1967, more that two years before the pilot episode of Night Gallery aired and more than three years before the actual debut of the series. The last episode of The Twilight Zone (the original series) aired for the first time on June 19, 1964. Thus, when Serling was writing these tales, Night Gallery hadn’t been conceived yet and The Twilight Zone was still very much in the national consciousness. The designer of the paperback edition went to great pains to give the impression that this is a Twilight Zone spin-off. Serling’s name is above and bigger than the title, and he is identified in all caps as “THE CREATOR OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE.” The cover art shows him standing and looking out at the beholder as if into a camera. He is nattily dressed, as usual, and is holding some sort of a script in his hand. My guess is that Serling, who had already written three hugely successful Twilight Zone tie-in books, wanted this book to be an extension of the series, a collection of original tales in the spirit of the TV show. But CBS Television owned the rights to the series, and I imagine they probably balked at a tie-in book that was full of Nazis and n-words and f-bombs. In his introduction to Color Scheme, Serling mentions that the idea had been germinating in his head for five years (after being suggested to him by his friend Sammy Davis, Jr.) and that “Television wouldn’t touch it.” Eventually, Serling would convert two of the stories in The Season to Be Wary into Night Gallery scripts (Color Scheme was way too raw and powerful to have been adapted for television in the 1960s or 70s without undergoing a complete bowdlerization). Thus the book is now considered by many as a Night Gallery tie-in. But it is probably more accurate to view it as an unofficial Twilight Zone tie-in. In either case, it’s not a true novelization, because the stories seem to have preceded the scripts rather than vice versa. Still, unless you’ve read the tie-in books Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and The Season To Be Wary, you aren’t familiar with every story ever written for Night Gallery and/or The Twilight Zone, because clearly, given his druthers, Serling would have dramatized both Does the Name Grigsby Do Anything To You? and Color Scheme for one or another of his two TV series. Furthermore, the short story Eyes differs dramatically from the version filmed by Spielberg. The short story focuses on a down-and-out ex-boxer, an American Indian who has been screwed over by his handlers and is now so desperate for money he is seriously considering selling his eyes to a wealthy blind woman who wants them transplanted into her head in place of her own sightless ones. Joan Crawford was a screen diva, and in order to attract her to the Night Gallery project, the story had to be written so that the focus was almost entirely on her character – i.e., the wealthy blind woman. Thus the American Indian ex-boxer was excised from the story completely, rendering it an altogether different tale than the one that appeared in the book.
A few genuinely gifted authors have occasionally deigned to write a novelization of a film or TV series. Richard Wormser, a prolific genre novelist who won several Spur Awards for his Western fiction and an Edgar Award for one of his mysteries, wrote nine film novelizations and four TV tie-in novels, occasionally using the pseudonym Ed Friend. Elmore Leonard’s Mr Majestyk was a novelization of the 1974 film directed by Richard Fleischer, which Leonard had scripted. The award-winning British crime novelist Philip MacDonald wrote a novelization of the classic 1956 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, although he employed the pseudonym “W. J. Stuart,” apparently not wanting to be associated with such a disreputable genre of literature. Isabel Allende’s 2005 novel, Zorro, is a spin-off of Johnston McCulley’s 1919 novel The Curse of Capistrano, which is the novel that gave the world the pulp-fiction hero Diego de la Vega, better known as Zorro (Spanish for fox). Allende’s novel is just one of hundreds of cultural products – silent movies, talkies, serials, TV series, novels, short stories, comic books, graphic novels, etc. – that have been spun off of McCulley’s original. Frederick Forsyth’s The Devil’s Alternative, the eighth-bestselling novel in America for 1980, began life as a screenplay and was converted into a novel only after the film deal fell through. Likewise, Vera Caspary’s classic noir novel Laura began life as a play and, when that didn’t work, was transformed into a film treatment. When the studio rejected the film treatment, Caspary turned it into a novel, which was so successful that Hollywood snatched it up and turned it into a film. Thus the book was actually a novelization of a rejected film treatment, which is a fairly commonplace story. Arthur Hailey’s first two novels – Runway Zero-Eight (on which he collaborated with Ronald Payne and John Garrod) and The Final Diagnosis – were novelizations of highly successful teleplays he had written. In the late 1930s Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood collaborated on a film précis of their own, which they called Jacob’s Hands, and which they eventually transformed into a screenplay. The screenplay got lost and the précis was forgotten until it was discovered in the late 1990s by, of all people, actress Sharon Stone, after which it was published as a novella. In 1955, a year after the release of the film On The Waterfront, Budd Schulberg, who won an Academy Award for the film’s screenplay, published a novel called Waterfront, which was essentially a novelization of the film. Subsequent paperback editions of the book claimed that it was the source of the film, but this was the opposite of the truth. Writer/director John Sayles once penned a novelization of Joe Dante’s 1978 horror film Piranha, for which he had written the screenplay. Tony-Award winning dramatist David Rabe (Sticks and Bones, etc.) wrote a novelization of the 1995 Sean Penn film The Crossing Guard (Penn himself wrote the screenplay). Tony Award-winning playwright Arthur Laurents novelized the scripts he wrote for the films The Way We Were (1973) and The Turning Point (1977). Other name brand authors who have contributed to the novelization craze include Louis L’Amour (How the West was Won), Isaac Asimov (Fantastic Voyage) and John D. MacDonald (I Could Go on Singing). British crime writer John Gardner is best known for the sixteen James Bond novels he published between 1981 and 1996. In a sense, all of these could be considered movie tie-ins, since it was the popularity of the James Bond films (based on Ian Fleming’s original novels) that created demand for these books. But two of the sixteen – License to Kill and Goldeneye – actually were novelizations of someone else’s movie scripts. Occasionally, back in the heyday of the movie tie-in book, if a script was highly regarded, it would get the novelization treatment even if the film itself wasn’t particularly successful at the box office. This happened with Ray Rigby’s script for the Sidney Lumet film The Hill. The script won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival of 1965. In 1966 it received a Best Screenplay award from the British Academy of Film & Television Arts’ (BAFTA). Wikipedia notes that “The Hill did not perform well in cinemas,” but apparently all the prizes awarded to Rigby’s script were enough to induce a publisher to request a novelization, which was written by Rigby and published in 1965. A much fuller list of novelizers, famous and not, can be found in Randall D. Larson’s excellent 1995 tome Films Into Books: An Analytical Bibliography of Film Novelizations, Movie, and TV Tie-Ins. It is the only full-length academic study of the genre I’ve ever come across, and it is not nearly as stuffy or as pretentious as the subtitle makes it seem. Its only shortcoming is that it is 25 years old and lacks information on more recent publications. An updated edition is badly needed.
Although many (perhaps most) authors of novelizations did the job primarily for the money, that doesn’t mean that they put little or no effort into the writing process. Conscientious novelizers often appear to have worked as hard when novelizing some TV show as they did when writing their own original work. For example, take a look at these opening paragraphs from Jim Thompson’s Ironside, a novelization based on the NBC TV series (1967-75) created by Collier Young:
It was the kind of place where if you didn’t spit on the floor at home you could go down there and do it. The smell was thick enough to write your name on (if you were still using your own name) – the aroma of stale beer and cheap wine and cloying sweat, colored and given body by the gut-like strands of cigarette smoke. In the nearly opaque night-fog of San Francisco, the place could hardly be seen from the outside. But the smell from the interior pointed an invisible finger at it. And even in the distance of the bay, the ferries and tugs seemed to acknowledge it with sickish and shuddery hoots.
From somewhere in the smoke and stench, an unreasonable facsimile of a piano player was doing his own arrangement of “Goofus.” It had to be his own; no one else would have claimed it. At the bar, a rail-thin man sipped muscatel and surreptitiously counted the cigarettes in his package. At one of the small, smeared tables, which seemed splattered rather than scattered around the sawdust-covered floor, a bloated-faced woman made an apparently endless appeal to a thin-lipped young man who apparently rejected her endlessly.
Such writing may not be Shakespearean, but it compares favorably with the prose in The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280, The Getaway, and other classic Jim Thompson novels.
One of the most interesting sub-categories of the genre is the stealth novelization. This type of book pretends to be the source of a film when actually it is a byproduct of said film. Herman Raucher’s Summer of ’42, Erich Segal’s Love Story, Marc Norman’s Oklahoma Crude, William Dale Jennings’s The Cowboys – all of these “novels” were released prior to the films of the same name. But the screenplays were written first and then, while the movie was in production, the authors rapidly cranked out a novelization that could be published slightly ahead of the film’s release date in order to promote the film.
Rushing out a fairly short novel in advance of a film in order to drum up interest in the film’s release was a fairly standard practice back in the1960s and 70s. Alistair MacLean’s novels Where Eagles Dare (1967), Puppet on a Chain (1969), and Caravan to Vaccares (1970) were all novelizations of screenplays he had written earlier. The books were released slightly ahead of the films and were not identified as novelizations, giving the impression that the film was based on the novel.
And many of these stealth novelizations were quite good. Consider, for instance, Marc Norman’s novel Oklahoma Crude. The book is a small comic masterpiece reminiscent in some ways of Charles Portis’ True Grit (and even of Portis’s earlier novel Norwood). True Grit tells the story of a gutsy 14-year-old girl who hires a rather crude older man to track down the killer of her father, an outlaw named Tom Chaney who has since joined a group of murderous thugs known as the Ned Pepper gang. Oklahoma Crude is the story of a gutsy 27-year-old woman (whose life has been blighted by the absence of a father) who hires a rather crude older man to help her get an oil well up and running before a gang of murderous thugs hired by an oil company can steal her land from her. True Grit is a historical novel set in the Oklahoma Territory. Oklahoma Crude is a historical novel set in the state of Oklahoma. Both novels are told in a colloquial and highly eccentric first-person voice. Both books, though essentially comic novels, have their fair share of violence and murder. True Grit has an impressive opening paragraph that instantly captures the reader’s attention with its oddly formal diction. In that opening paragraph the narrator tells the reader that the public is wrong to doubt the tale she is about to relate. Oklahoma Crude’s opening paragraph also informs the reader, in a somewhat odd diction, that the public is wrong. But Norman’s opener is even better than Portis’s:
I’m aware the public at large holds the plains cowboy to be illiterate and a rowdy, and while the latter is fair enough, the former is not. The cowboys I knew would read everything and anything they could get their hands on, a habit most of them picked up from long frozen winters locked in a line shack where it was either read, whittle, or bugger each other, and of the three, reading was both the most acceptable and the most educating. Whatever words found on paper were devoured, be it the Old Testament or a course in crocheting, and as many shawls came out of the woods with spring thaw as lay preachers.
The movie tie-in book is one of the least pretentious genres in all of literature, right down there with the dirty limerick. And Marc Norman’s stealth novelization of Oklahoma Crude is practically a paean to unpretentiousness. The narrator is able to make poetry out of the names of the unglamorous components of an oilrig (auger stem, rope socket, temper screw, walking beam, pitman arm, Sampson post, calf wheel, bull wheel, crown-block pulley, etc.). But even he knows that employing too much specialized terminology is the height of pretentiousness:
Inventing a lingo to me is the product of men at a dull task trying to make it sound complicated, usually to impress somebody, and it’s been years since I amused myself with the knowledge I was speaking of things only one out of ten men around me could understand. I used to go on – I would say things like, “There was a cat’s ass in the line so bad I had to take a preacher’s prick to it,” and think myself quite a rake, but then I was in a grocery store one day and heard the term preacher’s prick applied by the grocer to that stick thing with jaws he used to fish cans off the high shelves, and I’ve been simply saying kinks in the cable and wrenches ever since.
It would be nice if academics and journalists would eschew their love of specialized jargon in the same fashion.
Norman’s book, like a lot of novelizations, has a somewhat rushed quality to it, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Often it lends a bit of immediacy to the reading experience. An over-polished book can sometimes be worse than an under-polished one. And few novelizations have ever been accused of being over-polished. The Oklahoma Crude novelization is long out of print and largely forgotten but it doesn’t deserve to be. As novelizations go, it is the GOAT (you should pardon the jargon). Perhaps if the Coen brothers were to remake Stanley Kramer’s film, as they did True Grit, the book might enjoy a revival.
Another fine but now forgotten book that bears all the hallmarks of a stealth novelization is Raggedy Man, written by William D. Wittliff and Sara Clark. The book is copyrighted 1979. In 1981, Universal Pictures released a film version starring Sissy Spacek and directed by her husband Jack Fisk (better known as the production designer for many of Terrence Malik’s films). The movie’s screenplay was by William D. Wittliff. The book was a paperback original, as most novelizations are. Its back pages advertise another paperback original by Wittliff and Clark called Thaddeus Rose and Eddie, which the advertising copy tells us is “based on the screenplay by William D. Wittliff.” Wittliff is best known for having scripted the 1989 TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, based on Larry McMurtry’s 1985 novel. Wittliff died in 2019 and his obituary in the New York Times mentions that he wrote a screenplay for Raggedy Man but doesn’t mention a novel (novelizations are usually beneath the consideration of the Times, which may be why many of them aren’t advertised as such). According to the obituary, “In 2014 he published his first novel, The Devil’s Backbone, about a boy named Papa who searches for his estranged mother in Texas Hill country in the late 19thCentury.” Either the New York Times’ obituary writer somehow missed the fact that Wittliff had published a book called Raggedy Man (unlikely) or he simply dismissed it because he didn’t consider it a legitimate novel. My guess is that the book is another of the many novels published between 1960 and 1980 that belong to a strange twilight zone of American literature – the stealth novelization of a film.
Another hallmark of the stealth novelization is that it is almost always written in a sort of wistful colloquial style, as though the narrator is talking it out in front of you while sitting in a rocking chair on his porch. Love Story famously begins, “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” Norma Klein’s Sunshine, published just a few years after Love Story and lighting out for the same kind of emotional territory, begins simply, “It’s funny how you can tell when people are lying to you.” We saw above how Marc Norman began Oklahoma Crude in a similarly intimate style. Raucher’s novelization of the film Ode To Billy Joe begins like this:
It had been a hot day and a lot of it. From the sun’s first stretching right up till dinner time, the hours had steamed the ground until going barefoot was jumpy even for lizards. Sweating came easy, calling for nothing more than showing up. Anyone could do it.
It’s possible that a lot of these books were dictated into tape recorders before being typed up as “novels.” And that process doesn’t seem to have hurt them any.
And just as there are novelizations from the 1970s that these days are remembered largely as novels, there were novels published in that era that feel so much like novelizations that some might mistakenly believe that’s what they were. Consider, for instance, Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft, published in 1970. The idea did not originate organically in Tidyman’s imagination. He had published one previous novel, Flower Power in 1968, which had been a commercial failure. Determined to not to fail again, he sought the advice of Alan Rinzler, an editor of mystery novels for Macmillan Publishers. Tidyman had been introduced to Rinzler by African-American literary agent Ronald Hobbs. Rinzler and Hobbs convinced Tidyman that a novel about a black private eye might have a shot at commercial gold. Novelist John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night, published a few years earlier and featuring a black police officer, had left a huge impact on the cultural moment, primarily through its film incarnation. Thus, Rinzler gave Tidyman a modest advance and instructed him to write a novel about a black P.I. According to Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft (2015), Tidyman, who was working as a journalist at the time, dictated segments of Shaft on his way to the office each morning and had them typed up by the company’s secretaries. The narrative’s chatty, fragmented style seems to verify this:
He had been digging it all the way. Digging it, walking fast and thinking mostly about the girl. She was crazy. Freaky beautiful. Crazy.
And long before the book was published, Tidyman had his eye out for a film sale, which no doubt influenced the way the book was written. MGM purchased the rights while the novel was still in galleys. Another reason the book might be mistaken for a novelization is that Tidyman himself became most famous for his Academy Award-winning screenplay for The French Connection, the William Friedkin film which was released in October of 1971, just four months after the release of the first Shaft film (co-scripted by Tidyman, in collaboration with John D.F. Black). For Shaft’s second outing, Shaft Among the Jews, Tidyman wrote the screenplay first and the novel(ization) afterwards, but though the novel was published the screenplay never got produced. Thus the book appeared to be an original rather than a tie-in. The third novel in the series, Shaft’s Big Score, was a novelization by Tidyman of his own original screenplay. For the next book, Shaft Has A Ball, Tidyman came up with the story line and then hired prolific pulp-fiction writer Robert Turner to flesh it into a full-length manuscript – essentially novelizing it. Later installments in the seven-book Shaft series, though they were credited solely to Tidyman, were often collaborations between him and Phillip Rock, novelizer of such films as The Cheyenne Social Club, High Plains Drifter (from a screenplay by Tidyman), and the aforementioned Dirty Harry. Although the first Shaft book was not technically a novelization, the whole series has the feel of a movie franchise tie-in.
Another book of the era that gives off strong novelization vibes is the 1973 Signet paperback edition of Joe David Brown’s Paper Moon. Two years earlier, Brown had published a novel called Addie Pray, which garnered strong reviews but small sales. John Huston liked the book enough that he wanted to adapt it for a Hollywood film starring Paul Newman and Newman’s young daughter, Nell Potts. When that project fell through, director Peter Bogdanovich stepped in and hired Ryan O’Neal and his ten-year-old daughter, Tatum, to play the leads. Bogdanovich, understandably, had a problem with the title: Addie Pray. It sounded like a command from parent to child and might confuse the public into thinking the film was religious in theme. The story actually concerns an eleven-year-old female con artist named Addie Pray, who is anything but religious. While putting together a soundtrack for the film, Bogdanovich heard the 1932 song “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (written by Billy Rose, Yip Harburg, and Harold Arlen) and it occurred to him that Paper Moon might be a good title for a film about a con artist. He ran the idea by his mentor Orson Welles, who reportedly told him, “That title is so good you shouldn’t even make the picture, you should just release the title.” Bogdanovich hastily shot a scene in which the O’Neals pose for a photo in front of a paper moon so that he could justify his title change to the studio. That photo, of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal (dressed chastely but holding a cigarette in her right hand), appeared on the cover of the Signet paperback, which also used Bogdanovich’s title. Thanks to the new title and the Hollywood tie-in, the paperback sold much better than the hardback and was ubiquitous on supermarket spinner racks back in the early 70s. But that’s not the only reason why I tend to mistakenly remember the book as a novelization. The paperback is exactly 240 pages long. It is written in a colloquial front-porch style, as evidenced by the opening line:
They say my mama, Miss Essie Mae Loggins, was the wildest girl in Marengo County, Alabama.
And, in the fifty years since its publication, I’ve never come across a copy of the hardback in any bookstore I’ve ever visited (and I spend a shocking amount of time in book stores). Thus I keep Paper Moon alongside Oklahoma Crude and Ode to Billy Joe on my novelization shelves. It just seems to belong there.
The line between novel and novelization is oftentimes difficult to define. Mystery writer Max Alan Collins wrote a movie tie-in novelization of the 2002 Sam Mendes film The Road to Perdition. But the film itself was based on a graphic novel written by Collins and illustrated by Richard Piers Rayner. So was Collins novelizing Mendes film or simply producing a revised edition of his own earlier work? Collins, by the way, would not be offended by the term novelization. He has penned more of them than just about anyone other than Alan Dean Foster, having novelized such films as In The Line of Fire, Maverick, Waterworld, Saving Private Ryan, and many others.
Another curious story involves the two novelizations of How The West Was Won. The 1962 anthology film How The West Was Won was scripted by James R. Webb. That script was novelized by Louis L’Amour and published that same year. In the mid 1970s, ABC-TV released a two-hour television movie called The Macahans, which was loosely based on parts of the 1962 film. The made-for-TV-movie was a success so, in 1977, ABC expanded it into a mini-series called How The West Was Won. That, too, was successful so, in 1978, ABC brought out a regular weekly series called How The West Was Won. In January of 1978, to promote the new series, Ballentine Books published a fat paperback novelization that combined several of the series’ early scripts, comprising the work of eight different writers, into one long narrative. This novelization, written by award-winning Western novelist Lou Cameron, was also called How The West Was Won. Thus you have two novels, written by award-winning Western authors named Lou, both called How The West Was Won. Naturally, this has caused some confusion among a few book buyers through the years. But this particular battle of the books appears to have been won easily by L’Amour. His novel remains in print, both electronically and as a paperback. It has 278 mostly positive reviews at Amazon.com. Cameron’s novel is long out of print, was never available electronically, and has only six (mostly positive) reviews at Amazon. Nonetheless, I’ve known Western readers who prefer the Cameron novelization to the L’Amour novelization. Cameron, by the way, wrote other novelizations, including work for the Kung Fu TV series, and the films None But the Brave (1965) and California Split (1976).
Sometimes trying to figure out which came first is a lot like the famous chicken-or-egg conundrum. Consider, for instance, Jeff Rice’s novel The Night Stalker. Rice wrote the novel in the early 1970s and titled it The Kolchak Papers. He shopped it around but couldn’t find a publisher for it. An agent who looked at it thought it might be something Hollywood would be interested in. The unpublished manuscript somehow ended up in the hands of Hollywood producer Dan Curtis, who hired legendary pulpsmith Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, Hell House, etc.) to convert it into a screenplay. The film, retitled The Night Stalker, aired on January 11, 1972 and was a monster hit, attracting 75 million viewers (including me), or roughly one-third of the country’s population. It was so successful, in fact, that it was released theatrically in Europe. The success of the film allowed Jeff Rice to find a publisher for his novel (Pocket Books, a paperback imprint of Simon and Schuster). But by the time the book came out in December of 1973, its title had been changed to The Night Stalker. It’s possible that the contents of the novel were also changed somewhat to more closely mirror the TV movie. The release of the paperback was delayed until 1973 so that it could be released simultaneously with The Night Strangler, a TV movie sequel to The Night Stalker. Richard Matheson wrote the sequel without help from Rice and then Rice wrote a novelization of Matheson’s screenplay. Rice’s books The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler were published simultaneously. Both book covers feature Matheson’s name as prominently as Rice’s (more prominently, in my opinion). Is the first one a novel and the second a novelization? Are they both hybrids of novel and novelization? At this point, it’s difficult to tell.
TV movies were a rich source of novelization. Occasionally, a TV movie would be so successful, so well-received by both critics and viewers, that some shrewd paperback house would rush out a novelization afterwards to capitalize on that success. That happened with the aforementioned novelization of the TV movie Sunshine, which was written by Norma Klein. It also happened with a 1977 TV movie called Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the process for that film’s novelization:
A novelization of the film, packaged and by-lined to give the impression of being the story source, was published by Signet Books shortly after the film aired, to capitalize on its ratings impact. (There is no record of the book having ever existed prior to this paperback edition.) The stated authorship is shared by Joanna Lee and T.S. Cook. Given that the book is a tie-in created after the fact, what the by-line implies, but avoids particularizing, is that Cook actually wrote the novel based on Lee's teleplay. As Cook would himself soon emerge as an award-winning screenwriter (The China Syndrome), it's likely that Lee and he were colleagues, and that he took the assignment at her behest. In media tie-in terms, an adaptation presented in this manner is called an "implied novelization."
I think the term “implied novelization” gets it backwards. Such books are trying implicitly to present themselves as novels. The covers don’t describe them as novelizations. The cover of Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night specifically states “A Novel By Joanna Lee and T.S. Cook.” This is a stealth novelization, a book that’s trying to pretend that it is the source of the successful TV film, rather than vice versa.
Another successful TV movie that got the retroactive novelization treatment was The Gun, a 1974 film directed by John Badham. It is an odd pseudo-anthology film that follows a single .38-caliber revolver from owner to owner, bringing near tragedy to all of them except the last, to whom it delivers real tragedy. It was so successful that it inspired numerous imitations by other TV programs (Hawaii 5-0, Quincy M.E., etc.). The film is completely unavailable these days in any format, and some have suggested that the gun industry might have used its influence to pull the film out of circulation, perhaps by purchasing its copyright. Nonetheless, the film was novelized by Michael T. Kaufman (from a script by Richard Levinson, William Link, and Jay Benson). It’s long out of print but easily acquired online, sort of like a cheap handgun.
If a novelized film script is nominated for an Academy Award or some other prestigious honor, you will find it much easier to determine which came first, book or script. In Hollywood it is generally considered more prestigious to win an Oscar for an original screenplay than for a screenplay that has been adapted from another medium. That is why, even though Steve Shagan’s novelization of his screenplay for the 1973 film Save the Tiger was marketed as an original novel and released prior to the film, the screenplay was nominated for the Academy’s Best Original Screenplay award and not for its Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium award. Shagan or, more likely, the studio’s publicity department, had submitted the screenplay for consideration in the more prestigious category, and you can bet that they would have been able to defend that submission had the academy balked. Likewise, Arthur Laurents’ novelization of The Way We Were was promoted as a novel. But when the screenplay was submitted for consideration to the annual Writers Guild of America Awards it was submitted as a contender for Best Drama Written Directly For the Screen, not Best Adapted Screenplay. Hollywood writers want their cake and they want to eat it too. They want their screenplays recognized as original stories, but they also want the novelizations spun from those screenplays recognized as novels. In other words, they want both iterations of the story recognized as original work. Only in Hollywood can you be a virgin twice. (N.B: Shagan lost the Oscar race to David S. Ward, who wrote The Sting, but he beat out Laurents, as well as Ward, for the Writers Guild award).
Some novelizations are little more than published screenplays, although they’ve generally been stripped of their slug lines (i.e., INTERIOR – LESTER’S BAR & GRILL – EVENING), which are often replaced by more reader friendly scene descriptions. The novelization of Rooster Cogburn, a 1975 sequel to the 1969 film version of True Grit, follows this format, although nothing on the book’s cover suggests that it’s anything other than a paperback novel. This novelization, like the screenplay, is credited to “Martin Julien.” Who exactly that is remains somewhat of a mystery. In his introduction to the novelization/screenplay, journalist Wayne Warga writes, “Rooster Cogburn, they would have us believe, was written by Martin Julien, about whom more later.” A few pages later he elaborates:
There is no Martin Julien. And should this script one day win an Academy Award, I for one simply cannot wait to see who comes forward to claim the Oscar. Charles Portis, the author of the novel True Grit and the creator of the Cogburn character, reportedly put what we in Hollywood call “the polish” on this delightful tale. [John] Wayne, ever the soul of discretion, suggests that Portis is also responsible for “several of the situations in it as well.” Miss Hepburn, who knows damn good and well who wrote it – as does Wayne – makes a similar statement. [The film’s producer] Hal Wallis, who commissioned and bought it, also knows. Mrs. Hal Wallis, a beautiful woman who was once an actress known as Martha Hyer, also knows because the whole thing was mostly her idea in the first place. And it is she who probably wrote it, although she isn’t admitting it. No one knows why, few have yet asked, and even those supposedly in the know aren’t really sure…At any rate, the following suggested credit which will do until something better comes along:
ROOSTER COGBURN
Based on the Character of Rooster Cogburn
in
TRUE GRIT
by
Charles Portis
Polish
by
Charles Portis
With a lot of help from
Martha Hyer
Who in turn was aided by
Hal Wallis
All of whom decided to say:
Story and screenplay
by
Martin Julien
You can try untangling that knot, if you want, or you can just trust Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database, both of which now give Martha Hyer sole credit for having written Rooster Cogburn (her only screenwriting credit, though she lived 89 years).
One of the best of these slugless screenplays is Robin and Marian, written by James Goldman, the older brother of the more famous William Goldman. Like his brother, James was both a screenwriter and a novelist. Unlike his brother, he was also a successful playwright. He won an Academy Award for scripting the 1968 film The Lion in Winter (which he adapted from his own stage play). James wrote an original screenplay for the 1976 Richard Lester film Robin and Marian. His novelization of that film is an odd but excellent hybrid of novel, essay collection, and screenplay. It is a slender Bantam paperback (186 pages) and its first 54 pages are given over to three essays written by Goldman. The first of these is titled “Where Have All the Heroes Gone?” and is a meditation on the subject of heroes in both fiction and in real life. Writing in an era in which antiheroes (such as the title characters in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, scripted by William Goldman) seemed more prevalent than actual heroes, Goldman discusses the need for real heroes and why he believes Robin Hood, whom many would label an anti-hero, to be one. He follows up that essay with “What All the Singing Was About,” an essay on the early origins of the Robin Hood legend and the folk songs that kept it alive and gave it substance. Finally he gives us “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Screenplays and Were Afraid to Ask,” an entertaining look at the long and tortuous process that Goldman’s script took on the way to becoming a major motion picture. Cynics might argue that these essays were added just to pad out a relatively slender book. I don’t believe it. All three essays are entertaining and informative, and I enjoyed them as much as I did the story that follows them. Besides, novelizations are almost always fairly slender paperbacks. No regular purchasers of novelizations would have been put off if the book had been even slimmer. But Goldman’s real innovation is the way he transforms his screenplay into not quite a novel. The book retains all of the film’s dialog. But instead of sluglines and barebones descriptions of the action we get a full prose treatment of what an ordinary screenplay elides. Thus, the novel opens with several pages of scene-setting exposition. Here’s the opening paragraph:
The Great Crusade was over. Armies of a size no living man had ever seen had been assembled. Kings from England, Germany, and France, each followed by his Bishops, Earls and Counts and Knights and slaves and peasants set out, marching to Jerusalem. They never got there.
The novel goes on like that for several pages, describing in cinematic detail a failed crusade that got close enough to Jerusalem to actually lay eyes upon it but without the strength to actually seize it. So many of Richard the Lion-Hearted’s men had been killed en route to Jerusalem that he didn’t have enough numbers to put up a fight. We learn now that Richard and his remaining men, who are on their way back to England, have stopped in an insignificant French town called Chaluz. A mile or so from town they find what appears to be an abandoned castle. Gradually the omniscient narrator zeroes in on two of the returning crusaders, Robin Hood and Little John. At that point, we are given their dialog in a format that resembles a script or a play:
Robin turned to Little John.
ROBIN: See anything?
John shook his head.
JOHN: You think it’s deserted?
ROBIN: Why not? It’s a damn fool’s errand we’re on in the first place.
The format preserves all of the film’s dialog but instead of the niggardly descriptions found in standard screenplay format, we’re given more novel-like descriptions of various people, places, and things. No less an expert on popular fiction than Elmore Leonard once wrote: “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialog.” Generally, I agree with Leonard on that. But Goldman goes him one better by removing all the “saids” and “grumbles” and “barks” and “whispers” and “retorts” and so forth. If the dialog does its job well, the verb shouldn’t be necessary. And Goldman’s dialog, as you’d expect from a playwright, does its job well. I think a lot of actual novels (not just novelizations) could be improved by following the format that Goldman employed in his novelization of Robin and Marian.
Plenty of successful movie musicals got the novelization treatment back in the 1960s and 1970s, which may seem odd when you consider that musicals are popular primarily because of…well, the music. The novelization of Morton Da Costa’s 1962 film version of Meredith Willson’s 1957 Broadway musical The Music Man was written by Willson himself. This isn’t too surprising considering that Willson devoted a large part of his life to The Music Man, which was inspired by his own Iowa boyhood. He began work on the play back in 1948. In 1958 he wrote a book, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, about his long effort to make the show a reality. He wrote the music and the lyrics for the show and co-wrote the “book” (i.e., the script minus the songs) with Franklin Lacey. So when it came time to write the novelization of the movie based on Willson’s Broadway musical, Willson was the obvious choice for the task. And it seems to have been a labor of love. The book contains some clever scenes and dialog exchanges that don’t appear in the film (although they may have been in the Broadway version of the show, which I’ve never seen).
George Scullin’s novelization of the 1969 movie musical Paint Your Wagon is actually more charming than the film, which is gassy and overlong. Here’s a scene in which he describes an aspect of Ben Rumsen, the alcoholic gold prospector played by Lee Marvin in the movie:
Ben had one mean streak in him. He hated his hangovers with a sullen passion, and to punish them, he worked them to death, feeling in each swing of the pick, each heave of the shovel, the agony that told him his hangover was suffering. Considering the frequency of his hangovers, that made him the hardest working man in Tent City, and there were times when he was hard put to keep his drinking bills and gambling debts ahead of his income. In fact, there was one bad period in which he hit three rich [ore] pockets in a row that left him with money ahead, and he had to take a week off to let his bar bill catch up.
You won’t find anything that witty in the film, despite the fact that it was co-scripted by Paddy Chayefsky, the only person ever to have won three solo Academy Awards for writing both original work and adaptations.
If you’ve never read a movie novelization or a TV tie-in book because you think those genres aren’t worthy of serious consideration, think again. Sure, 95 percent of the novelizations and tie-in books ever published are not very good. But that’s true of 95 percent of the books published in all genres. Yet the best novelizations and TV tie-in books – like the best mystery novels, fantasy novels, sci-fi novels, etc. – are as good as just about any popular fiction ever written. Pick one up and give it a try. You just might find out that it’s even better than the film that inspired it.