Last night, Patterns played on TCM, the 1956 drama adapted from the television presentation of a year earlier. Both were written by Rod Serling and both are very good but the point is, television has been producing ideas for the movies and the movies for television as long as the two have been around together. As I noted the other day, the air of resentment the movies had over television in the fifties may have actually come from some of that success. After all, everyone knew that the winner of Best Picture for 1955, Marty, had been adapted from a television presentation the previous year. And television had provided a platform for entertainers the movies deemed second tier, like Lucille Ball, to show off their talents in a way the movies never could. So the give and take had been there from the beginning. But in the spirit of expanding the idea of the two mediums working together, I’d like to now explore which stories might now work best on television and, if the times had been different, what might have changed in the past.
Had television as it exists now existed in 1939, that is, with cable and streaming options available, I think there’s little doubt that a big, hulking novel like Gone with the Wind would have been picked up by the HBO of its day and turned into a series, at the very least a single season series, like True Detective. But would it have worked? Well, given the length of the book, probably. A better bet might be The Wizard of Oz though, thanks to its multiple books and story lines. Now, of course, whether it still would have had the same music and charm is another story but it’s clear it could have become a successful series. The point isn’t that one would be better than the other (I am of the personal frame of mind that The Wizard of Oz is practically unimprovable) but that the way it works now gives us an insight into what might have worked well then, too.
One movie that comes to mind quickly is The Godfather for the very reason that Francis Ford Coppola himself edited the first and second movies together to make a television saga in the seventies. This is one of the first instances of a filmmaker heavily altering his own work and it implies that Coppola welcomed the expansiveness that television gave the story. Well, sort of. Actually he just wanted to raise money and agreed to work with NBC on the project to do it. But the fact is he managed to take just two movies and assorted deleted scenes and get over seven hours of run time from it. The only reason it doesn’t really work is because it wasn’t made for television to begin with so the editing of the two movies together kills the pacing of the film. It shows, however, that the novel could have worked extremely well for television had they decided to make it for television as they would today.
Another movie that comes to mind is Ragtime, a film I’ve written up here before. As long as it is, I’ve always felt Ragtime feels rushed and, if you’ve read the book, there is simply too much left out or sidelined to make the story work on screen. For instance, if you only ever see the movie, you will probably leave with almost no impression of the Mandy Patinkin character or how and why he ends up with the Mary Steenburgen character at the end, along with the Debbie Allen character in the back seat with her child. That’s because almost all of his very important story is truncated to the point of meaninglessness. He’s very important to the overall tone and message of the work but not so vital to the plot. That’s the problem the movie faced: because of the depth of the novel’s story and characters, the movie was forced to streamline everything to the basic plot points and move forward. Ragtime would work considerably better as a television adaptation, done over, say, ten episodes. If anyone can get that going, they have my full support.
Even something as recent as Harry Potter now feels like it would have been made into a television series rather than a movie series. That much has changed in just sixteen years. After all, it has the same book total as, supposedly, the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martins and that has been made into a series whereas, if all the books had been finished by the late nineties, I imagine Game of Thrones would have been a trilogy, like Lord of the Rings, rather than a series and would have suffered as a result. One book that has always suffered from the truncated limitations of movie running times is Moby Dick. How I would so dearly love to see someone do a three season series of this novel, complete with entire episodes where Ishmael describes the different types of harpoons, sailors, and accents. I think it would be magnificent and I think the main reason it has never been successfully adapted is precisely because a novel of its length and depth deserves more than two or three hours.
What’s ironic in many ways is that when television first became a threat to motion pictures, the movies responded by widening the screen and giving us big budget epics, always reminding the viewer, “You can’t see this on television!” Nowadays, epic stories, like that one by Martins I keep mentioning, are now uniquely suited for the home screen (I can no longer call it the small screen as that distinction, too, is dying): the home screen, aka television, allows an epic story to play out over seasons and massive sets and effects can all be created with computer graphics at a far lower expense and time suck than practical effects, giving a multi-season show a financial way to keep going. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, had it not been made in 2001, 2002, and 2003, might now be a television epic instead and most likely will be some day, once the theatrical versions are a littler further behind us. And none of this bothers me. I continue to believe that both movies and tv have incredible amounts to offer and as the two lose the technical limitations that once separated them, it becomes clearer that certain things are suited for tv and certain for the movies. Some may want to pick sides but I’m happy letting the mediums sort it out while I continue to partake in the best that both have to offer.