SOME THOUGHTS ON THE “TRANSLATION”
OF PRINT TO FILM
August 1988
Just recently I was reading a novel called The Color of Money, by Walter Tevis.
This was my second reading; I read it for the first time right after it came out. It was published in 1984 as an original Warner Books paperback. I’m not entirely sure why the book didn’t appear in hardcover first. Most if not all of Tevis’s previous novels did, including, most recently The Queen’s Gambit, which sold well and garnered good reviews not long before the publication of The Color of Money.
The decision to go paperback original may well have been based on the nature of the book. The Color of Money, as you may know, is a sequel to The Hustler, taking up the life and career of pool hustler Fast Eddie Felson some 25 years later. (Right around the same time, several contemporary novelists produced sequels to books they had brought out 20 or 25 years previously. Sloan Wilson, for example, brought us up to date on The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, while Hal Dresner wrote an as-yet-unpublished sequel to The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books. And there are more examples, could I but summon them to mind. Why so many writers should spontaneously choose to renew acquaintance with their long-lost fictional friends is something to ponder. Sixties nostalgia? Some arcane line-up of the stars and planets? Beats me.)
In any event, the publisher may have wanted to skip hardcover publication on the grounds that the book’s great audience was in paperback, that the continuing popularity of the Newman-Gleason-Scott film guaranteed a large paperback readership, and that a sequel might get short shrift from reviewers anyway. Walter Tevis died around the time the book came out; his health may have been a factor in the decision.
As I said (pages and pages ago, it seems), I read The Color of Money when it appeared. Then I saw the film version when it appeared; it was released late in ’86, so that Paul Newman could pick up an Oscar for his role in it the following spring. Then I read the book again, just a couple of weeks ago, and I’ll tell you something. The book is better.
I should point out right away that I’m prejudiced. For one thing, I’ve had three books of my own filmed, two of them fairly recently, and if they weren’t better than the movies made from them, I ought to get into another line of work in a hurry. For another, I’m a book writer; it’s very much in the natural order of things for me to prefer a novel to the film made from it. Finally, I read the book first, and I’ve observed that most of us tend to prefer a story in whichever form we first make its acquaintance. (I saw The Manchurian Candidate before I read it, for example, and consequently believe John Frankenheimer’s film is superior to Richard Condon’s novel; had I read the book first, I might think otherwise. And, for that matter, I saw Robert Rossen’s film of The Hustler before I read the Tevis novel, and at the time preferred the film. Since then I’ve reread the book and reviewed the movie, and I think they’re both just fine.)
In respect to The Color of Money, however, the book and film are so utterly different that comparing them may be instructive.
In the book, Fast Eddie has been anything but fast since his retirement from pool a quarter of a century ago. He quit hustling rather than share his winnings with a criminal syndicate, and he married and opened a pool room in Lexington, Kentucky. The book opens with the marriage over and the pool room closed; the tables themselves are being sold off piecemeal as part of the divorce settlement.
Fast Eddie coaxes Minnesota Fats out of retirement so that the two of them can participate in a series of exhibitions sponsored by a cable TV network. In each match, Fats beats Eddie badly, but Eddie is spurred to practice again and work on his game.
Meanwhile, he meets a woman, the ex-wife of a professor at the University of Kentucky. She’s a folk art expert, and Eddie responds strongly to the work of some of the local folk artists she has discovered. With his capital and hustling ability and his willingness to plunge in support of his hunches, they buy up the work of several of the best artists and open a gallery. The same characteristics that made Eddie successful as a pool hustler work for him here, and we see him exercising the same muscles.
The exhibition matches end one day when Eddie discovers Fats dead in bed in his hotel room. Eddie, playing pool for money again after all these years, finds that the world has changed. All the action is in nine-ball, a game he has always despised and one he now finds out of his reach. The younger players who win the nine-ball tournaments can do things that seem to be beyond him. At the same time, Eddie finds that playing pool for money is quite simply his life. He unaccountably lost it for 25 years. Now he’s found it again, and they’ve changed the rules, and the kids are better at it than he is.
The denouement, at a top tournament in Nevada, is just wonderful, and I’m not going to spoil it for you.
The film is completely different. Fast Eddie 25 years later is still a hustler type, making his money as a liquor salesman. In a bar one night he meets a brash, cocky pool player he recognizes as an enormous natural talent and a reminder of his own younger self. He takes the kid as a protégé. The kid has a girlfriend who is smarter than he is, which is not all that hard to believe, and there’s a triangle, and the kid gets jealous. He’s also unmanageable, winning games when he’s supposed to lose, letting his ego get in the way of his hustle. Tom Cruise plays the role well enough, even as Newman plays Fast Eddie capably. Richard Price’s script is good, with some crisp dialogue, and there are some nice scenes and good moments, and if the ending is not terribly illuminating, neither is it a great disappointment. It’s not a bad movie. It may even be a good one. But it has nothing to do with the book beyond the fact that it too is a sequel to The Hustler, and that it’s about pool.
Does that make it a travesty? Did the film’s makers do something unconscionable to Walter Tevis’s book?
You could argue the point. But you could argue as well that they only did what had to be done in order for the book to work on the screen After all, when you opened up the book and looked at it, what did you have? The early business with Minnesota Fats doesn’t lead anywhere; halfway through the story Fats dies of a heart attack and you’re nowhere. Besides, Jackie Gleason isn’t about to play the part, and Newman wouldn’t work with him anyway, and how are you going to do a sequel with someone else playing Fats, after Gleason made a meal of the part the first time around?
And the whole business of the love story and the folk art gallery, that entire subplot, doesn’t go anywhere either. You deal with characters there who don’t reappear. It’s interesting stuff, but it would just get lost on-screen without advancing the story at all.
No, forget all that. Stick with something you know will work. Keep all the same characters on-screen for the whole movie. Use a nice Oedipal situation, something tried and true. Make Cruise’s part almost as prominent as Newman’s, so that it comes down to a contest between them and a buddy picture at the same time. Have Paul get drunk in one big scene; after all, he should have gotten an Academy Award for The Verdict, so give them a scene to remind them of what they overlooked last time out.
And, whatever you do, keep the whole thing simple. Fast Eddie in the novel has a great deal of dimension. He’s more sophisticated than you’d expect in some areas, far less so in others. You don’t want to confuse the popcorn-munchers. Keep it all simple, and every once in a while come in tight on Paul’s blue eyes, and they’ll love it.
I don’t mean to imply that The Color of Money was filmed quite so cynically. I do know that the people who made the film felt the book did not have a usable storyline, and perhaps they were correct. Perhaps what worked so superbly in the novel would not have survived the transition to the screen
I wish they’d tried. Tevis was an extremely cinematic writer, given to writing in strong scenes, and it wouldn’t be hard to show everything that takes place in the novel. You could change Minnesota Fats to another old-time pool player and get around the Gleason problem easily enough. The folk art scenes could be marvelous, and if you handled it right you could do them justice without losing the audience.
On the other hand, if I had money in the film I probably would have made the same decisions the screenwriter and producer made. Because it costs millions and millions of dollars to make a movie, and do you really want to increase the odds against you just for the sake of aesthetic considerations? Are you going to plunge that heavy on a hunch, a whim? Fast Eddie Felson would, but he’s not running a studio.
And what’s my point?
I suppose what I keep becoming aware of is what I would call the natural superiority of print to celluloid, of the novel to film. As a book, The Color of Money was able to be done as its author wanted it done. As a film, it had to be changed into something altogether unrecognizable, and for what may well have been valid reasons.
Novels are so much richer. There’s so much more in almost any book than can possibly wind up on the screen. This is not to say that a book is always superior to the film made from it—on the contrary, sometimes a good film is made of a terrible book, and occasionally a novelist’s pedestrian writing and cardboard characters turn into something wonderful on screen. But every halfway decent novel has a slew of bits and elements to it that you have to leave out when you film it. And that’s one reason, incidentally, that novelizations of original screenplays are almost always anemic; there’s nothing there that wasn’t in the film, and there’s not enough in a film to make a book of substance.
Is all of this an argument against becoming a screenwriter? No, of course not. You write what works best for you, and what yields the most satisfaction.
But do have a look for yourself at the work of Walter Tevis, a fine novelist who died too young. The Queen’s Gambit, the story of a female chess prodigy, is a masterpiece, and you no more need to be a chess player to love it than you need to hustle pool to read about Fast Eddie Felson.
Read it and see for yourself. And read The Color of Money, too, even if you’ve seen the movie. Especially if you’ve seen the movie.