Excerpt from Pages behind The Scenes

Pages Behind the Scenes: How Great Books Make the Journey to Hollywood's Classic Movies. A lecture by Dan Gregory. This video is an excerpt from Part 7 -- Current Trends. There are a couple of trends worth noting when we look at films today. The first is the film series. Sequels are a safe investment for filmmakers because audiences are already familiar with the characters. And of course, sequels and film series are nothing new. To give an example, let's look at Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's classic horror novel was first published in 1818. A stage version, adapted in the late 1920s by Peggy Webling and further adapted for American audiences by John Balderston, a journalist from Philadelphia, was used as the basis for the classic 1931 film Frankenstein. It was followed a few years later by The Bride of Frankenstein, then Son of Frankenstein, Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, and the deliberately silly Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Or, to take another series that went on and on, in 1912 author Edgar Rice Burroughs introduced the character of Tarzan in All Story magazine. Two years alter it was expanded and published as a book. A first edition copy in its original dustjacket, such as this, might set you back $60,000 or more. Several Tarzan adventures were filmed in the silent era before Johnny Weissmüller and Maureen O'Sullivan were teamed in 1932's Tarzan the Ape Man. The stars returned again and again for several other pictures. The film series is alive and well today, and nothing exemplifies this better than one of the longest running and most successful of all film series, James Bond. Ian Fleming introduced his famous spy in 1953, and followed Casino Royale with 13 other books before his death. The book series has been continued by several other writers. Bond made his big screen debut in 1962, and his exploits have been transformed into 25 different feature films so far, featuring actors such as Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig in the lead role. Last year's Skyfall was the latest entry in the film series, and I'm sure we haven't seen the last of secret agent 007. Only one film series is more successful that James Bond in terms of gross ticket sales, and it too was based on books. The Harry Potter series managed to be very faithful to its source material. The seven book series was published in the space of a decade, from 1997 to 2007, while the film series followed very quickly and also took a decade, from 2001 to 2011. This tight production schedule was quite an accomplishment because it allowed the filmmakers to use a consistent cast throughout, creating an indelible link between the books and the films. For the first six books, the screenwriters managed to condense the story of each one into the space of a single feature film. But for the final book, a decision was made to split the book into two movies. It certainly wasn't first time a long book had been split into two films, but the practice was somewhat unusual. It proved so successful for Harry Potter, though, that we're now seeing a new trend: several books and book series are being teased into multiple films. This was the case for another popular series of supernatural young adult novels: the four novels of the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer were made into five films. The post-apocalyptic book trilogy The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins will be four films. Each volume in J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings was made into a single film. But now director Peter Jackson has decided to take Tolkien's earlier novel, The Hobbit, and make not one, not two, but three films from the one book. How can he possibly expand a single book into three feature length films and still remain faithful to the source material, which is important to the films' fan base of Tolkien aficionados? He's helped by the fact that Tolkien wrote out voluminous notes about his fantasy world, which after his death were edited by his son and published in a 12-volume series called The History of Middle Earth. So even though the filmmakers are cheating to make more money, they're still using books to do it.