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My Movie Business (Hardcover)

by John Irving (Author)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

Hardcover: 144 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (27 Sep 1999)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0747546312
ISBN-13: 978-0747546313
Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.4 x 2.6 cm

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 777,101 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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#57 in Books > Fiction > 20th Century Classics > Irving, John

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

John Irving is one of America's most widely read contemporary novelists, a man Peter Matthiessen has described as, "probably the greatest storyteller of American literature today".

At a 1981 talk in New York, Irving mentioned working as technical director on the movie of his most famous novel, The World According to Garp. Asked about his views on the transition of his work from page to screen, he replied that faithful translation was impossible and that the process didn't interest him: "Why spend three to four years writing, and then another three to four trying to convert it to a less-perfect medium?"

He also divulges here that he himself is "not a moviegoer." It's perhaps odd then that he's embarked on, and documented, an "almost fourteen year odyssey to see The Cider House Rules made into a movie". Not only that, he's written the screenplay to both this and another of his novels, A Son of the Circus.

My Movie Business is essentially about making the screen version of The Cider House Rules. As such, it's concerned primarily with the intricacies of condensing a 500-plus page novel into two hours of screen time, discussing necessary adaptations of the plotline, the treatment or cutting of characters and the shooting of specific scenes. This will be of interest to other writers, film buffs and fans or students of Irving.

But this book's not only about writing screenplays. Irving's digressions are what make it interesting to a wider audience. He writes in detail on the main subject of The Cider House Rules, obstetrics and abortion (chapter titles include "Rubber Gloves" and "The Disintegrating Uterus"), describing one of the narrative's two main protagonists, Doctor Larch, as "a polemicist raving against an entrenched moral doctrine of his day". Irving himself continues the pro-choice polemic, and more aggressively than Larch: "Let doctors practice medicine. Let religious zealots practice their religion, but let them keep their religion to themselves".

However, not all the subjects on which Irving touches are as intense or controversial. He deliberately follows a narrative path that's "circuitous or serpentine, that wanders far afield". His anecdotes comprise many of the most intriguing passages of the book: from his grandfather's ribald poetry, to his hectic, improbable-sounding account of the filmmaker Martin Bell being bitten on the face by a rabid chimp while researching a documentary on Indian circus dwarfs. The whole amounts to an insightful slice of opinion and autobiography. --Martin Drewe

Product Description

John Irving's memoir describes the author's involvement (and lack thereof) in five of the films that have (and have not) been made from his nine novels. It focuses primarily on the 13 years Irving spent writing and rewriting his screenplay of "The Cider House Rules", for four different directors. A Miramax production, the film was finally shot in the fall of 1998; directed by the Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom, with Michael Caine in the role of Dr Larch, it is released in November 1999. Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel "Setting Free the Bears", into a movie; about two of the films that were made from his novels (but not from his screenplays), "The World According to Garp" and "The Hotel New Hampshire"; about his ongoing struggle to shepherd his screeplay of "A Son of the Circus" into production. In addition to its qualities as a memoir, this book is an insightful essay on the essential differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay.

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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Miniaturised by the movie, 19 Nov 1999

By	lawrences@eggconnect.net (Southampton, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

At first glance you might think that this was simply about how The Cider House Rules got made into a film, but it is more than that. It is also an account of a writer choosing (and some times regretting) to make a journey out of a world he loves, the one of his imagination and his novels, and into one he finds rather uncomfortable. As Irving has discovered over the however many years since he began work on the project, there are a lot of unpleasant people around, especially in the movie business. He saw a close friend and associate driven, he believes, to a premature death by the snakes that slither around in those particular financial swamps, and, less devastatingly, but still disconcertingly, he has seen directors come and go along with versions of his screenplay and innumerable actors. Irving's biggest challenge was reducing a 500-page novel of Dickensian complexity into a screenplay that wouldn't lead to a nine-hour film. To do this he had to make what, for a conscientious writer, must have been a series of agonising decisions over the fates of his characters. Some had their parts in his plot reduced from major to marginal, others, who were in some cases central to the original novel, he was forced to lose altogether. He conveys this sense of loss rather movingly. I suppose that for people who know and like the novel (and I'm someone who thinks The Cider House Rules is Irving's best book after Garp), it is this part of the book that is the most interesting. The regret he felt over getting rid of Melony, for example. Irving makes several detours, describing the inspirational role his grandfather played in the character of Dr. Larch is one; others are more serious and raise issues that are close to Irving's heart: abortion and the woman's right to choose, for example. Ever since I read Garp, and identified with Irving's obvious anxieties over the responsibilities of parenthood, I have recognised some other shared views on things. In My Movie Business it's a reluctance to actually go to the cinema, but to watch most things on video at home. There are no rustling papers and chatterboxes and so on, and, as Irving says, you can fast forward through the boring bits. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that a genuine and thoughtful novelist like Irving emerges damaged by his brush with the movie world. How could find he find such a world anything but a shock to the system? Unlike the ones he is used to and happiest in, the ones he creates on the page, the real one isn't amenable to control. Incidentally, if anyone is interested in what Irving had in mind for the relationship between Dr. Larch and Homer in The Cider House Rules when it was still in the very early stages, when it was still just in his head, take a look at the New York Times of November 29 1981, and the comments he made to an audience of students.

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