The three Steven Spielberg movie adaptations authors hated
It’s often the case that the best film directors consult the great works of literature in order to inform their next project. While Stanley Kubrick certainly profited from the writings of famous authors, it’s equally true that Steven Spielberg has frequently adapted texts of fiction into some of his best movies.
Jurassic Park was based on Michael Crichton’s science fiction novel of the same name, just as Empire of the Sun was informed by J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical book of 1984. Elsewhere, Spielberg has adapted the works of Philip K. Dick in Minority Report and Thomas Keneally in Schindler’s List.
While such films have been met with widespread acclaim, it also stands true that not every movie adaptation directed by Spielberg has been praised, particularly in the eyes of the authors who wrote the original books. Three of the director’s movies stand out because of the original writers’ hatred for how they were handled.
Even one of Spielberg’s most iconic movies was poorly received by the author of the novel on which it was based. 1975’s Jaws was based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 and saw Roy Scheider play a police chief who teams up with a marine biologist, played by Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw’s shark hunter to hunt down a man-eating great white shark that has been attacking humans throughout a summer.
Benchley had been no great fan of Spielberg’s film adaptation, though, particularly its ending. Benchley had actually written three versions of the script for Spielberg, which were either rejected or heavily edited by Carl Gottlieb. The result was that the film greatly differed from the book, and when the film ended in a huge explosion, he argued that it was unrealistic with Spielberg, who proceeded to throw him off set.
Ten years later, Spielberg again seemed to upset another writer, Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel The Color Purple. The story tells of a young African-American girl and the difficult experiences she faced in the early 20th century in Hartwell, Georgia, including domestic violence, sexual abuse, poverty and racism.
Critical and commercial success arrived for Spielberg with his eighth feature film, but Walker accused the director of “straightwashing” a sexual and romantic relationship between the film’s protagonist and another woman. Spielberg preferred to explore the theme of friendship between Celie and Shug, but it was a facet that led to the disapproval of the original book’s author.
Finally comes Spielberg’s 2011 war drama War Horse, based on Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel of the same name and its 2007 stage adaptation. Starring Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, and Jeremy Irvine, War Horse focuses on a horse raised by a British teenager that was bought by the British army, leading to encounters with various people in Europe during World War I.
Morpurgo was less than impressed with Spielberg’s film version of his book, though, which he found “poorly written” and full of “cliches”. “Even the horses are wrong,” the author had told AFP. “They’re all fine, aristocratic animals. The horses that go to war are farm horses, great big chunky things.”
Spielberg has drawn widespread acclaim for his book to film adaptations, but clearly, there have been a handful of authors who have aimed criticism for the way he has handled their original stories.
Check out the trailer for Spielberg’s War Horse below.
