David O'Mahony: Gatekeepers for screen adaptations of books should leave the rest of us to enjoy them

Fine, if you're unhappy about a screen adaptation of your favourite book; hate changes to the stories and characters, by all means be unhappy about it. But don’t deliberately get in the way of somebody else enjoying it

Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel is someone you’d follow into battle thinking you might win. Photo: Matt Grace/Prime Video

I might get cancelled for this one. Spurned by fellow readers, a pariah to my fellow writers, maybe even cast out of Bookhalla altogether.

I really like Rings of Power, Prime’s series based on the Lord of the Rings and its epically detailed appendices. There, I said it. It’s out there. I’m not taking it back and you can’t make me. 

It’s not perfect but it’s well made, the orcs have some decent depth to their back story, Charlie Vickers is an engaging Sauron, Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel is someone you’d follow into battle thinking you might win.

That there are still some people out there complaining about the diversity of the cast is a touch of madness, as such folks miss the point that in Tolkien’s original four different species — elves, humans, dwarves, hobbits — work together toward a common goal.

It is, perhaps, overshadowed by Peter Jackson’s masterful Lord of the Rings trilogy, perhaps even by his Hobbit trilogy (which includes Galadriel, who isn’t in the source novel), and probably too by the fact he is due to produce a new series of films set in that universe.

I’m happy to enjoy Rings of Power on its own terms. I have no time for gatekeeping. If my daughter at five can love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and happily accept that there are multiple editions and films all telling the story differently, who am I to think otherwise?

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After all, books are typically meant to be lingered over, chipped away at, come back to with your mind’s eye. Films and television need to work in a set time and within parameters that don’t lose their audience.

Think of it, as I think of my pieces when I submit them to prospective publishers, as the story going on its own little adventure in a different medium. Or think of it as somebody telling you an old story in a new and unfamiliar way.

Remember that Jackon’s original trilogy, while respectful to the spirit of the books, has no qualms about doing its own thing. Aragorn, who in the hands of Jackson’s team has become the poster child of positive masculinity, is far more nuanced and reluctant in the films than he is in the books. 

Two of the most iconic scenes in the films, when the elves come to fight with the Rohirrim at Helm’s Deep and later when Aragorn brings shiploads of ghosts to fight Sauron’s armies, didn’t happen. In the latter, the ghosts merely scared away the original crews (no shame, I’d leg it too), allowing Aragorn and others to capture them.

No adaptation can win over every book fan. Even relatively faithful ones, like the animated adaptation of the classic Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke, can miss the mark slightly. And we all remember what happened when Game of Thrones — a moment of silence for Ned Stark, please — began to deviate from the source material and then had to figure out its own ending. 

Gene Wilder starred in the original Willy Wonka. Roald Dahl hated it and wanted Spike Milligan or Peter Sellers in the role.

Yet other adaptations are, dare I say it, substantially better than the source material. I was excited to find one of the anthologies I’d picked up included ‘Who Goes There?’, the 1938 story that went on to become 1982’s The Thing. Sadly, I was less excited to find I didn’t enjoy the story at all, even though the film remains a classic.

Plenty of authors have been unhappy with how films of their stories have turned out. Notable examples here are Stephen King hating Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and Roald Dahl hating Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — he wanted Spike Milligan or Peter Sellers in the role, and while he’s down as the screenwriter he quit and didn’t write most of it. The success of both shows the value of embracing change, both from a viewing and filmmaking perspective.

It isn’t wrong for you to have somebody in your head when you read about or indeed create a character. The creators of Scrubs wrote Dr Cox with John C McGinley in mind, though he still had to audition for it five times. Greta Gerwig wrote her version of Ken in Barbie envisaging Ryan Gosling playing him (evidently he was kenough all along).

In more than one online writing group I’ve seen people ask a variation of “if your book was made into a film who would you want to play the lead?” Spoiler alert: It can’t be you, even if the person is loosely based on you, not even if it’s completely based on you.

While some of my stories might work as films — my Christmas horror story A Winter’s Wrath probably, or my unpublished ghost protector piece Always Watching, Always Waiting — I don’t set out to write somebody inspired by an actor, or with the vain hope that some star will play them, although I wouldn’t say no to Dev Patel playing any of them, all of them, even the women and the animals because he can do anything. I’d quite like if any casting of projects based on my work was gender-blind, actually.

If I’m not willing to gatekeep my own work, why should I or someone else do it to books and stories that they didn’t write? Be unhappy about it, sure; hate changes to the stories and characters, by all means. But don’t deliberately get in the way of somebody else enjoying it. That’s just good manners, and we could all do with a little bit of extra kindness in the world, don’t you think?