Generally, LL has fared almost as poorly as Stephen King in translation to film. In many cases, the nuts and bolts of their stories are there, but whatever it is that pulls their readers in is completely missing. With THE GREEN MILE and SHAWSHANK, folks began to get King right and LL has some good representation as well.

For fun, my list of the best is-

DIAMOND OF JERU - Billy Zane plays the best LL archetype hero, hands down. Super, super film.

CONAGHER - Sam Elliott and Catherine Ross are largely responsible for how this one came to be from what I've read. Beautiful and poignant, it's just about perfect.

CROSSFIRE TRAIL- Tom Selleck should have made about a dozen more westerns than he has, and now its too late. Another one that feels LL through and through. I watch this one once or twice a year. Its one of my go-to westerns, like RIO BRAVO and EL DORADO. That's good company.

THE SACKETTS - even though I see the flaws more clearly now than back then, I still love this. It suffers from 70s TV production values and being a bit TOO condensed, but it was (at the time especially) quite an event for us fans, and I was a fairly new obsessive one at that time. It sure put Tom Selleck on the map.

THE SHADOW RIDERS is also fine, but most everything I've managed to see seems pretty much standard to sub-standard fare...most of them just not particularly good, with TAGGART, CATLOW and THE MAN CALLED NOON being better than the rest. SHALAKO and THE BURNING HILLS on the other hand are two that SHOULD have been way better than they are. There was a TV-made HONDO film back in the 60s that's just awful. Pretty lousy stuff.

HOW THE WEST WAS WON is one of my favorite films, but its not a true LL book so it doesn't count :)

>Generally, LL has fared almost as poorly
>as Stephen King in translation to film.
>In many cases, the nuts and bolts of
>their stories are there, but whatever it
>is that pulls their readers in is
>completely missing. With THE GREEN MILE
>and SHAWSHANK, folks began to get King
>right and LL has some good
>representation as well.

There is something about LL's work that just breaks the minds of filmmakers. Some of it has to do with much of it being Westerns but there seem to be other issues beyond that.

There have been so many myths made up about the Western genre, many of them by fans, that it has become a complete minefield when you have to think creatively about it. Successful Westerns find a path around the minefield rather than walking through it.

An example of one of the bigger mines in the field, one that kills off creative types who take the genre for granted goes like this ... MYTH: Westerns should contain a clear division between good guys and bad guys, the white hats and black hats, that's just what they are about. MORE INTELLIGENT APPROACH TO A SIMILAR ISSUE: Westerns are about the friction between levels of civilization. An excellent example is The Searchers. There is THE WILDERNESS, no civilization, no morality, just the hard logic of survival. There are THE INDIANS, seen variously in this story as savages and an alien (to the Anglos) civilization, with their own rules and their own morality that are well developed for their environment. The ANTI SOCIAL SETTLERS, the hard core near amoral outlaw types like Ethan Edwards (Wayne's character) that played such a role in the American West. The SOCIAL SETTLERS like the ranchers who are very much like all of us. The story is created, and MANY Westerns are created, by rubbing these elements up against one another. This is how you create a good Western because this is the sort of storytelling the western genre is FOR.

If you look close you can see a similar set of issues playing out in Conagher. Women are the sex that civilization is created for. Evie is forced to live at the bare edge of it. Civilization teases her, approaching then abandoning her as fate of her home as a stage station ebbs and flows. Eventually she is reduced to trying to connect to the world by tying notes to tumbleweeds. Conagher lives in a slightly more "civilized" environment in that he is employed on a ranch but he's still at the edge of things, rubbing up against outlaws and the like. This story was the quiet version of Hondo, with no Indians to connect the man and the woman, in Conagher they must find one another themselves. It succeeded as a movie because of its simplicity, there were few possible side tracks to lead it off into idiocy.

My feeling is that there are reasons why a story is a "Western." But any time you go TRYING to write a Western you're going to get yourself into trouble. Just put yourself into the time and place, develop a plot that works and deals with one of the "Western" themes (that civilization thing is probably the biggest one but there are others), take your characters SERIOUSLY not as symbols or the sort of people who "should" be in a western. When you take westerns for granted or think they are just about superficial attributes, you fail.

As good as Dad was at not doing this something about his work led others to do it poorly. It's a trap that is easy enough to avoid but you have to be smart enough to realize you might fall into it.

More thoughts: Another "friction of civilization" story is the Firefly/Serenity TV/Movie series. It's space opera science fiction with HEAVY HEAVY HEAVY western overtones and themes. It's about living and operating at the edge of things, it's about the gray areas that occur there NOT Black and White good and bad guys. Civilization is a smothering oppressive and ruthlessly enforced nanny state. Interestingly applicable to many issues today.

It is important to remember that the civilization in most Westerns stories is Victorian ... socially repressive, morally strict, and limiting of thought and entrepreneurship. It's rarely mentioned but this is what the "Wild West" was rubbing up against and what people who came west were trying to escape from.

Out of your list of movies I worked on The Shadow Riders and The Diamond of Jeru and knew a good deal about The Sacketts because I later worked with Doug Netter, its producer.

TSR was a response to Doug's not being able to revitalize The Sackett's franchise because of some contract and partnership issues. If memory has got this right, Verne Nobles ended up in partnership with manager Dennis Durney, who was connected with Selleck, Elliot, and Sackett screenwriter Jim Byrnes. After some discussion with Dad they decided they would try to do an end run around the Sackett problem. Dad wrote an outline on a napkin while at lunch at the Beverly Hills hotel and they got started.

My take on it is that it is no great shakes as a movie but it did cash in on the energy of the great cast upping the game with others from The Sacketts and people like Katherine Ross and Geoff Lewis.

There are aspects of Byrnes writing I love. There's a scene with one of the bad guys and a prostitute in The Sacketts that freaking had me on the floor: Him: What's your name? Her: De-lila! Him: "... don't talk." But then there's all that "big brother/ little brother" crud that feels like Bonanza.

Probably the best part and the worst part of The Sacketts was using a great cast of younger actors and a great cast of older actors ... it's just that the old guys, many of them the "bad" guys, were too old to be scary.

TSR suffered greatly from an executive at the network ordering the script to be cut "because Sam Elliot talks slow." Yeah, maybe a little slow, but not the sort of slow you cut a script over. But that's the way it goes. They are the boss and when they have a dumb idea everyone suffers ... except them because their name is not on the picture. Anyway, every damn thing we shot, good or bad, had to be thrown into TSR to try to make it long enough ... that's not the way to make a good movie. Its much better if there is so much good stuff you have to leave other good stuff on the editing room floor!

There were similar things that happened in TDOJ. I wrote several drafts of the script under the authority of one executive then another took over and started working to remove everything his predecessor and touched. Then other people jumped in to try to demonstrate that they had the power to change the script (a common political battle on movies unless you have a producer who cares and has the power to stop them) we left for Australia with the script in tatters.

They hired another writer who was ordered to make certain (idiotic) changes. He did but, surprise, surprise, the execs didn't like them because ... they were idiotic. At the last minute the director did a cut and paste edit of all the old drafts to construct some sort of script. As shooting started I found that I could have conversations with some of the actors and, as a last minute "fix", get some of the stuff that was needed to make it all work back in. Other actors would take the opportunity to tear everything apart to fulfill their own ego or to show that they had the power to do so (as above).

Other writing challenges showed up because of budgetary constraints but this is expected just needs to be dealt with. The waterfall scene in the beginning was created because we didn't have the money to travel to a big enough river to stage a canoe wreck in fast water. None of us liked it because it suggests that the Borneo interior might be too dangerous for tourists but we had to have Kardec lose his diamonds and meed Raj.

Jeru was originally an older man and we even cast a rather evil looking, and quite old looking, guy who was into marshal arts. But as we were creating the schedule we realized that we would only have 2 days to shoot the Kardec/Jeru fight ... not long enough to shoot all the little details that prove Jeru is a master at fighting with a parang (machete). Without those we were worried that it would look like Billy Zane was beating up a little old man. Thus Jeru became a 6'7" 300lb Maori in his late 30s.

So there's stupid reasons movies change, not just from the original work but from the script, and there are practical ones. All of them happen on most movies, the question is do they do serious damage or not?

Movies and books are totally different mediums. What you do in one cannot be done in another. Dad's short story of Jeru and my novella of Jeru were first person from the point of view of Kardec. This was NEVER going to make a good movie, let alone one that was long enough. My film script added in scenes with the John and Helen Lacklan and rounded out the story a good deal. Films are generally third person point of view. In the Audio of The Diamond of Jeru, I was able to add in a good deal of detail about the Borneo native characters, to the point where you realize that it's their part of the story that actually created everything that's happening. This is just what happens when you work with adapting a story and keep learning from it about what it wants to be. It's what happens when you keep looking deeper even into a sort of superficial piece of pulp like Jeru.

No writer can work on a story without making it theirs. In Jeru you can even see the difference between me in 1998, 2000, and 2008. Almost like three different writers. But you have to take it seriously and you have to be ALLOWED to take it seriously. Too often that last part does not happen in movies.

If I was to say anything about other adaptations of my Dad's I'd say that something about his writing tells the writers and producers that they can treat it superficially and get away with it. "Oh, it's just another western, whatever that is ... horses and cows, guns and revenge."

Dad was addictive as a writer not because he gave you a lot of detail, he didn't. He gave out enough to activate your imagination and enough to activate that imagination on different levels. You, the reader make it into the story that you want it to be. That is IMPOSSIBLE to do in a movie. Every level of interpretation locks in the "reality" of that interpretation and excludes layers of your imagination, the director's shot, the actor's performance, replace your imagination and if they don't do it in the way you want then you find the experience lacking.

An aside about recent western films that annoys me...their complete lack of color. They are all grim and gray, a choice I'm assuming the film makers feel is an accurate representation of the times. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but it's the movies. I'll take John Ford's color-drenched view over them hands down.

Some of this is technical issues. Many old movies were shot in "technicolor" a process that locked in each primary color on its own separate negative. This allowed for just amazing, though not necessarily accurate, color. later color film had its own issues both positive and negative. Today many use digital cameras which struggle to represent the warmer tones accurately. Long wavelengths require a lot of power which has to be stored against peaking/clipping issues at different points in the circuit. This its easier to let it look "cool" or to fudge it into a sort of sepia color scheme that doesn't carry the full range ... I'm butchering this but you get the point that you have to work hard to get digital to look like technicolor!

Worse yet many do the faded look because it's "in the past", which is fine for some interpretations but in general it takes much of the immediacy out of a story. It's hard to ramp up the excitement when the photography hints that it's all over and in the past.

Yes, I know the vivid color-thing has a lot to do with film vs digital, but I HAVE seen some pretty colorful sci-fi things so its certainly partly an artistic choice. I think younger people generally view the era as alien to them as opposed to when I was a kid and westerns were the genre that dominated TV, although films were beginning to wind down a bit.

How did LL feel about any of the films from his sources? Were there any he was pleased with?

He didn't really care, except as a way of making money. If he sold a film, maybe we could afford a new car.

He liked Hondo ... but then he used it to change his life ... and it worked.

That's a pretty healthy way to look at it. A general line from some authors about such things is "they haven't done a thing to my book, it's sitting there right on the shelf just fine" while a few others seem genuinely upset when the adaptations get it wrong.

I typically have no faith in an adaptation capturing the book so I'm always pleasantly surprised when it does. That says a lot for the filmmakers.

I recently caught ICE STATION ZEBRA on TV somewhere and realized I hadn't seen it before. It's a really terrific first person MacLean thriller that I thought would be impossible to film adequately. It certainly wasn't very good.

It's really best to think of movies and books as completely different things ... because they are. However, people's attitudes towards a film's accuracy to the underlying story is hugely influenced by how good a film it is. If you look at The English Patient, a film and novel beloved by some, you will see that the two are VASTLY different ... yet both are very good in their own way. And they are thematically and stylistically similar. This is a very well documented adaptation with Walter Murch, the film's editor, having written a book with the novelist. Anyway, you very rarely hear any griping about the difference.

The first several seasons of Game of Thrones is similar (before the screen writers ran out of novels and enthusiasm for the series). There were significant "differences" (though it was clear that they were doing their best to stay accurate) but few complaints because those seasons were very good. However, make a crappy movie and you get a lot of complaints about it not being "the same."

As you can see from my notes above, sometimes making a good movie is not in the cards. Many are cursed from the beginning or have underlying flaws which sometimes could have been repaired but often could not.