QotD: Written By Yours Truly

Actually, it's the novel that Celebrated Summer is based on, "1989 A Novel."

Since I changed so much in the story, I wasn't really able to copy and past every much at all. "1989 A Novel" covers the period from beginning of summer 1989 to some time in November. "Celebrated Summer", on the other hand, takes place in one day, in late July. I kept the same characters, but had to ditch a lot of the events of 1989 since they made no sense in the one-day format. There are definitely individual lines that you can fine in both the novel and the screenplay, but other than that, it's mostly new stuff.

Novels and movies don't really have a one-to-one equivalence in terms of the amount of action and plot they contain. Most novels, if you faithfully adapt them for the screen, end up lasting about 10 to 20 hours-which is why television is a much better format for adapting them (Something the English seem to have known much longer than we have.) Many of the best film literary adaptations have been of novellas or short novels (James Joyce's "The Dead" or Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", Forster's "A Room With a View") or adaptations where the director was willing to skillfully cut and compress plot (the Harry Potter movies are actually surprisingly good at this-I would have never thought that "Goblet of Fire" could have been cut to a two hour and twenty minute movie and still make any sense, but they did it.)