Meme: Worst movie ending changed from a book.

[roseembolism]

Caged from a discussion on worst movie endings, this is a bit specialized: what movie adaption took a great ending to a book, and screwed it up? That is, at what point did you gape at the movie and scream "WRONG!"

For me? There's so MANY candidates, but for the one that made the worst impression, the one that made me realize that the studio just didn't care about the authors idea, we'll have to go back about thirty years or more. Back to a film I saw in school. Back to a grade school English project.

Back to "My Side of the Mountain".

<lj-cut text="The book was cool!">

The resourceful Sam Gribley runs away from home to live on a mountainside his family owns. In the process we get detailed descriptions of how he survives, and in the process learns independence, makes a house out of a tree stump, and tames a pet falcon named Frightful. In the end, his parents visit him, and decide to move out to the mountain with him. It's a great example of a kid developing independence, and parents accepting his decisions.


<lj-cut text="The movie though...">
A hunter shoots Frightful the hawk, and Sam decides to abandon his camp and go back home.

I mean seriously....what the FUCK!? Was Paramount so afraid of lawsuits from the parents of kids who would also go out in the wilderness, that they had to completely reverse the meaning of the movie? The book has adults accepting the kid's counterculture ways, and adapting to it; the movie has the kid abandoning his independent ways and returning to civilization.


So basically, we had an inspiring book turned into a depressing movie that was one more step in making me the cynic I am today. Bummer.

Comments

[seawasp]

I'll beat your 30 years and take you back 80.

The Wizard of Oz.

In the book, Dorothy IS whisked off to Oz. She travels, at first alone, and then gathering new friends to her, through hostile, dangerous territory, learning to survive, to oppose fear with courage, hatred with friendship, etc., and eventually winning her way back home through her indomitable spirit and the answering resolve she has engendered in all whom she has met along the way. The book ends with her running up to the house that Uncle Henry has just finished rebuilding, to the joy of her foster parents who had long thought her dead. She later has many other adventures in Oz and elsewhere, where the lessons she learned in her first trip stand her in good stead.

In the movie, she gets conked on the head and the whole trip is a nightmare or dream sequence in which she's just working through her dissatisfaction with her hemmed-in life on the farm, and comes to the nauseatingly conformist conclusion of There's No Place Like Home.

In many ways it's a great movie, but it does a TERRIBLE disservice to the book.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

OOh, that's an excellent example!

And now I'm wondering of the horror of other literature and movies being given the "Wizard of Oz" treatment. Say...

Amber: Corwin really IS crazy. The entire story is taking place in his head, while he rests in a padded cell.

Star Wars: a knock on the head will result in odd hallucinations, you see.

Girl Genius: Everything after the first page is merely a story the storytellers are relating. Though that may be getting a little too metatextual.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, I vividly remember watching that movie as a young child, and dismissing it as stupid crap, which in part helped shape my decision to avoid both the book (which I never read) and in fact almost all non-SF&F novels that were written specifically for children, because I assumed that they would also be annoying pro-conformist crap.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I accidentally got logged out - the above was posted by me.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

S'OK. While it's been decades since I read My Side of the Mountain, I thought at the time it was a pretty damn good kids survival genre book. It generally had him behaving more intelligently and resourcefully in the book than the movie.