Sweet, Sweet Fantasy: Part II

In the first part of "Sweet, Sweet Fantasy," I distilled the common elements of the decade's fantasy film blockbusters. In this part, I want to take a closer look at the books on which these films have been based and see what it takes to turn a hit book into a hi-tech, high budget feature film.

Every film on the list was adapted from a book. We have The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series (of which only five books have been adapted), The Chronicles of Narnia (of which only The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been adapted), The Inheritance Trilogy (of which only Eragon has been adapted -- and it looks like that may be all), and soon His Dark Materials and The Dark Is Rising.

Perhaps the lesson here is that one should only adapt books that have sold well. It's simple, it's logical -- I like it. Unfortunately, simplicity and logic aren't sexy enough. They don't provide the kind of buzzwords that make a film producer's blood boil. And anyway, I'm not convinced that's all there is to it. I know many people who saw all three of The Lord of the Rings films without having read a single page of any of the books. Mostly, these are the normal people I know, the kind who had friends in high school and watched MTV Spring Break.

This lesson also fails to attack the heart of the problem: how to write a bestselling book in the first place. Creative Differences doesn't shy away from problems like this (we only shy away from loser problems like the Iraq war, climate change, poverty, hunger, blah blah whine whine). So what makes a fantasy novel irresistibly attractive to both super nerds who drink Coke to stay up and play Dungeons and Dragons all night and movie execs who snort coke so they can stay up and have sex all night?

Here are some simple rules:

1. Internal consistency: This one's for the nerds. Fantasy fiction is escapist. Nerds want to imagine that they can inhabit the world of the book and there find social and sexual gratification. This isn't possible if the fictional world doesn't follow a set of rules from which the nerds can extrapolate their own personal fantasies. Nothing bothers a nerd more than a fantasy writer breaking his own universe's rules in order to conveniently advance the plot.

2. Magic: There has to be a cool take on magic. The fantasy world the author creates can't merely be implausible in some boring way, like everyone is smart or good-looking. There needs to be something resembling what we'd call magic or (at least the supernatural). Again, this magic or the supernatural should follow a set of rules, even if those rules are themselves implausible. So if waving a wand and saying "Blue orchid" lights a tree on fire once, it should light a tree on fire every time, barring some other rule which is also rigorously followed. But the important thing is that the characters are magically lighting trees on fire. Fire is cool.

This one is also essential for film execs because they feed off of expensive visual effects. No seriously, film execs have a degenerative condition that requires them to watch insanely costly and gratuitous visual effects. It's a horrific condition that claims the lives and budgets of over 100 producers a year. Go see a terrible action film now and you might help save a life.

3. Restraint: The world the author envisions cannot be too grand, nor can the story be too expansive. Remember, the film exec is thinking about a maximum running time of 150 minutes and, with rare exceptions, only three films. If the series is too large, with too many characters, it's just hopeless. Authors who want their books made into films have to keep this in mind. And don't get all huffy about your "creative vision." You're writing a fantasy novel for God's sake. You gave up self-respect a long, long time ago.

Ok, those are the rules. Now, how about some plots? In the final installment of "Sweet, Sweet Fantasy," we'll imagine some new ideas for fantasy books, along with some suggestions on how to turn them into major motion pictures.