Reclaiming the vast wasteland - made-from-television movies

Reason, Oct, 1994 by Nick Gillespie

If impugning TV-based movies as especially sullied by greed is myopic, then excoriating them as a sign of Hollywood's creative exhaustion borders on total blindness. Throughout its history, film has always been a hugely plagiaristic art form, exhibiting a longstanding penchant for appropriating materials from other genres. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Most movies--whether good or bad, popular or not--are based on something else.

Novels have probably been the most fertile source, but stage dramas and musicals have of course inspired countless films. Film makers also utilize non-fiction sources (All the President's Men), short stories (2001: A Space Odyssey), and even pop songs (Alice's Restaurant) occasionally, as the parenthetical examples illustrate, with excellent results. If anything, movies made from wholly original screenplays may be a distinct minority.

SINCE THE MOVIE INDUSTRY IS ALWAYS borrowing anyway, it is worth puzzling over the contempt for TV in particular. A large part of the answer lies in the fact that the boob tube continues to be seen as, well, the boob tube--a younger, dumber cousin to film. Despite the occasional Marty or Requiem for a Heavyweight, the big screen has more often served as source material for the small, as with shows such as The Odd Couple, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, and M*A*S*H. It is telling that the annual broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony is almost always nominated for a number of special-event Emmys. TV itself defers to the movies.

So, in terms of relative prestige, TV was and still is generally viewed (albeit less harshly) as a vast wasteland to which has-been or never-were movie stars are banished. Ronald Reagan's career was hardly going gangbusters when he moseyed onto Death Valley Days. The same could be said of Candice Bergen and Burt Reynolds, who restarted stalled careers via sitcoms.

The film industry's recent use of TV shows, then, is a reversal of the traditional hierarchy of big and small screens, a turn-about which no doubt bothers film mavens. For the cinema to turn to TV for ideas is an aesthetic double-cross, akin to finding out that the camera angles in Citizen Kane were stolen from comic books.

Beyond selectively seizing on economics and overlooking the motion-picture industry's relentless use of other media, the peremptory dismissal of TV-based movies shrugs off an even more elemental truth regarding any film adaptation, whether the source is TV or Tolstoy: The quality of a movie's source is ultimately unrelated to how it turns out on the screen.

In 1987, for instance, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities was a huge critical and commercial success as a novel. For the much-ballyhooed movie version, Hollywood packed the production with hot stars of the moment (Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis) and a hot director (Brian DePalma, flush with success from his remake of TV's The Untouchables). The final result was a neutron bomb of a movie that cleared the theaters of people and the studio of its top management. But if an outstanding original source can give rise to an utterly failed movie, it's also true that mediocre material sometimes culminates in great cinema. Casablanca was based on a thoroughly forgettable play titled Everybody Comes to Rick's.