From Library Journal
Turning film or TV scripts into novels is a peculiar literary subgenre. But it's not just a recent phenomenon-King Kong (1933) being an early example. To capture the scope and examine the idiosyncrasies of this form, Larson (Film Music from Around the World, Borgo Pr., 1987) divides the book into three sections: a brief introduction, short interviews with 50 contemporary practitioners, and an immense bibliography, organized by film, book title, and author. Throughout, Larson is amazingly thorough and always candid about the form's limitations. However, the high price combined with the fact that many of these books are just marketing tools with short shelf lives recommend this only for larger collections.
Thomas Wiener, formerly with "American Film"Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Films are often based on novels, but sometimes novels are written based on films. Author Larson, who has written several books on film and literature, covers two kinds of materials: novelizations based on the screenplay of a movie or TV script and original novels based on the characters, stories, and settings of a film or TV series.
In the first section of the book, Larson discusses such issues as authorship, quality of writing, time constraints (many writers have not even seen the final cut of the movie!), and contractual arrangements. Here we learn that novels based on TV series such as Dr. Who, Twilight Zone, and Star Trek are the most prolific in this field, and that novelizations based on screenplays that were themselves based on novels are fairly common. The second section, "Viewpoints," contains interviews with 50 writers such as Piers Anthony and John Jakes, who share their experiences and opinions on the creation of novelizations.
The third part is a bibliography of more than 2,500 novelizations, arranged by title. Abbreviations are used to designate published screenplays (in order to differentiate these from novelizations), "photoplay editions" (novelizations of silent or early movies), children's and young adult novels, and television series or films. Each citation notes title; author; author of the screenplay, play, or characters from which the book was adapted; publisher; and date. Larson has also provided a separate bibliography by author. There are cross-references and notes on pseudonyms. The book concludes with an index to subjects, titles, and authors found in the text of the first two sections.
Comprehensive or not, this reference work is the only one of its kind; it will be useful for libraries with collections in film and television, genre literature, and popular culture.
