The National Enquirer has never enjoyed a reputation as a bastion of truth-telling. This publicity was no doubt welcome for the film, even if the story bore little or no relation to the truth. And as it reported, earlier that year Rod Stewart, by then dating Britt Ekland, had offered a six-figure sum to buy what it called the ‘nudie movie’ and destroy it, in an attempt to keep his girlfriend’s nude scenes from being seen by audiences. Late in 1977, Cinemafantastique magazine had dedicated the bulk of an entire issue to the film. This was an ideal time for it to come out, though. The Wicker Man was exceptional in that it wasn’t published until the summer of 1978, over four years after the initial release of the movie.
Never before, as that would have given away too much of the plot. Novelisations tended to come out in time to accompany the release of the film that they are based on, or just afterwards.
We’re all familiar with comments on adaptations from literary sources along the lines of ‘It wasn’t as good as the book’, but I doubt that anybody has ever claimed a novelisation was better than the film it was based on. It was much darker than the film, which was already considered by many too dark for young Slade fans.Īs Allan Brown points out in his 2006 introduction to Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man novel: ‘More often than not these are hack jobs, souvenirs, vestigial remnants of the days before videotape allowed enthusiasts to possess their own personal copies of films.’ That was the only one I know that significantly differed from its source material. I might have a copy of John Pidgeon’s Slade in Flame lying around somewhere but I’ve never felt the need to re-read it. Until this week, novelisations of films are something that I’ve managed to avoid since the 1970s.
0 kommentar(er)
