h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello there chaps...

I have been thinking about this, and I have come to these conclusions:

Books have their strengths (like some miserable nerdy bloke going on about boring stuff) and movies have their strengths (stuff blowing up, Cameron Diaz, etc). Unfortunately what works in a book doesn't really work in a novel, and vice versa. Maybe this is why many movies are adapted from comics these days. Back in 'olden times' filmmakers looking to adapt from comics would only have the works of William Blake to hand, and steadicam technology hadn't been invented by then.

And... all it takes to make a book is one miserable nerdy bloke with too much spare time. What it takes to make a movie that you've seen is loads of people and millions of pounds sterling. So movies are likely to be better than books.

Movies are better than books because you can hire a screenwriter to put some funny bits it it with, like, chimpanzees.

Movies are also better than books because you get adverts for twiglets at the beginning.

Also, movies are better than books because you don't get Charles Bronson in a book very often, do you. Bronson's autobiographical oeuvre is excluded from this somewhat sweeping statement.

To Have and Have not is a lot better than Hemingway's book, because Howard Hawks had the book completely rewritten until it was good.

If The Godfather hadn't been turned into a movie, you would never have heard of that bloke, him, the one that wrote the book it came from.

And, on the other side of the argument a film such as Get Shorty is a great film of a great book, because the bits that don't fit are changed. Likewise Out of Sight. You can take my word on this, because I now have a PhD in Elmore Leonard studies. I have even seen 'Mr Magestyck' with Charles Bronson in it.