Novelization

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Dean Foster once wrote the novel of the film Alien without knowing what the Xenomorph looked like. That oddity says a lot about the novelization, a book that retells a story first made for the screen, the stage, the comics page or a video game. Someone has to turn a script or a game into a full-length novel. The job often comes with a rushed deadline, an unfinished draft and a relatively low flat fee. Why do these books keep selling? How does a thin screenplay grow into a thick paperback? And who ends up writing them?

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• 2. Why They Sell

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  In 1933, King Kong became one of the first films with spoken dialogue to get a novelization. Silent pictures had received book versions earlier, in the 1910s and 1920s. Examples include the serial Les Vampires from 1915-16 and London After Midnight in 1927. The real boom came in the 1970s. Home video did not yet exist, so a novelization was one of the few ways to relive a hit, besides a television broadcast or a return to theaters. The books for Star Wars in 1977, Alien in 1979 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 sold millions of copies.

  The 2014 novelization of Godzilla later reached The New York Times Best Seller list for mass-market paperbacks, so the habit survived home video. Fans get the credit. About half of all novelizations are bought by people who have already seen the film. They want more time with its characters, or a chance to feel that first excitement again. The film therefore works as an advertisement for the book, and its success or failure carries over to sales. The relationship runs both ways, because a novelization also builds publicity for a film that has not yet opened.

  Publishing industry estimates put the buyers at about one or two percent of a film's audience. Because these books are cheap to produce, that small slice is attractive for blockbuster franchises. Established novelists have also taken on tie-in work. Their involvement is credited with giving the books a "patina of respectability" after years of being dismissed in literary circles as derivative merchandise.

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• 3. Stretching The Script

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  A screenplay runs about 20,000-25,000 words, and a novelization is supposed to reach at least 60,000. Writers close the gap with description and introspection. Ambitious ones put effort into transitions and characters, aiming for what one account calls "a more prose-worthy format". Where the contract allows, a novelizer may also invent new scenes to give the plot added dimension.

  Timing sets a trap. Publishers want the book in shops before the film opens, so the writer usually works from a screenplay rather than the finished movie. If that script predates later cuts, the book can include scenes that were deleted from the release. Some of that material later appears in a director's cut. It might take an insider to tell whether a difference between book and film was intentional.

  Capricorn One shows how far this can go. The American and British novelizations were written for separate markets and based on different drafts of the screenplay, so the two books clearly differ.

  Writers also pick their own ways to enrich a script. Dewey Gram's novelization of Gladiator took one route and added historical background information.

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• 4. Rights And Titles

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  When a film is based on an existing novel, the publisher usually reissues that book with a cover borrowed from the film's poster. A separate novelization raises a legal question. The film company is supposed to approach the author who holds what are called Separated Rights. A writer has them by supplying the source material, or a great deal of creative input to it, and by being properly credited.

  Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker was published under the name of George Lucas. The script behind it, however, had been novelized by the prolific tie-in writer Alan Dean Foster.

  Sometimes the original book and the film share almost nothing. Ian Fleming's 1962 novel The Spy Who Loved Me was still in bookstores when the film of that name came out in 1977. Its story had nothing to do with the movie. Novelist and screenwriter Christopher Wood therefore titled his book James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me, to avoid confusion. It is also an example of a screenwriter novelizing his own screenplay.

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• 5. Blurred Authorship

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  Arthur C. Clarke supplied the ideas for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. He drew on his own short stories and on his cooperation with Kubrick during preparation and filming to write the novelization of the same name. Fans appreciate it because the film offers little exposition, and the book fills in some blanks.

  David Morrell wrote the novel First Blood about John Rambo, which led to the film of the same name. In the original story Rambo dies. Even so, Morrell's contract included a paragraph saying he was "the only person who could write books about Rambo". That clause paid off when the producers changed the ending and went ahead with a sequel. Morrell accepted the novelization, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and negotiated unprecedented liberties. The book entered The New York Times Best Seller list and stayed there for six weeks.

  A character can also outlive the creator. Leslie Charteris, who created Simon Templar, had been dead for four years when the feature film The Saint was released in 1997. Another author had to write its novelization. Ian Fleming, by contrast, left official successors who wrote "Post-Fleming" Bond novels. John Gardner novelized Licence to Kill in 1989 and GoldenEye in 1995. His successor Raymond Benson wrote several original Bond novels and three novelizations, including The World Is Not Enough.

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• 6. The Hired Pens

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  The script for the 1966 film Modesty Blaise was rewritten by five different authors. Cases like that make a novelizer's job harder. The writer responsible for the "final" version is not necessarily the one who contributed the original idea or most of the scenes. Directors, principal actors and script doctors may rewrite during shooting, and each rewrite can force a last-minute change to the book.

  An editor who wants a credited screenwriter faces more obstacles. Early writers may no longer know the current draft, or may already be on another film. Not every screenwriter will accept less money than a film script pays, or deliver the prose on time. Writers Guild of America rules give screenwriters a right of first refusal on novelizing their own films. They rarely use it, because the work offers little prestige and money. The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers admits that its craft is "largely unrecognized".

  Those who do the work are often accomplished fiction writers and fans of what they adapt. Foster said of the Star Wars-era work, "I got to make my own director's cut. I got to fix the science mistakes, I got to enlarge on the characters, if there was a scene I particularly liked, I got to do more of it, and I had an unlimited budget. So it was fun." Max Allan Collins wrote the novelization of In the Line of Fire in nine days. For Road to Perdition, his contract limited him to the film alone, without the detail he had created for the graphic novel behind it.

  Low prestige has not kept serious writers away. Arthur Calder-Marshall, William Kotzwinkle and Richard Elman wrote novelizations and have been critically acclaimed. Ken Follett did one early in his career, and Isaac Asimov did one later. The drawbacks remain modest pay, tight deadlines and no ownership of what is created. The tie-in writers' association hands out annual awards called the Scribes, including one for best adapted novel.

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• 7. Beyond The Screen

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  The Adventures of Superman, written by George Lowther and published in 1942, was the first novelization of a comic book character. Such books are rare, because comics more often adapt novels, as the series Classics Illustrated did. In the early 1970s the Avon publishing house asked Lee Falk for Phantom novels based on his comic strip. A dispute over how he would be credited ended the series. Peter O'Donnell, who scripted the Modesty Blaise strip, later wrote novels about the character that were not directly based on the strips.

  Television gets the same treatment. Target Books published many Doctor Who stories as novels, especially from the era of the original series. Science fiction writer James Blish adapted Star Trek episodes into short stories and gathered several into each volume. Foster later adapted the follow-up animated series as the Star Trek Log books. Mel Gilden turned Beverly Hills, 90210 into novels by merging three episodes into one book, which meant finding a joint story arc.

  Shadowkeep, in 1984, was the first video game ever novelised. Games bring their own problem. A player may happily replay an action scene for hours, but a reader of the same scene gets bored quickly. The writer has to cut down the action.

  Matt Forbeck came to game novels after writing tabletop roleplaying game books for over a decade, and he also designed video games. S. D. Perry wrote a series of Resident Evil novels, covering every mainline title up to Resident Evil Zero. Eric Nylund tried a new format for Halo. He delivered a prequel, Halo: The Fall of Reach, then a true novelization, Halo: First Strike, then a sequel, Halo: Ghosts of Onyx.

  Metal Gear Solid produced the most tangled credit list. Project Itoh wrote a Japanese-language novelization of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots in 2008, and an English edition followed in 2012. Itoh died in 2009 before he could write the planned books for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Those passed to Satoshi Hase and to Hitori Nojima, a pen name for Kenji Yano. Kojima himself went on to write Metal Gear Solid: Substance, a two-part alternate novelization, and the novelizations of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Death Stranding, a game he helped write.

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• 8. Books Before Films

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  Ian Fleming's 1961 James Bond novel Thunderball began life as a script he co-wrote. His collaborators later sued him for plagiarism. Some books look like ordinary novels but are in fact novelizations of scripts that were never filmed.

  Peter O'Donnell's novel Modesty Blaise was a novelization of a film script that was refused. O'Donnell had written it alone, but other authors changed it over and over until a single sentence of the original remained. The novel came out a year before the film and, unlike the film, had sequels.

  Frederick Forsyth's 1979 novel The Devil's Alternative was based on an unfilmed script he had written. Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted from a screenplay he wrote. That let the Coen brothers stay "almost word for word" faithful to the book when they adapted it back into a screenplay for the acclaimed 2007 film of the same name.

  Occasionally a novelization is published even though the film is never made. Gordon Williams wrote both the script and the novelization for producer Harry Saltzman's abandoned film The Micronauts.

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