Were you mad?

comment:

I love your books. Thank you for writing them. But a while ago I tried to see the movie…. and oh my gosh. My first thought was ‘This is nothing like the books!’ My second thought was, ‘Alice doesn’t seem nice, like a friend that I would come for advice like she seems in the books.’ My third thought was, ‘I wonder what the heck Ms. Naylor thinks about this!!’. So I decided to ask. Were you mad that they decided to not at all commit to the feeling and themes of the books? Or do you not agree with me and think it was more alike than I’m saying? Please write back. I’ll just tell you this… if it were my book, I’d be furious.

Phyllis replied:

I wasn’t mad, but I was disappointed.   They did  allow me to see the script ahead of time and I made some corrections, but I understand what they were trying to do–make a movie based very loosely on The Agony of Alice.  They had the idea, I think, that if it was very successful, they might do more of the Alice books.  But in trying to make their first movie to include everything that they thought movie goers would want to see, they lost the essence of the Alice books.  I liked the casting of Alice and Mrs. Plotkin, but some of the others weren’t anything like the characters in the book.  Lester, for example, looked even younger than Alice, not seven years older.  I think that people who had never read the Alice books might like the movie.  But obviously the screen writer and director had not read the rest of the Alice books.  If they had, I think they would have made the script more like the book and cast the characters correctly.  But the movie business is a very iffy thing; I’m not mad at them, because several of them were connected with the Shiloh movie, which I loved.