Adaptation: Book to Movie

An examination of the historical significance and cultural contexts of film adaptations of books.

Ep. 27: 'One Battle After Another' & Why Storytelling is Important 01/29/2026

‘Wuthering Heights’: In Defense of Emerald Fennell’s Adaptation 01/26/2026

‘Wuthering Heights’: In Defense of Emerald Fennell’s Adaptation BY NATE DAY In the lead up to the release of ’s “” adaptation, I have seen a number of opinions being shared online about the lack of fidelity to the source material, originally written by in the 1840s. These opinions mainly revolve around the gross and obvious anachronism displayed by the movie, featuring costumes, set, hairstyles and more that didn’t exist during the late 1700s, the setting of the (majority of the) story. Other arguments poke holes in the casting, particularly that of as Heathcliff, a character who is ambiguously described in Brontë’s book as a person of color. In criticizing Fennell’s film for what it isn’t, many viewers misunderstand not only this adaptation, but the purpose of adaptation itself. The thing about the 2026 adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” is it’s just that: An adaptation. That means it is explicitly not Brontë’s vision being executed, but instead is that of the writers, director and producers. This version of the story has never positioned itself as a traditionally faithful adaptation. One of the first names to sign on was , for God’s sake, the architect of the ultra-post-modern Brat Summer. There are dozens of adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” from across the globe, many of which prize transcription and fidelity as a central tenet – for those seeking faithful retellings, I suggest seeking those out – or, better yet, read the book – you can’t get a clearer depiction of Brontë’s vision than that. The expectation that this particular adaptation adhere to a strict mandate of fidelity is inherently anti-art, at the very least it fundamentally misunderstands how art functions. It greatly overlooks what every single person on a film set does, because it asks them to ditch their own creativity in favor of what somebody has already created (which is exactly what generative AI does, by the way). Film isn’t preservation, it’s a translation, which inherently involves change. The vast majority of film adaptations of this story do not cover the full text, ending the story with Catherine’s death. In reality, the story continues and follows Heathcliff’s tortured final days at the titular manor. This is done to underscore the romance and make it more palatable for audiences than the dense and depressing text written by Brontë – one of the most important goals of any retelling or adaptation. Fennell has always called this movie her personal version of “Wuthering Heights.” The title is in quotation marks on the posters to signal that this isn’t your grandma’s adaptation of the classic novel. Taking bold swings and reimagining classics in the context of the world we’re living in is artistic and thought-provoking. By its nature, this latest adaptation is very punk rock, which is to say it takes risks and challenges norms (themes that align well with “Wuthering Heights” itself). That’s why I’m fully on board with this adaptation. Whether it’s good is a moot point because this movie is engaging with art and imagination in a special and unique way that I wish more films and filmmakers were doing. As for Elordi’s casting: Is it problematic that Heathcliff was not depicted as a person of color? Absolutely. This movie isn’t perfect, and I don’t think concerns about the casting are invalid. But I also don’t think fidelity to racial coding in “Wuthering Heights” is the clear ethical slam dunk people are treating it as. Let’s examine why Brontë wrote Heathcliff as a person of color in the first place. Despite her family’s abolitionist sympathies, Brontë did not intend Heathcliff’s racialization as a progressive political statement. Instead, his skin color, the abuse he suffers, and the slurs hurled at him were narrative tools used to underscore the differences between Heathcliff and the Earnshaw family, particularly the class divide. His skin color was used to widen the gap between him and Catherine, not to offer positive representation – or any kind of representation at all. It’s instrumental rather than celebratory. He’s depicted as “other,” a framing that functions to justify the abuse he receives and ultimately his poor attitude later in life. Heathcliff being the only person of color in the story and being objectively manipulative and emotionally abusive could absolutely be seen as poor representation that weaponizes his identity, especially considering his romantic tension with Catherine doesn’t end well. While many readers and scholars interpret Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity through the lens of Britain’s imperial history, I’m more interested in how the novel uses racialized otherness structurally, as a tool of exclusion rather than representation. I’m not saying that erasure is explicitly better, only that fidelity cannot be treated as a bible of morality – especially for a text published nearly 200 years ago, long before modern frameworks for analyzing race and representation existed. Not to mention, the overwhelming majority of visual adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” has depicted Heathcliff as white. That doesn’t mean it’s right by any means, but if you’re mad about Elordi’s casting, that criticism should be applied consistently, otherwise, the criticism risks being performative. Hollywood titans like Ralph Fiennes, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Tom Hardy have played the role of Heathcliff over the last century, and not one of the TikToks I’ve seen complaining about Elordi’s casting has mentioned the men that have come before him. If those adaptations are overlooked but this one is treated as a moral failure, that’s just selective outrage. I’d also challenge critics to examine the vehicle for this discourse a little more closely. How much of this criticism comes from Fennell being a woman? One of the great feats of this movie was that someone got Warner Bros. — one of the biggest movie studios on the planet — to committ tens of millions of dollars on this stylized, erotic and idiosyncratic movie. Do you think this discourse would have erupted if that person was a man? I’d guess we’d be patting him on the back for subverting that company’s money into progressively sex-forward art. Martin Scorsese, one of cinema’s most prominent male directors, recently told the story of the systematic murders of indigenous women from the perspective of a wealthy white man, and the movie was awarded with 10 Oscar nominations, after all. This is not an argument against Scorsese’s film, but an observation about which artists are afforded moral complexity without preemptive suspicion. This is a question that we don’t have an answer to, but considering how modern audiences seem to be ready to pounce on women creators and retract those criticisms after more careful consideration (see: Blake Lively and the “It Ends With Us” drama), I feel this is a place where that pattern may be emerging. 2026’s “Wuthering Heights” adaptation is one of many, many attempts to translate Brontë’s epic tale to the screen – not to mention stage adaptations, radio plays, even novel translations, all of which inherently must include deviation from the source material because it’s not Brontë composing anew. Why then should Fennell, or any other director for that matter, create yet another version that fails to stand out from all of the others? Isn’t it more artistically generative to support filmmakers who take risks by imprinting their sensibilities onto familiar stories, rather than letting the ever-accumulating weight of countless other people’s work flatten their creativity? If every adaptation must answer for the past before it can speak to the present, then we aren’t giving them new life, we’re only embalming them. /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/39879850

‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ Review: There are No Movies Like This 01/25/2026

‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ Review: There are No Movies Like This BY NATE DAY Cutting right to the chase here: There are no movies like ’s ‘.’ Nearly every descriptor you could apply to this film comes with an asterisk. It’s a full-tilt musical, yet it never drifts from its grounded narrative, as if the characters themselves are simply living inside song. It’s a historically accurate biopic of a religious leader, but a great deal of the history is, as Fastvold has admitted, “imagined” because of how poorly documented ’s life was. It’s a cult drama with little sense of danger or evil. Fastvold and company approach Ann Lee and her followers with genuine reverence, depicting a largely progressive and non-intrusive belief system – save for one glaring requirement of membership. Even some of the asterisks have asterisks. While this may read on paper like a messy basket full of contradictions, I can assure you, it’s not. This is a tender snapshot – albeit an epic one – of Ann Lee and her community, rather than a sermon or manifesto about their beliefs. The film feels layered, honest, and balanced because Ann Lee and her followers embodied those same qualities. Amanda Seyfreid in 'The Testament of Ann Lee,' Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures offers a titanic performance as the titular cult leader, a religious figure who believed herself to be the second coming of Jesus Christ and led her followers in worship by song, dance and, perhaps most importantly, abstinence. Seyfried juggles singing, dancing, and acting with her usual precision, but here she also wields the commanding confidence of an effective cult leader. She gives birth four times on screen, loses those four children, and reaches a state of spiritual transcendence that borders on psychosis. She traverses the full spectrum of human emotion while making you fall so deeply in love with Ann Lee that you’re willing to forgive her forceful obsession with celibacy – the one belief that nudges her movement into uncomfortable territory. Truly, what Seyfried has done here is one of the century’s great performances – it’s a shame that she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for it, but perhaps that’s an indicator that some audience members were unsettled by such a non-traditional piece of filmmaking. In concert with Seyfried is ’s enchanting, naturalistic score. The music soars seamlessly from hymnal dance numbers to moments of emotional tenderness, never breaking into songs in the traditional musical sense. Similarly, choreography from balances beautifully the lofty idealism of cults with the passionate and overwhelming worship of its members. Further setting ‘Ann Lee’ apart from other films is its script, written by Fastvold and , her partner in marriage and creative endeavors. They don’t shy away from the remarkable qualities of Ann Lee and her movement in order to condemn religious zealotry as many storytellers might, but instead, they examine the way this (largely) unobtrusive belief system benefited from some of the same historical fallacies that other, much more dangerous cults would take advantage of in the future. This allows them to tell a grounded story about a truly bizarre slice of history that has been all but scrubbed from the zeitgeist of Christianity. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ is, undoubtedly, an arthouse film—don’t let its epic scale or marketing fool you. While I’d never discourage audiences from embracing unconventional work like this, it’s worth noting that this is far from a typical moviegoing experience. I found the movie to be transcendent, but those less acquainted with Fastvold’s fast and loose ideas of film structure may find this an odd watch, given it’s being pushed as a historical cult drama with a movie star at its center. Ultimately, ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ is one of the great cinematic triumphs of 2025 for reasons that are difficult to articulate beyond what you’ve read so far. It also pushes the boundaries of what cinema can be – a boldly healing idea for an industry increasingly defined by formula and box-checking over risk and artistic ambition. /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/39872855

Ep. 26: 'The Outsiders' by S.E. Hinton Makes People Feel like Insiders 01/15/2026

Ep. 26: 'The Outsiders' by S.E. Hinton Makes People Feel like Insiders In this episode of 'Adaptation: The Book to Movie Podcast,' Nate and Chris dive into S.E. Hinton's 'The Outsiders,' a classic that most folks both read and fall in love with in school - the heartbreaking tale of Ponyboy, who is entangled in a crime he's not exactly guilty of. Chris also reached out to English teachers to ask about why this book, and its film adaptation directed by Francis Ford Coppola, are so beloved and so enduring across generations of readers. UP NEXT: 'Vineland'/'One Battle After Another' Follow us on social media: Hosts: Nate Day, Chris Anderson Producer: Nate Day "Adaptation Theme" Written by: Chris Anderson, Performed by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow, Nate Day ***** 00:00:00 - Nate Welcome to Adaptation, the book-to-movie podcast. I'm Nate. 00:00:03 - Chris And I'm Chris. 00:00:04 - Nate And today we are actually pre-recording this episode to keep in our back pocket in anticipation of me moving and Chris moving or traveling or both. So apologies if this is not the episode that was promised. We will get to whatever text we expected, but we just needed to have this ready to go. We're just two guys. We can't control time. 00:00:29 - Chris Can't control time? Not yet. 00:00:30 - Nate Not yet anyway, but... We do have a great episode today, recording in the past, time traveling here a little bit. We are talking about The Outsiders, written by S.E. Hinton, with a film adaptation directed by Francis Ford Coppola. But before that, I still want to check in. How you doing, Chris? 00:00:49 - Chris I'm doing wonderful. We're having a great week, eh? 00:00:52 - Nate Yeah, we are. We are actually recording in person, sort of, from adjacent rooms in my apartment. And I had a good, fun weekend, and Chris and Blair came to visit. Watched a lot of great British bake-off. Yeah. Yeah, and saw a lot of friends. We've had a good time. 00:01:10 - Chris But... 00:01:10 - Nate Since we're skipping the usual intro stuff here, Chris, dive in and tell us a little bit about the book. 00:01:25 - Chris Yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels so strange to go straight in now. 00:01:28 - Nate I know. I feel a little naked. 00:01:30 - Chris Yeah. So we read, well, I read, you watched The Outsiders, written by S.E. Hinton, published in 1967. The setting is never said explicitly in the book. I don't know if they refer to it any way in the movie. 00:01:48 - Nate They don't. A lot of the actors use heavy southern accents, so I could tell what region of the nation it was in. 00:01:57 - Chris Yeah, and obviously the book, I had no idea. So I was interested to look it up. Apparently it takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I saw different, I don't know, opinions. I don't know that the author ever said explicitly. But about 1965, mid-60s, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The author, S.E., is for her given name, Susan Eloise Hinton, born in only 1948 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So for anyone that doesn't want to do the fast math there, she started writing this book when she was just 15. 00:02:36 - Nate 15 years old? 00:02:37 - Chris Yeah, right? Crazy. And then was 17, 18 when it was published. And even at that time, at that young age, chose deliberately with publishers to use the initials to not... let her gender come in when sending it for publication in case they would just say, Oh, this is written by some girl and not even read it. 00:03:00 - Nate Wow. 00:03:01 - Chris And indeed, I mean, obviously I didn't think it was crappy because of the gender of the author or anything, but reading it, I just assumed it was a man until I went to do some research. 00:03:12 - Nate Yeah, I don't know if I knew it was a woman either until looking into this. 00:03:17 - Chris Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, we've talked about this a little before we started recording. I had never heard of this before you told me about it. That's crazy. 00:03:26 - Nate I've read it, I want to say in middle school. And it was like a huge, you know, hit. Like everyone in school loved reading it. 00:03:35 - Chris Why couldn't we just read this instead of To Kill a Mockingbird? You know? 00:03:39 - Nate Oh, I love To Kill a Mockingbird. 00:03:43 - Chris I need to get back to it. I think I would appreciate it far more now in ninth grade or whenever we read it in school. I did not enjoy that book. 00:03:51 - Nate No, it's on our list. We'll get to it someday. 00:03:54 - Chris Okay, okay. Well, this book, the one we're actually talking about, is essentially at first not great sales, relatively poor initial sales. And then the publishers looking at demographics of who was buying it realized it was selling well with teachers who were using it in classrooms. 00:04:13 - Nate Oh, well, yeah, that tracks. 00:04:16 - Chris And it is credited because of this. I should have found more sources corroborating this. But from what I found, credited as kind of creating or being the first book of what we now call YA or young adult books, the genre itself, which is super cool. Turned out a lot of the content, obviously 15 in high school in Tulsa, everything same as the book, fairly autobiographical. The book is about two rival gangs, the Greasers and the Sochas. I guess I didn't see if those were the exact same gangs, but she was inspired to write it based on two rival gangs at her high school. Her father died when he was 15, spoke a lot later about a... When he was 15? When she was, when she was. Oh, she was 15, sorry. Just like the boys in the book, both their parents passed. But, you know, along the same lines, a lot of themes, as we've seen with many of the books we've discussed, she wrote about what she knew. And in this case, especially literally writing about the people she was seeing and what they were doing directly around her, which is super cool. It's a coming-of-age story about Ponyboy. For anyone else who had not read it before this, like myself, that is truly the character's name. That's not a nickname. He is one of the Greasers, and the story is essentially following him. You know, the Greasers at large, but really, he's truly the main character. And his brother, Soda Pop. 00:05:51 - Nate Yeah. 00:05:51 - Chris And then what i think is so good their other brother dairy i know i think in the is it short for daryl but they do call him dairy yeah but like yeah because he makes reference at some point in the book like my dad was creative or some original or something like that it's like oh but his first child he just thought nah you get something regular sorry bud you get a real name yeah yeah yeah yeah The story is pretty much along the lines exactly what you expect from a coming of age. You know, this outsider's title comes from the life I think all of us had. I think if you say you didn't have this experience, maybe you're not being truthful with yourself or you hit the jackpot. Because I think that we all had the experience, especially in high school, of not feeling 100% accepted. Part of that being that we certainly did not know ourselves 100% at that age, right? 00:06:53 - Nate Yep. 00:06:54 - Chris I thought it was fascinating because I'm immediately picturing these characters that are... more known fairly well known you know um the fawns from happy days and the movie greece this um to me at least this persona this huge personality um very outgoing boisterous i read that as confidence And a lot of the theme here is regardless of what people are showing, this tough guy act or whatever, it is out of a very vulnerable state. And this idea, this came up often where essentially Ponyboy would suggest, well, the Socs, they've got this money, they've got this great life in their cars. And so they have all the outlets they need. And when we, the greasers, don't have a loving household, don't have the money to get what we need, we have all this pent up emotion and we need to act out. And unfortunately, his friends' responses to that were like, I don't know how to express myself. I'm going to rob a gas station. yeah which feels i don't know dated or however you want to i never thought man i don't know how to express my emotions i should rob a gas station but the overall experience very very relatable right yeah yep um so sorry i threw in a discussion question right away because this was a very interesting experience for me okay and i think it fits at this point in our discussion So every experience I've had with the American literature coming of age story, I have hated. Oh, I'm sick of them. I want no more to do with them. It's like repetitive. It's a dumb, boring town in my head. The world I'm creating as I read is like nearly in black and white, real drab. Everybody's bummed all the time. 00:08:57 - Nate Yeah. 00:08:58 - Chris Um, and as I thought, I thought about it trying to figure out, you know, we're going to discuss it. This is a good time for me to maybe sort through why, where does this disdain come from? And I think I really have a new paradigm for myself. I also have absolutely no allegiance to my hometown, Eagan, Minnesota. Who cares about Eagan? Never harbored any strong school spirit about either my high school, my college, any of that. I'm not going back for the big homecoming games at my alma mater's, right? And the portrayal here, and I'm going to argue, I wrote this before I saw her age, but even at that, I think this is what she was seeing and was trying to do. It's a humanizing of this group that feels other, and it's not teenage angst. It's not they're acting out because they don't know how to, you know, they're so emotionally dull. They have an inability to express themselves. It's a need that we all had at that time. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah. That's an objectively bad situation that I think few of us have legitimately had to do, had to resort to that, right? And instead of complaining about them who have been labeled public nuisances, she paints the picture from their perspective and you immediately just go, oh, they're not criminals. I feel bad for them. So that was a very long lead up. What is your view on this writing or storytelling style? Clearly, there's something to it because it keeps getting reused. Viking Publishing said as of 2017, this book, The Outsiders, still sells half a million copies a year. How do you feel about this approach, this, I guess, nearly a genre in and of itself? 00:11:09 - Nate I tend to be a big fan of coming-of-age stories. I think, for me, it's similar. In the Agatha Christie episode, we talked about how those sort of campy whodunits make it comfortable and, I don't know, socially appropriate to access and explore our morbid fascinations with death and being scared and things like that. I think that these stories... We're drawn to them because we've been through something similar. We've all like you and I were also both once 14 year old boys, 14 and 16 year old boys, which is the main characters of this book. We didn't go through things exactly the same as them. But but the things that they go through are so big that we're able to sort of find our way into those. Right. So. He stays in a park because he doesn't get along with his parents or brother. I think it's his dad, right? 00:11:57 - Chris He doesn't... Johnny... Both his parents. 00:11:59 - Nate Gets beat by his father. Oh, okay. Oh, that's right. His parents fight a lot. I mean, we've all, as teenagers, had spats with parents or siblings or friends or whatever. Obviously not to the degree, hopefully, that Johnny did. But, you know, we get to sort of explore those feelings and remember... what that was like and the good times too, you know, becoming such good friends with people. And you remember the people that stick out in your life, right? And this is about some very, very young boys that don't get to be lifelong friends. Spoiler alert. 00:12:32 - Chris Jeez. 00:12:35 - Nate Yeah. So I tend to like it. I also think, I do think that the term coming of age is kind of funny because we typically apply it to stories about teenagers and young adults, but I think that we have these sort of coming of age moments throughout all of our lives. You know, like you enter a new phase of life when you get married or you get divorced or you move to a new city and all of these experiences, they help you grow and explore yourself, but they also sort of humble you in certain ways, which I think is really sort of the core of a coming of age story in the traditional sense that we're watching somebody go through these changes. So it's just applicable throughout your life and accessible from the time you're old enough to practice reading comprehension, basically. 00:13:23 - Chris Yes. No, that's an excellent point that I had not thought about. This keeps happening. I just moved. It's obviously exciting. It's a choice that I made, but it's still difficult. I still have these big feelings, and if I had gotten to read this at that time, maybe I'd have a little more in the tank for how to deal with it. No, that's a great answer. I'm going to throw a curveball at you because it's completely not what we discussed, but I think it's very germane here. A little treat for any of you Burnsvilleites that do listen to this, all two of you. We've got a cool electronic guest appearance here today. It really made me curious when Nate said he read this in school and I did not. So I reached out to one of my favorite teachers on earth from, I suppose, about 19 years ago now, Mr. David Burr. 00:14:16 - Nate Wow. Wow. 00:14:17 - Chris And he responded, which is super cool. So he was my eighth grade English teacher and, um, We sent them a few questions, and his answer was actually really along the lines of what you just said. 00:14:32 - Nate I'm sorry, let me pull it up. 00:14:34 - Chris Yeah, so he talked about, I asked, you know, what is it about this that keeps people coming back year after year, right? And it truly was nearly what you just said, this idea of working through tough concepts, life situations at any time is a challenge, but we all have to do it. And so his point was living through the character allows the students to develop coping mechanisms that they'll need. They're going to face these again, as you said, hopefully not the same things, but you're going to face things that are hard. And this is your way of saying, I mean, they got through it. 00:15:11 - Nate Yeah. 00:15:12 - Chris This is how they dealt with it. Oh, that's fascinating. I'm really it's very cool to me that you two. It was very similar. He also went on to talk about dealing with an event and how the choice did not pan out. Right. I guess we didn't talk about whether we're going to spoil that or not. 00:15:31 - Nate Probably not. 00:15:32 - Chris OK. OK. Not going to spoil it. 00:15:34 - Nate If you can avoid it. 00:15:36 - Chris Yeah, that seems fine. But observing that as an outside party, what we talked about with the dreams in our discussion in Agatha Christie of the fascination with murder and how you can observe this and maybe empathize, how would I deal with this situation? How would it feel for me, but from the safety of a classroom with your peers? Okay. 00:15:57 - undefined 100%. 00:15:57 - Chris Yeah, so that is all to say I think it has considerably changed my paradigm on the genre. I know. Um, yeah, very cool. Especially some 15 year old from the sixties has got me really reevaluating how I look at life. 00:16:14 - Nate Yeah, that's pretty cool. 00:16:16 - Chris So we'll wrap up our book time here. This is not a fun fact, but I thought I laughed out loud when I hit this part, the phrase stay gold pony boy. 00:16:24 - Nate Yeah. 00:16:25 - Chris I've heard that 1 billion times in my life and I had no idea it was a quote from this book. 00:16:31 - Nate That's crazy. That, I love you, but that is a little bit of a lapse of like, that's, that's a little bit on you. 00:16:40 - Chris No, I think you are 100% correct here. Yeah. But I just, I hit that and I laughed out loud. I was like, how did I never wonder where this was from? 00:16:50 - Nate Um, like you never asked your parents, your, They never said that and you weren't like, what's a pony boy? 00:16:55 - Chris Nope. 00:16:56 - Nate You were just like, okay. 00:16:57 - Chris Did not question it at all. It was someone's friend who was, I don't know, into ponies. I don't know what I thought. 00:17:03 - Nate Okay. 00:17:05 - Chris But yeah, it's honestly a very tight read. We really covered everything but like a couple big events. I mean, that was a fast overview, but the heavy, heavy themes really kind of are the shining element here. 00:17:17 - Nate Yeah. 00:17:17 - Chris So that's what I've got for you about the book. 00:17:20 - Nate Okay, great. Well, let's pause for a minute and take a break, and we will be right back. And we're back. Thank you so much for joining us for our conversation for S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Chris just went over the book. I'm going to go over the movie. It was written by Kathleen Rothwell, the screenplay was, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, which is a really, really big name in cinema. cinema history for all the cinephiles out there. They know that he's widely known as one of the greatest directors to ever live. 00:17:56 - Chris I've heard that name. Why have I heard that name? 00:17:58 - Nate The Godfather, most likely. Apocalypse Now. 00:18:02 - Chris I mean, like... Yep, yep. 00:18:04 - Nate Everything. This movie, The Outsiders, was released in 1983. This is at the tail end, maybe even a little after it ended, of the New Hollywood Movement, which is my favorite... period in Hollywood history. This movement, there's some debate as to whether it's a movement or the time period, because most of it took place during the 70s. But it was mostly characterized by the most popular stories coming out of Hollywood centering on people that felt very disaffected by their communities. So I very much feel like this Fits that because we're talking, I think we'll get into it later in the discussion questions, but we're talking about people that don't exactly feel like they fit in. Yep. And Francis Ford Coppola was a leading voice really in this movement. So often people say that it ended in like 1982. I would just maybe put this in as an asterisk in the new Hollywood movement there. 00:18:59 - Chris Okay. 00:19:01 - Nate The movie stars C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy with a huge, huge supporting cast. Obviously, there's a ton of characters in this book. And what's really interesting is that the supporting cast is full of huge names in their sort of breakout roles. This is what made people very famous, including Ralph Macchio. This was right before Karate Kid. Rob Lowe. I believe this is Rob Lowe's first movie ever. Patrick Swayze. Emilio Estevez. Tom Cruise has a tiny, tiny role in this. And then Diane Lane, who is the star of one of Chris's favorite movies, Under the Tuscan Sun. 00:19:34 - Chris What a list. Yeah. 00:19:36 - Nate I know. It's just unbelievable that these guys all went on to have huge careers and in such different ways. You know, Tom Cruise obviously is just like nothing compares. But I mean, Rob Lowe's had a great time. Patrick Swayze had a good run. 00:19:51 - Chris Wow. It just doesn't. 00:19:53 - Nate I think it just really speaks to how... Francis Ford Coppola and whoever his casting director was, they really had their thumb on some big pulse there when this movie was being made. 00:20:06 - Chris Tell me, Rob Lowe had to be one of the socios, right? 00:20:09 - Nate No, Rob Lowe was Soda Pop. 00:20:11 - Chris Really? 00:20:12 - Nate Mm-hmm. 00:20:14 - Chris Interesting. Okay. Okay. 00:20:16 - Nate Yeah. Yeah. I'm so glad that you reached out to your high school teacher to talk... /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/39051600

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Ep. 25: 'The Housemaid': Freida McFadden & the Psychology of Thrillers 12/24/2025

‘The Housemaid’ Review: Sweeney Stumbles, Seyfried Soars in Semi-Camp Romp 12/16/2025

‘The Housemaid’ Review: Sweeney Stumbles, Seyfried Soars in Semi-Camp Romp BY NATE DAY ‘The Housemaid,’ directed by Paul Feig, is a breath of fresh air at the movies—if only because movies like it don’t seem to exist much anymore. A twisty psychological romp starring Sydney Sweeney as the titular housemaid and Amanda Seyfried as her wealthy employer, the film is far from perfect. Still, it’s crafted well enough to deliver a genuinely fun night at the theater—which is exactly where it should be seen. Psychological thrillers without guns, car chases, or superheroes are increasingly rare, and ‘The Housemaid’ scratches that itch with a diabolical sensibility reminiscent of ‘Basic Instinct’ and ‘Gone Girl.’ Comparisons to those films are inevitable, though whether it ultimately holds up against them feels beside the point. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate This movie plays more like a traditional star-driven blockbuster: hot people making bad decisions, funny (and occasionally unhinged) one-liners, and a glossy setting designed to make audiences drool. It’s pulpy, knowingly ridiculous, and unapologetically crowd-pleasing. Based on Freida McFadden’s best-selling novel, ‘The Housemaid’ has been a known quantity for years, and this adaptation feels engineered to extend that success. Its themes—righteousness, power, and a distinctly modern brand of girlboss revenge—are broad but accessible, and the film rarely forgets its audience. The elephant in the room is Sydney Sweeney. After a rocky year marked by controversy and commercial misfires, ‘The Housemaid’ has the potential to reassert her box-office viability—but she’s also the film’s weakest link. Her performance in the first half is broad, oddly flat, and undermined by a grating voiceover narration. Compounding the issue is her public persona: Sweeney feels miscast as Millie, a formerly incarcerated woman living out of her car and scraping by for survival. It’s a tough sell when the actor still reads as the face of a recent (and infamous) denim campaign. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate To her credit, Sweeney improves significantly in the film’s back half, once the story accelerates and allows her to lean into humor and rage. Whether that shift reflects growth in the performance or simple relief at the improved pacing is up for debate—but the movie is better for it. Amanda Seyfried, meanwhile, reminds us exactly why she’s a bona fide movie star. As Nina, a brittle, paranoid housewife whose grip on reality is perpetually in question, Seyfried commands every frame she’s in. Her voiceover—measured, sly, and unsettling—highlights just how much that device depends on control and intention. Seyfried is clearly having fun, grounding the film’s bonkers script in something human and emotionally legible. Paired with her recent turn in ‘The Testament of Ann Lee,’ this marks one of the year’s more intriguing examples of an actor balancing “one for them” with “one for me.” Photo courtesy of Lionsgate ‘The Housemaid’ is flawed: it runs too long, particularly upfront, and the script often prioritizes shock over coherence. Still, those shortcomings are offset by real thrills and a campiness that studios rarely allow onto the big screen anymore. In line with Feig’s ‘A Simple Favor’ (and its straight-to-streaming sequel), ‘The Housemaid’ is best enjoyed in a packed theater—preferably near an audience that groans at the cringy flirting, cheers at the twisted empowerment fantasy, and audibly reacts to every shirtless appearance by Brandon Sklenar. As far as holiday-season multiplex offerings go, there are far worse ways to spend two hours. /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/39427070

Ep. 24.5: 'The Housemaid,' Sydney Sweeney & Looking Ahead to the Freida McFadden Adaptation 12/15/2025

Ep. 24: 'Wicked': Are We Changed for the Better or Just 'For Good?' 12/11/2025

Ep. 23: Stephen King's Killer 2025: 'The Running Man,' A New Luke Skywalker and Beyond 11/26/2025

Ep. 23: Stephen King's Killer 2025: 'The Running Man,' A New Luke Skywalker and Beyond In this special mega episode of Adaptation: The Book to Movie Podcast, Nate and Chris discuss the famed horror author Stephen King and his titles that were adapted to film this year, including 'The Monkey,' 'The Life of Chuck,' 'The Long Walk' and 'The Running Man.' Expect discussion about why King has been popular for so many decades, what these stories mean in the context of 2025, and more. UP NEXT: 'Wicked' by Gregory McGuire & 'Wicked'/'Wicked: For Good' directed by Jon M. Chu. Follow us on social media: Hosts: Nate Day, Chris Anderson Producer: Nate Day "Adaptation Theme" Written by: Chris Anderson, Performed by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow, Nate Day ***** 00:00:10 - Chris Welcome to Adaptation, the book-to-movie podcast. I'm Nate. 00:00:13 - Nate And I'm Chris. 00:00:15 - Chris And today we are talking about Stephen King's absolutely bonkers 2025, yet several book and story-to-movie adaptations happen. Before we dive into that discussion, Chris, how are you? 00:00:29 - Nate Yeah i'm good i'm wonderful nice crisp fall day here um what have you been up to uh just getting ready for the holidays and so happy thanksgiving if you celebrate i guess have you been reading any books lately chris what on earth have i been reading oh well prepping for the next one um in case anybody doesn't know wicked this is the second movie coming out and they split the book that it is adapted from in half. 00:01:00 - Chris Right. 00:01:01 - Nate And we obviously did not have this podcast when the first one came out. So I'm doing, I'm doing some double duty here. I'm getting caught up. So I've been working my way through that and, um, uh, a fun little series that I've been away from for a long time. I started book five, but that's all I'm going to say for now. And I'll share a little bit more when I finish it between this and the next episode. Cause it's a, it's a, delightful little morsel for some people to grab onto but it also takes some explanation okay next time i will have that book more yeah tantalizing You've still been busy watching. Yeah, I feel like hot flicks are coming out left, right, and center. 00:01:43 - Chris They are. And like I said, I think in our last episode, it's award movie season. So I'm at the theater quite a bit. So I'm just going to do another rapid fire. 00:01:52 - Nate Yeah. Yep. 00:01:53 - Chris So The Running Man, which we'll talk about later here in this episode. I got to see Hamnet a little bit early. Incredible movie. We'll talk about that in a later episode as well as we get closer to the Oscars. A couple of Netflix movies, Novelle Vogue, which is a French film. It'll be really fun for movie nerds. It's about the making of a famous French movie. So I liked it. I think a lot of people will find it boring, but I liked it. Train Dreams is another Netflix film and actually an adaptation of a novella that we might want to get to at some point because it was a really strong, beautiful movie. yeah put it on the list okay sentimental value is a really big norwegian film this year loved it it's fantastic and then also very recently saw wicked for good and i'm gonna save my thoughts on that one for our next episode so busy lots of movies yeah yeah yeah yeah blair and i went and saw frankenstein oh right what'd you think incredible you liked it good not a fan of the changes that they made sure i am actively displeased with some of the changes that they made wow i think it was to the detriment of the story which is a strength to them that it's still such a cool movie i just it's a little bit of a shame to me there are some parts that i don't understand why they chose to stray from the original Yeah, I think that's going to be a conversation that we have maybe a few times over the next few months, particularly with Wicked and Wuthering Heights in February, I think, because that's kind of a common theme in adaptation right now. 00:03:31 - Nate Yes. 00:03:31 - Chris Especially, I think, in the critical analysis of them, trying to navigate sort of on the receiving end, navigate why they did it that way. 00:03:43 - Nate Yes. Yes. And I know it's often, there's a pragmatic reason in this case, we have now discussed in multiple episodes, Guillermo del Toro's vision and how he chose to interpret, you know? So I understand. And I do not want to be just another book lover. That's knee jerk reaction. Well, the books better because it's a book, you know, that's, that is not what I think. I, I would imagine exactly what you said. There's probably good explanation. 00:04:12 - Chris Yeah. 00:04:13 - Nate For many of these changes, I just, yeah. But fantastic movie. Super fun. 00:04:19 - Chris I'm glad you guys saw it and you saw it in a theater too, right? 00:04:22 - Nate Yeah, really cool. This old theater across from the park right by our new place. It's only four rows of seats and the waiter comes through throughout the night. You just put a little piece of paper up when you want another bowl of popcorn. It's fantastic. So we will be, I think it is our new haunt of choice in the neighborhood. 00:04:41 - Chris Good. I can't wait to visit and see a movie there. 00:04:44 - Nate Yes, you're gonna love it. 00:04:45 - Chris Good. 00:04:46 - Nate Should we talk about the man of the hour? 00:04:48 - Chris Yeah, let's do it. Let's talk about Stephen King and all of his work that got adapted this year. 00:04:54 - Nate Yeah, basically Stephen King has been working forever and has such a body of work that is so continuously adapted. Nate and I have elected to, rather than doing individual huge titles, because he has many, or individual titles that have been adapted versus not or something, again, because he has many, we'll just do year at a glance. Here's what he did this year. And even this was tough to get to all of it. 00:05:22 - Chris Right. Yeah. There's some, there's a lot that you and I didn't even get to. 00:05:26 - Nate Yeah. It's crazy. 00:05:28 - Chris He was a busy guy this year. 00:05:29 - Nate Yeah. And he's, and it seems that he is just one, always a busy guy too. He has been writing for a long time. So only one of the three of these is a recent literary publication. 00:05:42 - Chris Yeah. 00:05:42 - Nate And, and obviously, you know, for the most part, it's not him sitting there and spearheading these adaptations. So we have this kind of. wombo combo that he continues writing and other people continue mining through his decades of work archive to make modern edit. It's crazy. It's crazy. 00:06:04 - Chris Yeah. 00:06:05 - Nate So that's, that's at least my disclaimer. I think kind of our disclaimer of this is not exhaustive by any means, nor, I mean, if we started trying to do them one by one, the shining and misery in it, we would just become a Stephen King podcast. 00:06:18 - Chris Right. Right. 00:06:19 - Nate So this is the approach we've chosen. 00:06:22 - Chris Yeah. 00:06:22 - Nate But obviously, I'm not going to give the full author rundown that I usually do. 00:06:26 - Chris Okay. 00:06:27 - Nate Just because we will be back to him at some point. 00:06:31 - Chris Yeah. 00:06:32 - Nate So the real quick introduction to the man that, I mean, thankfully, everybody has heard of. If you're listening to this, you've heard of Stephen King. 00:06:39 - Chris Yep. Yep. 00:06:40 - Nate Born Stephen Edwin King in 1947 in Portland, Maine. Maybe you knew better than I did, Nate. I was shocked to see how old he was. 00:06:49 - Chris I think, I mean, I understood that he was old. He's been working for decades and decades, but yeah. 00:06:55 - Nate Forever. 00:06:56 - Chris The actual year of his birth is a little bit like, whoa. 00:07:00 - Nate Yeah. Yeah. Really, really shocked me. Also partially because I obviously don't look at pictures of Stephen King often, but to his credit, he has not physically appeared to age much in two or three decades. He kind of reached a point and settled in there. 00:07:18 - Chris Which would make for a really good Stephen King story. 00:07:22 - Nate A phenomenal story. 00:07:23 - Chris A man that never ages. 00:07:25 - Nate Sir, because obviously you're going to listen to this episode, you're welcome. A modest 5% royalties is all we ask. Yep. Yeah, what do we say about potentially one of, you know what, maybe this was the wrong way to put it, potentially one of the most famous, well, yes, that Maybe most well-known or maybe most still actively working contemporary. I don't know. I don't have a good description. This is an author of such a magnitude. I told you a little bit about our mutual friend Colton that I used to work with in Colorado. 00:07:59 - Chris Right. Yeah. 00:08:00 - Nate Has a copy of every single book King has ever written. 00:08:04 - Chris Wow. God. 00:08:06 - Nate I made the poor decision of saying yes to help Colton move. And this collection is just it looks crazy on paper. It looks unreal in person when you see the physical copy of every single one just otherworldly. 00:08:24 - Chris That's got to be a sturdy shelf for those books. 00:08:26 - Nate Many multiple shelves yeah multiple multiple bookshelves so because of this fame we've left out much of the depth we'll return to him later maybe i'll find some more info about his life each time sure but the the very abridged tldr uh his father went to world war ii i didn't really find well i didn't look for much information i believe he was just a soldier in world war ii maybe that's incorrect Came back when Stephen was just two years old. Father left the family, abandoned them. His mother raised him and his older brother, David, I think. Bounced around the country a little bit, but at a very young age started reading everything he could get his hands on and writing. So I think that's a big part of both he is fairly old and in good health, so he's continued publishing and began publishing very early. 00:09:20 - Chris Yeah, well-rounded. 00:09:22 - Nate Yes, yes. I found some very interesting quotes from him because I have three different books that I talk about in this episode. Some cool, you know, the author's foreword at the beginning of the book. 00:09:37 - Chris Sure. 00:09:37 - Nate And so this was him talking about this experience for himself. He said, it was so far as I could remember the first book with hands, strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, this is not just entertainment, it's life or death. To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for and why they are indispensable. So this is a quote, obviously, about he was very young. Between seven and nine, if I remember correctly, he approached a teacher and said, give me a book that shows kids how they actually are. 00:10:15 - Chris And the teacher went for Lord of the Flies? 00:10:18 - Nate Yeah, which is objectively the correct choice, but a wild choice for, if I remember correctly, and he was seven years old. 00:10:28 - Chris Right. 00:10:28 - Nate I don't know that I would do that, but clearly a... paradigm shifting moment for this very, very successful author. So maybe the right choice. 00:10:40 - Chris I don't know. 00:10:40 - Nate But I think, um, seeing his thoughts so, um, concisely distinctly immediately. This is life or death. This story has hands that reach out and grab you. I think that really says a lot about how he views what he's chosen to make a living at, you know? 00:11:01 - Chris Right. Yeah. Horror. Yeah. 00:11:02 - Nate I meant the import of the written word, but yes, horror as well. Indeed, yes, horror. Almost certainly inaccurate, but just a brief by the numbers. I believe I counted 58 adaptations. 00:11:21 - Chris That's got to be like half. 00:11:23 - Nate Yeah, I mean, yeah, I doubt that that is accurate, but that's bonkers yeah that's a lot movies tv shows i think i saw four video games comic books series graphic novels just absolutely absurd absolutely absurd his bibliography of just his personal works because obviously as we said a lot of those adaptations are not his his work the adaptation they're based on his writing right right His personal bibliography, again, I would guess these numbers are low. This is as close as I could get quickly. Includes 65 novels, 12 story collections, which contain his over 200 published short stories. 00:12:10 - Chris Good God. 00:12:11 - Nate Absolutely crazy. I know. I saw that and I'm like, I've read 1%. of the total shorts okay cool cool bud five works of non-fiction one um on writing is also on many bestseller lists very highly regarded beyond you know that he's primarily this horror fiction writer right right yeah 19 screenplays a very very interesting miscellaneous or other section including his comics, his graphic novels, his essays on other people's writings, and an entire opera libretto. 00:12:48 - Chris What? I want to see that. 00:12:51 - Nate I do too. I would be very curious, honestly, almost as much in his writing as who wrote an opera and thought, you know, who I want for my lyricist, Stephen King. 00:13:05 - Chris Well, it's interesting too. I don't like music doesn't really stick out as a theme and in what I've consumed of his work. You know what I mean? Like it's, he's, I guess I'm saying the same thing. Like what a weird pick. What a weird zag. 00:13:19 - Nate No, I agree with you. Yeah. It makes me wonder, you know, was he interested in kind of introduced himself? Was he approached? Yeah, I agree. And, um, you know, the librettist is not, he, at least not that I saw had anything to do with any of the music or, you know, necessarily the plot. They're the one who comes in and just writes the lyrics lyrics. 00:13:41 - Chris Yeah. 00:13:41 - Nate Um, so yeah, I'm, I'm very curious how that came to be. Uh, yeah. Almost certainly will not experience it anytime soon, but fun little factoid. 00:13:52 - Chris Yeah. 00:13:53 - Nate Prior to this episode, I tried to go back through, I had only read three Stephen King books. 00:13:59 - Chris Okay. That's three more than me. Which three? 00:14:02 - Nate So prior to this, I had read the first Dark Tower, which I cannot believe I didn't continue with that series. The Shining. Yeah. And then 11, 22, 63. What? Okay. 00:14:14 - Chris That was yesterday. 00:14:17 - Nate Whoa. That was yesterday. 00:14:21 - Chris That's my dad's birthday. 00:14:23 - Nate That's the book. Incredibly famous. It's kind of one of the earliest or maybe most famous. I don't know. I should not say earliest novels of time travel to go and change history. Is it based on the Kennedy assassination? 00:14:43 - Chris Yes. 00:14:43 - Nate 11-22-63 is the day Kennedy was shot. 00:14:45 - Chris Yeah. My dad was born on 11-22, several years after that, but interesting. 00:14:52 - Nate Yeah. Because of what the story is about, that's always my immediate thought. I've never paid any attention to what the actual date was. 00:14:59 - Chris Yeah. I only know it because it's my dad's birthday and It's like one of those facts, you know, when you're born on that day. It's like if your birthday is 420, they're like, did you know it's also Hitler's birthday? 00:15:11 - Nate Yep. Yep. Oh, yeah. I bet your dad heard about that for a long time. Maybe he still does. Yeah, totally. I had only read those three. Preparation for this episode, two of the three are, of course, short stories. Still, this doubled my Stephen King consumption. We have, we, we have kind of a couple of ways that we can skin this cat. I was thinking maybe we go, um, chronological by publication. 00:15:39 - Chris Yeah, that is fine. 00:15:42 - Nate All right. So first up again, by publication order 45 years ago, King published the monkey, a short story from the collection, uh, skeleton crew. 00:15:56 - Chris Okay. Cool title. 00:15:58 - Nate It is. And it's a super cool, very ominous looking book. It's like 650 pages or something. 00:16:03 - Chris Whoa. So do you read the whole, did you read that whole collection of stories or just the monkey? 00:16:09 - Nate No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I just read the monkey. 00:16:11 - Chris I was going to say, woof. 00:16:13 - Nate This book I wrote this down immediately when I finished it so I could not forget it feels like you stayed awake for 72 hours living on caffeine and nicotine oh my god and then stared at a stuffed animal in the corner for too long yeah that tracks actually that's pretty accurate you know yeah well and there there's always been this conjecture or the um Like the, the accepted cultural truths that are not like, like, like lore old wives tales. I don't know what, uh, you know, that, that like a number of some of his most famous books were just written in like crazy 1980s coke binges and he like doesn't even remember writing them or something. 00:16:58 - Chris Yep. 00:16:58 - Nate Yep. So who knows? That could be exactly how he wrote the monkey. 00:17:01 - Chris Maybe. 00:17:02 - Nate I think a lot of the brilliance of this book lies in its brevity. And he kind of said something similar that we'll get to later. The writing in this novella, short story, whatever, is so rich and descriptive that I think were it a full-length novel, it would be exhausting. 00:17:24 - Chris Okay, interesting. 00:17:26 - Nate So I wrote this one quote down because I read it, and you kind of get to the end of the sentence and just go, oof, like you need to reread a few times. And this was a fairly tame example. outside a cold gust of wind rose and for a moment lips with no flesh blew a long note through the old rusty gutter outside goodness i don't the word flesh is like i don't like that there's a lot going on there and i mean anything having to do with lips and a big rusty piece of metal in the same sentence it's just Yeah, and I know what you mean. 00:18:04 - Chris I need to hear that again because I got so distracted by some of the imagery that I don't know what he said. 00:18:10 - Nate Exactly, exactly. Imagine reading 300 pages of that. It's untenable. Yeah, this was this was very, very interesting to me. So he had a preface. These were written over time and then put together into the collection that was later published as skeleton crew, right. So in in 84, he wrote a preface to this collection being published. That was very interesting. I really had to clip out a lot of parts that he said that I thought were humorous. But at the very end, the last page of this preface says, Okay, commercials over, grab onto my arm now. hold tight we're going into a number of dark places but i think i know the way just don't let go of my arm and if i should kiss you in the dark it's no big deal it's only because you are my love oh now i do want to be clear because i think that removes some context yeah earlier earlier in this same preface he discusses some complaints he receives from um who he calls the constant reader had you heard this before no they're like stephen king super fans they have their own proper noun constant reader capital c capital r yes correct oh okay so i think this is i had never heard of it before i think this is like the people who would read anything he put out sure But he's receiving complaints at this point that he's putting out these short stories rather than more novels. The people want more novels, basically. And to that complaint earlier in the preface, he said, a short story is a different thing altogether, obviously. A short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, which he compares novels to in an equally strange way. 00:20:02 - Chris Yeah. 00:20:03 - Nate But this is... /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/39156345

Ep. 23: Stephen King's Killer 2025: 'The Running Man,' A New Luke Skywalker and Beyond 11/19/2025

Ep. 22.5: Follow Up on 'Frankenstein': Everything is Gothic since 1764 11/18/2025

Ep. 22.5: Follow Up on 'Frankenstein': Everything is Gothic since 1764 UP NEXT: 'The Running Man' and Stephen King's 2025. Follow us on social media: Hosts: Nate Day, Chris Anderson Producer: Nate Day "Adaptation Theme" Written by: Chris Anderson, Performed by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow, Nate Day ***** 00:00:11 - Nate Welcome to Lightning Round, an adaptation mini episode. Today we're talking about Gothic literature, Gothic fiction, Gothic film, expanding a little bit on Frankenstein, which we talked about very recently on the main pod. So if you haven't caught up with that one, be sure to listen to that one first. Chris has some interesting stuff to tell us about Gothic fiction and Gothic literature. But before that, how are you, Chris? Mr. New York, since the last time I talked to you like two days ago. 00:00:38 - Chris I am concerned. I'm a little sick. I am pounding vitamin C and I think I was asleep at 8.42 PM last night. 00:00:50 - Nate Wow. Tough break for a teacher on his third day at work. 00:00:55 - Chris Exactly. I was like, I don't get to call in on my third day. I can't be sick yet. How have you been doing, Nate? 00:01:03 - Nate I'm good. Things are are stabilizing at my work a little bit. 00:01:09 - Chris Good. 00:01:10 - Nate No, I'm fine. I just need some frigging, we need some moisture out here before I get sick and shrivel up and die. 00:01:17 - Chris Oh yeah, I bet. I bet. I think we could use the same. I can't imagine it's as bad as there though. 00:01:21 - Nate But why don't you tell me a little bit about what the heck are we doing here today, Chris? 00:01:26 - Chris Yeah, so this was kind of a culmination idea that bubbled in my mind. This might have been one of the ideas that sparked our discussion of many episodes. I cannot remember now. We just had enough books on the slate that we'll kind of mention later that were real specific about Gothic literature. And for me, it was pretty similar to... Like that idea of anti-heroes that we talked about, and some of these themes that are like, I don't know if anyone else is like me, but I've heard the word a thousand times, and I don't actually know what it means, right? 00:02:07 - Nate Gothic lit. 00:02:08 - Chris Yeah. Yeah. We've all heard about it, but what the heck does that actually mean? And so I thought, if I'm wondering this, because this is what I tell my students all the time, if you have the question, someone else does too, just ask it. 00:02:20 - Nate Yep. 00:02:20 - Chris So here I am answering my own question and hopefully at least one person out there. 00:02:25 - Nate Probably for me, at least. 00:02:27 - Chris I mean, it was, it was actually really interesting to dig into. So I hope, I hope everyone agrees. Um, so this is like brief, brief, kind of how we always do not a full history, very mini. Sure. And then some of the authors that it applies to that we've discussed for any fans of the pod, that'll recognize them all. And then some really cool news that kind of tipped it into, okay, we have to have this talk now. 00:02:50 - Nate Yeah. Okay, great. 00:02:52 - Chris Yeah, so super fast. Pretty widely considered the first Gothic book ever was 1764 publication, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. I've never heard of that in my life. 00:03:07 - Nate No, me neither. 00:03:08 - Chris So that's cool. I mean, I definitely want to read it now, but had never heard of it. The, the genre, what it means really what I was looking for, it's built around tenants of an unsettling setting as a genre it's named after the crumbling Gothic castles. I think everyone probably has a picture in their head immediately. Right. 00:03:28 - Nate Totally. Yeah. 00:03:29 - Chris In modernity, like initially it was kind of stringent to an extent it seemed and it's spread into disturbing, uh, any, any content that makes the reader in some fashion uncomfortable. Okay. 00:03:43 - Nate Okay. 00:03:44 - Chris The theme has shifted a bit over time and now typically will include supernatural forces of some kind occurring and there's really a wide range. Some form of battle between good and evil again. to different extents and pretty much always evoking these emotions of fear and terror uh maybe some dark hidden secrets and uh sort of sub genres have evolved from there but there's our sure there's our genesis okay many modern subgenres are seemingly attributed to when gothic lit met the kind of victorian romanticism uh that seems to have been a big evolutionary turning point yeah yeah i can see that it makes sense right Yeah, just because when you say that gothic lit is like, or gothicism, I guess, I don't know, is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. 00:04:45 - Nate I'm like, what? I don't know. I mean, those line up frequently, but that doesn't seem like a genre-defining one for me. And I think it's because my mind sort of goes to that Victorian romanticism. 00:04:56 - Chris Yes, yes. I think especially to a modern... consumer of media that's become the focal point, at least to an extent. And I think that's actually an interesting point. I hadn't thought about it from this perspective until you said it that way. Think about some of these tales that we're so familiar with, Beauty and the Beast, Like the moral and ending, the conclusion is so well known that we kind of look past as a bare bones list of details. These would be unsettling details. 00:05:31 - Nate Yeah. Yeah. 00:05:33 - Chris You know, if you read a headline that was just those plot points, but happening in real life in Cincinnati in 2025, you'd be like, oh, that's kidnapping slash Stockholm syndrome, right? I don't know why that was the first city. Yeah. 00:05:48 - Nate But no, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. 00:05:52 - Chris So this was interesting because I knew we had touched on a couple and Frankenstein was just the final straw to say, let's kind of do a little compendium. It included a lot of what we've done. Beloved by Toni Morrison. 00:06:04 - Nate Southern Gothic. 00:06:06 - Chris Yes, exactly. Exactly. And we can all picture that, right? The creepy plantation house. The supernatural, but subtly influences. Yeah. very much a battle of good versus evil, right? From what I was reading, a lot of Southern Gothic, Gothic in particular, has developed in its own right because slavery in the American South is such an immediate, vivid, and pronounced example of that big overarching battle, right? 00:06:38 - Nate Yeah. Yeah. Cool. There's some cool movies about that too. 00:06:41 - Chris Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I mean, reading it, I absolutely at no point thought this is wonderful. Gothic lit. 00:06:49 - Nate Yeah. 00:06:50 - Chris Right. But then you read, you read all of those things and you go, yeah, it checks all the boxes. 00:06:54 - Nate Check, check, check. Yeah. 00:06:56 - Chris Oscar wild. 00:06:58 - Nate Really? 00:07:00 - Chris Not the importance of being earnest. 00:07:02 - Nate Oh, okay. 00:07:04 - Chris Uh, famously the author of Dorian gray. Yes, exactly. Arguably a more famous publication of his. 00:07:12 - Nate Oh. I guess maybe depending on- I don't even know if that's arguable. I think that's pretty definitive. 00:07:17 - Chris Okay. I mean, it's comparing apples and oranges, right? But so funny. I really felt good about putting that in there and then waiting for people to go, the importance of being earnest? Well, yeah, just like I did. And then Frankenstein, obviously. 00:07:33 - Nate Yep. 00:07:33 - Chris So this was where the idea came from. Very old, sort of credited with a shift in the genre where instead of one clearly specific evil villain, although, you know, based on our discussion, we both are clearly not fans of Victor Frankenstein. But what Mary Shelley did that really became canonized, it became... a consistently used tool of the genre was having the evil side as this moral quandary where here, instead of just an individual villain, the idea of the folly of man and his hubris represents the evil, right? 00:08:13 - Nate Okay. Yeah. 00:08:14 - Chris So that was very cool. There's also this later drawing on of Gothic themes that's been interwoven into books that I think we otherwise would not consider the genre, right? 00:08:25 - Nate Okay. 00:08:26 - Chris And a lot of these are going to come up. Two that I enjoyed and will end up covering are, of course, Wuthering Heights. 00:08:32 - Nate Yeah, very soon. A couple of months we'll be covering that. 00:08:36 - Chris Uh-huh. And I'm very glad for the opportunity. This will be my first reread of that. And exactly as I suggested here, in no way was I reading that thinking, oh, this is Gothic literature. But as I read Borrowing of Themes, I can see it. And Jane Eyre also, which surprised me. 00:08:58 - Nate Oh. Okay. Yeah. 00:09:02 - Chris And we'll talk about why those fit here. Also, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. 00:09:10 - Nate Really? 00:09:12 - Chris No, I'm kidding. Nope, nope, nope. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Louisa May Alcott's A Long Fatal Love Chase. 00:09:18 - Nate Okay. I don't know that one. 00:09:20 - Chris Yeah, never heard of it. We didn't talk about it. I... once again thought that would be super funny. 00:09:26 - Nate Yeah. Haha. 00:09:29 - Chris But crazy, crazy that two authors we've already covered have a book that's it's I guess I'm trying to illustrate how much more widespread it was. And in this case, all three of these fall under what's considered female Gothic. Okay, where it is a female protagonist as the theme of good fighting against each of their own versions of the evil, typically just absolutely unfair treatment of women historically in society, right? You know, usually they're in these confined, almost claustrophobic settings. That's a big part of it too. And this need to subvert culture to promote the good. 00:10:12 - Nate Okay. 00:10:12 - Chris Some others, I thought this was also fascinating because I wasn't prepared for this long a list and never considering what would I call this genre. So some that I've read, Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, Turn of the Screw, Henry James, Gothic Horror. So leaning into that side, very spooky. Apparently Great Expectations is considered a Gothic novel. 00:10:37 - Nate Okay. I can kind of see it because of how, uh, what's her name is, is described and portrayed. Cause she's so freaking weird looking, you know, she's like a monster kind of physically. 00:10:49 - Chris And that claustrophobic unsettling setting. Yeah, I can see it. Not my favorite book. I kind of would be okay if we never cover that, but don't tell David Anderson. 00:11:00 - Nate Oh, okay. 00:11:01 - Chris Oh, he got so mad at me once when I said I didn't like that book, his, his far kinder way of essentially saying you uncultured swine, take that back a very good one. If anyone likes any of what I've presented so far and is thinking I should try and dabble in this series secret history is by Donna Tartt, the author of the gold Finch. Incredible book. 00:11:25 - Nate Okay. 00:11:25 - Chris Phenomenal book. And some that we've also talked about that are leaning toward what is now considered modern Gothic, really gotten away from the tenets in their truest sense, as we've discussed them. But if you examined, kind of peeled back the layer of modernity, I think it would make sense. Neil Gaiman. Oh, we haven't discussed him yet, but Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and Bret Easton Ellis. 00:11:52 - Nate Oh yeah, sure. Modern Gothic. Yeah, that does track for American Psycho. 00:11:57 - Chris Yeah, exactly. And now this was the crazy part. This is why this came up right now. Mexican Gothic is obviously a Gothic novel, which any keen listener... Actually, you probably don't even have to be that keen a listener to recall. In our Frankenstein episode, I recommended if you like Frankenstein, you might like this. So crazy, the day after we recorded the Frankenstein episode, a New York Times article came out by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the author of Mexican Gothic, talking about Frankenstein. 00:12:36 - Nate Yeah. Kind of an op-ed. It was actually hours later. It was not the day after that you texted me. And yeah, she wrote an op-ed. 00:12:44 - Chris Yeah so cool and um first of all brilliant article so if you haven't read it go find it yeah very well written article very interesting also and i mentioned this to you just briefly she really seemed fond of guillermo del toro's treatment of the monster and i was very very curious to hear your thoughts on her thoughts it was a really interesting piece super validating you know we make a lot of jokes on this podcast about my inability to read i studied literature theory in college. 00:13:17 - Nate Super validating to hear that she had the same, at least core ideas as me. I don't know that it changed my opinion at all, but knowing that somebody who's operating in the space of Gothic storytelling at the capacity that she is. That book, Mexican Gothic, was a huge hit, if I'm not mistaken. 00:13:37 - Chris Massive, massive. Yes, contender on lots of lifts when it came out. 00:13:41 - Nate So knowing that she has such an appreciation for what Guillermo del Toro did with his version of Frankenstein, I think even though it doesn't make me like the movie anymore, it does provide sort of another pathway into the movie. and the way that it allows me to sort of hold an appreciation for maybe this evolution of Gothic storytelling. And, you know, I mentioned in that episode that GDT had been working on that movie for roughly 20 years. And I think that that maybe sort of fried some of the ideas that he was putting forward. Maybe that comes from the fact that this idea, this theme of gothism, that sounds like a stupid word. Is that really the word? 00:14:21 - Chris I haven't, you know what, let me double check now. I'm not convinced one way or the other. Yes, it is. Wow. 00:14:28 - Nate Anyway, maybe that comes from, because it's evolved so much over history, you know, so what felt wrought in this product that came out in 2025 might have, or does have, decades and decades of evolution and lineage informing it. 00:14:46 - Chris Yes, yes. Her quote here from the article that is essentially what you just said, the mutations are inevitable, for we are human. 00:14:54 - Nate Yep. 00:14:55 - Chris Yeah, I was, I mean, obviously, as... your friend here to toot your horn was very shocked to read this, you know, figurehead of Gothic writing, essentially giving in different words, the same thoughts that you had on the movie. So that was cool. 00:15:10 - Nate Yeah. I'm glad she enjoyed it. 00:15:12 - Chris Yeah. Again, if you needed a bigger push, absolutely, you should read Mexican Gothic, incredible book. I know she has others. Unfortunately, that's the only one of hers I've read. But I really liked her take on essentially not that any of the movies that you talked about far more in-depth had a right or wrong interpretation. But the very realistic interpretation that this was exactly what I alluded to, not a strict, you know, if you walked away from that movie and think the monster is the villain, you, you yourself are a villain. You are a bad person. 00:15:50 - Nate Yeah. 00:15:51 - Chris Right. Um, which again is juxtaposed with the fact that yes, Frankenstein's monster did like murder two children with his bare hands. But it's such a, it's ignoring so much. And she kind of alludes to how each film did not incorrectly interpret that, but did it their own way. So that was so cool. Go read the article, read some Gothic lit. I think maybe you've got some other ideas of Gothic movies along those same veins. 00:16:21 - Nate Yeah, I just wanted to give a shout out because it's kind of similar in nature to Gothic literature. There is no like definitive Gothic genre. And often, in fact, something is considered Gothic because it's an adaptation or inspired by some sort of Gothic quote unquote parent, be that a book or some other form of media that came beforehand. 00:16:43 - Chris Yes. 00:16:43 - Nate But like you said it's it's been spun out into a lot of sort of sub-genres the most prominent gothic movies these days come from guillermo del toro obviously he's got frankenstein crimson peak i think is maybe a comic book series or something like that um here i'll pull it up okay thanks i think you're even more correct than you thought it says it is not only not an adaptation this is um the one you just referred to crimson peak del toro intentionally crafted the film as his own take on the gothic genre itself oh it's not an adaptation no that's what it says oh i really thought it was wow that's crazy nightmare alley is another novel that he's adapted that i think maybe we should we'll get to someday very gothic even his adaptation of pacific rim his movies about monster fighting military men like hellboy too he does the hellboy movies. 00:17:39 - Chris I totally forgot about that. 00:17:40 - Nate Yeah, those are all very gothic as well. So he's definitely the most prominent guy operating in that space in cinema. But a few other names I wanted to throw out there. One that I think a lot of people will... feel comfortable identifying is Tim Burton. He's got a little bit more of like a cartoony family twist, which is where that subgenre comes in. Sweeney Todd is a musical, sort of a horror musical. Sleepy Hollow, very much a gothic movie. Edward Scissorhands sort of has that comedy element and is a movie that we actually discussed super briefly in the Frankenstein episode because it plays on that you know, creating life trope. Frankenweenie, obviously a spin on Frankenstein, is an animated Gothic movie from Tim Burton. So he's played into that a lot. Robert Eggers is a big name in this genre as well. He just had Nosferatu last year. Dracula, of course, is another story that we referenced in that episode. And he also did that movie, The Northmen, that I made you watch, which I think will come up in a later episode when we discuss Hamlet. But then I wanted to diversify the list a little bit here and think of some people that don't necessarily fit the standard Gothic mold. The first name that kept coming to mind was Sofia Coppola, who's sort of known for this modern Gothic feel to all of her movies. The Beguiled is a movie that she remade, actually, and is very quite literally a Southern Gothic movie. And that brought me to Francis Ford Coppola, who has actually adapted Bram Stoker's Dracula to film. But a lot like Sofia Coppola, I think this family, just because they are such a grandiose family that has existed for generations in American history, they've been significant forever. they have a lot of these Gothic sensibilities in their work. It's sort of just that sort of like overbearing weight that's on their shoulders and pressure to create and be incredible. I think that comes out through their work. And even the Godfather films are very Gothic, visually speaking. They're known for shadows and imposing figures and things like that. So really interesting how it comes out that way in those movies as well. Speaking of Southern Gothic, Casey Lemmon's Eve's Bayou, fantastic. I wish it was an adaptation. so that we could talk about it. But it's amazing. I believe it's just an original movie. And Casey Lemons does a great job directing it. And then I think the most recent example in modern cinema is probably Sinners from Ryan Coogler earlier this year, which of course we talked about being the sort of relative of Beloved. So it's interesting how all of these are so tied together and all act as stepping stones for one another too, as we talk about the evolution of Gothic storytelling. 00:20:31 - Chris Yes, yes, yes, yes. And they're all, I... /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/39071255

Ep. 22.5: Follow Up on 'Frankenstein': Everything is Gothic since 1764 11/18/2025

Ep. 22: 'Frankenstein': Guillermo del Toro, Mary Shelley and more Tell a Monster of a Tale 11/13/2025

Ep. 22: 'Frankenstein': Guillermo del Toro, Mary Shelley and more Tell a Monster of a Tale Welcome to Adaptation, the book-to-movie podcast. I'm Nate. And I'm Chris. And today we are talking about Frankenstein, one of the most, probably one of the most famous texts ever put to paper, wouldn't you say? 100%, yes. Yeah. Yeah. But before we dive in, I want to give ourselves a quick plug. Our first mini episode called Lightning Round was published just the other day. So be sure to check that out. It should just be in the regular feed on your streaming app. Sorry about using the wrong microphone on that one. I think I've got it worked out here. So smooth sailing from here on out, hopefully. Oh, definitely. Yeah. But how are you, Chris? I am wonderful. I am wonderful. Beautiful day out here today. How are you doing, Nate? Good. Is the weather good out there? I just realized that. Oh my gosh. It's 65 and sunny. And unfortunately, I've spent the whole day inside having a few Guinness and watching two full rugby matches. So I'm glad we're getting down to business here this afternoon. Yeah. Let's put our critical thinking caps on here a little bit. It's nice here to... know it's kind of scary when i say it's nice and it's november 8th but uh yeah yep i know what you mean but c'est la vie i guess this is the world we live in what have you been reading what you've been up to i have um actually most of my reading of late has been for the podcast uh very quick finally got blair to watch minority report oh what'd she think Loved it. It was exactly as good as I remember. And so this is my annual plug to everybody. I think this is the fourth time I've watched it. I think it might be the fourth time you've mentioned it. It is one of my favorite movies ever. And it's strange because what I love about it is it's just forgettable enough that you don't remember the cool part. Or at least I don't. But reading, I just finished one. I've been working on this for a little while. It's by a Catholic priest named Thomas Keating. Anyway, very cool book called Open Mind, Open Heart about contemplative prayer, contemplative life. It's a book I took a little while tracking down and it was very cool. What have you been watching? I've been, it's award movie season, so I've been really, really busy with trips to the movie theater and streaming and whatnot. So I'm just going to rapid fire. Are you ready? I'm so ready. Blue Moon, really good. Hedda, which is a adaptation of Hedda Gabler, really good too. That's on Prime, so you should check that one out. I think maybe we should get to it someday here on the podcast. Begonia, super weird, super fun. I liked it. predator badlands super fun really loved that one i've talked about how much i love the predator movies on here before yes ballad of a small player not very good at all uh on netflix super boring fell asleep in fact and then i saw die my love as well which is another adaptation and just kind of maybe one of the strangest movies i've ever seen i don't i don't even know if it's a conversation that you and i would be equipped to have because it's about like postpartum depression and things like that so Okay. Hefty slate, but mostly good. I'm a happy cinephile. Wow. Hold on, rewind. So Begonia, I've seen a number of trailers. You think I'd dig it? I think, yeah, I think you would. Like, don't go in with any expectations. Just kind of ride it like a roller coaster. No, based on the trailers, I've been thinking about maybe going and seeing it. Yeah, it's super funny. It's also got some really sad stuff but um really cool like an insane premise yeah oh yeah it's it's bonkers but fun yeah i like that okay still blows my mind that you're a predator fan every time you bring it up i wait for you to go boo and every time i'm incorrect i love them they're fun i mean i've skipped most of the franchise because they have like abysmal you know reviews and things like that so i've just seen sort of the cream of the crop and i'm happy that way and um and i have so much fun it's just like aliens beating each other up you know that does sound fun have they gone like the land before time approach and there are just like 17 of them um not quite i think this one is five or six but um oh okay that's not bad But it's also like none of them are, it's not connected like the Marvel movies where if you miss one, you don't really know what's happening. They're about different people and stories. So it's kind of fun to just be able to like pick up whichever ones you want. Yeah. Smart. Smart. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool stuff. I think you'd like those movies a lot too. Okay. I'll give that a shot. I've been, I got to track down my new local movie theater. Maybe we'll do that today. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's a really good one in the theaters too. Good like action scenes. Yeah. It's got to be. Yeah, giant screen, big sound system. Yeah, unfortunately, I accidentally bought a 3D ticket, which I don't normally do. 3D at this theater is so bad. I have to go again because I couldn't really see. Those glasses are so bad. Yep, yep, yep. Makes sense. Anyway, I digress because we're here to talk about an entirely different story. Totally different story that everybody and their nephew has heard of. yes and what is that story chris yeah frankenstein you ready to dive in i am yeah let's um let's let's do that okay um yeah i kept i kept looking through our entire list as i was making um that timeline this is arguably one of the most famous titles we've approached i think it is the most famous Yeah, I know. Maybe with the only exception being The Hobbit. And that's almost kind of... I agree. Throughout time, that's almost kind of riding the coattails of Lord of the Rings, which we haven't quite covered yet. Oofta. That is a tough statement that I don't like. I don't think you're incorrect. That's a, it's a gross simplification. No, no, no. I see what you mean. The thing with the Hobbit is it, it still leans into like a fantasy niche where I think there are plenty of people who are at least, uh, prior to the movies, totally unaware of its existence. Yeah. Right. Where everybody has heard of Frankenstein. Yeah. And has some misconceptions. Yeah, so many. And we'll talk about that on the movie side. Kind of crazy. Oh, I'm going to beat you to it because I get to talk first. Okay. So, Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. It's full title, which I think is perhaps the first misconception. I would agree. So, without having read any notes, unless you already looked this up, who's Prometheus, Nate Day? He is... A figure from Greek mythology. Boy, this is like 20 years ago in my knowledge. And he, was he the guy that brought fire to Earth? He was. Okay. A plus, A plus. Thank you. I had the exact same initial reaction, came up with an entire blank, so I looked it up. prometheus in greek mythology is the titan who i believe if i if i was reading this correctly first formed man out of clay uh and then gave fire to mankind okay and then was punished for giving a technology that they should not have by being chained to a rock while an eagle came to eat out his liver every day and then overnight it would regrow Oh, it was the eagle liver guy as well. Okay. This guy, he got around. This guy was busy. Classic, classic. Um, no, you, you remembered more than I did. Uh, so that is the subtitle, the modern Prometheus. And we'll get a little bit into, um, why here briefly, all of my descriptions, I'll just give it right up top here. One, I have tried to say at least moderately spoiler free. Um, not in the sense that anybody listening will be brand new to Frankenstein as a character. Right. but that I feel comfortable suggesting far fewer people have read it than are aware of it. Does that make sense? Well, yeah, totally, totally. Right. So I'm going to try to leave this. This will be a relatively spoiler-free episode from the book perspective. Okay. That being said, there was essentially just so much information from a historical genre context side the book storyline itself, and the author, that I'm going much more shallow on each part than I would like to, just for the sake of scope and time. Okay. So the subtitle is a comparison that comes from the idea that Dr. Frankenstein accessed that which he should not have. Sure. Yeah. I don't think it is a spoiler to anyone. I hope that he created life in a laboratory. If that's a spoiler, then you are missing some serious chunks of Western culture. Yes. Yes. Agreed. Additionally, that's really the primary thrust of this subtitle, in my opinion. There are additional, in my opinion, weaker comparisons drawn, but I think that really sets you up from the title page of what you've got coming. Yeah? Sure. Yeah. so right off the top i think the biggest pop culture misunderstanding you hear frankenstein and in your brain you picture the monster uh-huh dude crappy julius caesar bangs black hair bolts coming out of his temples right yep incorrect right and i think some people have come around on this by now or more the title character victor frankenstein Um, he's often referred to as Dr. Frankenstein. I don't recall anywhere in the text where it is specified that he is indeed a doctor of anything. Okay. Um, he does leave home and go to university for a long period of time. Uh, so one it's entirely possible. There was some conferring of a diploma that I just missed. I don't remember that in particular, but he is Frankenstein and he creates Frankenstein's monster. Sure. Right. I think probably the biggest misconception. Yeah. Uh, published in 1818. So just over 200 years ago, uh, which really, really speaks to, I think the emphasis we put on it, not just that it's potentially, if not unequivocally the most famous title we've discussed, but also the oldest that we've discussed by 50 years. Whoa. That's a hefty margin. Yeah, Little Women was fully 50 years later, and especially for anyone who has stopped and looked at the timeline I worked long and hard on. Percentage-wise, this is a crazy outlier. Yeah. And has unquestionably stood the test of time. Yeah, great. So the author, Mary Shelley, so not just the most famous, but written at a time when female authors certainly were not prominent. and the most famous we've talked that's the last time i'll say the most famous we've talked about just crazy very very cool yeah um this is again a pretty high level summary with some quotes from online because i could not reword them better this lady's story is wild and we've discussed some wild authors yeah we really have so mary shelley born mary wallston craft godwin whoa in 1797 london her mother died it was a week and a half like 10 or 11 days after she was born oh and it gets crazier from right off the bat yeah okay yep um so 1814 mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers percy shelley he was already married oh um together with her stepsister claire claremont crazy name the three of them left for france traveled through europe when they get back she mary is pregnant with percy's child Upon their return, she's pregnant. Over the next two years, they face ostracism, constant death, and the death of their prematurely born daughter, I believe by like two months. They married late in 1816 after his first wife commits suicide. Okay. Yeah. Wild. Okay. Sorry, girl. And this was the tame half of the story. So then, later, a later summer, Percy is pregnant. almost certainly, at least historically believed, to be having an affair with this stepsister, Claire Claremont. So what do they do? The three of them go to Switzerland to spend the summer with Lord Byron, famous lord byron oh yeah poet author yeah who also got claire pregnant oh my god claire apparently as i was looking this up and i was like this is crazy this is crazy apparently there have been multiple publications just discussing the creation of the book frankenstein um just we're briefly touching on it here but essentially They're at this lake house in Geneva, Lord Byron, Percy, who is a well-to-do aristocrat, and his family is not stoked about first his political following of Mary Shelley's father, and then obviously his getting her pregnant while married to Harriet. And then the four of them go to Geneva. Lord Byron suggests, let's all write a ghost story. And Mary is having a terrible time, can't come up with anything. And then this is crazy. A fan, I think they said at like the 150th anniversary, went to Geneva and studied the astronomical charts and star movement to calculate exactly what time this idea struck her. I have no idea how much of that is true. But it's believed 2 or 3 a.m. She is unable to sleep, is up. middle of the night and envisioned this monster this creation of somebody bringing to life that which they should not be able to thinks this will make for a cool ghost story turns into the world famous novel we now have wow absolutely incredible yeah um so first of all to move on from the undoubtedly and there was so much more uh dear listeners if you are interested at all in the last paragraph and a half about this famous famous rightfully famous author i encourage you to look up more there was so much more about her that we just do not have like a soap opera yes wild wild incredible individual so the book i first want to hear from you what of the story of frankenstein were you familiar with or aware of pre films? And perhaps that's tough to surmise now that you've already seen more than one version. It is tough to surmise, particularly because there are so many different versions. But I guess what I would say is the general structure that a scientist brings somebody back to life or you know, reanimates a body. But basically the only idea that I had in my head of the monster itself was that the green guy with the stitches and bolts and just like we mentioned, my knowledge was very much based in sort of what pop culture told me. Yes. Okay. Okay. And that was, I mean, you know, besides asking nearly a leading question, essentially my experience as well. right um somewhere between yeah big big crazy monster is created unnaturally um and i think for some reason i thought young frankenstein is that the name of the other one right the mel brooks what is that is that gene wilder yeah that's a movie yeah um yeah i really i thought that was like canon And I'm now realizing that was satire. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Anything that comes from Mel Brooks. I know. I know. Well, I think it was the first Mel Brooks movie I saw. And obviously I didn't realize at that age how ridiculous the musical number putting on the roots was. So, yeah, I think for some reason I thought that was canonical knowledge, not the story. You did mention it in our prep for this, and I was like, what? I'm not talking about Young Frankenstein. I really, really thought it was part of the, yeah, yeah. That's on me. That's on me. So here's the actual story presented in the book, which was frankly quite, I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. Yeah. Incredibly dark tale. Honestly, it actually explained a lot, knowing she set out to create a ghost story, and this is what came of it. Yeah, that's interesting, uh, perspective. Yeah. It's so the book itself, there is an amount to the writing that I feel does betray its age to an extent you would be, um, maybe not even off put, but you would be surprised to see a novel written in this fashion today, I think. Okay. It involved primarily the titular character, Victor Frankenstein, and the character we're all familiar with, Frankenstein's monster. The bulk is told, and again, this is a gross simplification, but the bulk is told in two giant monologues. One first of Victor Frankenstein telling his tale of creating the monster, which is really in-depth, really vivid, As far as one entire monologue kind of doing a lot of heavy lifting for the book, it stands up to that test. The description is this terrible, agonizing process. He's robbing graves and finding cadaver parts to create this thing he knows he shouldn't be creating. Really fascinating. Really well written. And then... A second monologue, essentially, from the monster's perspective, who is now fully fluent in English and very eloquent at that. Yeah. And the fascinating tale of how he became who he is. He runs into Victor far later and explains where he's been this whole time and why he is the way he is now. And it's really sad and heartbreaking. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I had I had no I assume dude makes a monster monsters bad because monsters are bad, right? Yeah, sure. Especially the moniker we give him Frankenstein's monster monster. Yeah. Frankenstein's buddy. Unfortunate creation who was foisted into this circumstance. He did not choose. Right, right, right. We're really victim blaming here. He does kill people. Let's not get it twisted. But it is very much, in my opinion, in my reading, a chicken and the egg situation. I felt quite sorry for the monster throughout the book. This was an interesting bit that I found online and had not read into it. I don't know how widespread this view is. In modernity, it is also somewhere between speculated as Shelley's intention or merely interpreted as a metaphor for the LGBT community. Yeah, I think a lot of that, we'll talk about that. I think a lot of that comes from the films. Okay, that's interesting. It was obviously not my first reading of it because I was really enthralled with the characters themselves, not really reading into metaphor. But upon finding this kind of postulation or explanation, it doesn't necessarily feel off. You can see it because essentially the crux of the story is The monster confronts the doctor and demands he make a female version of himself, you know, saying, I have tried to be, you know, a member of society. I said I wouldn't give spoilers. I won't go further there, but this is what he demands of the doctor. I love the wording here. This is where it really stood out how old the text is. And I will quit the neighborhood of man and move to South America, you know, where man obviously is not, I guess. In comparison to 19th century switzerland i don't know yeah hilarious um some astonishing astonishing quotes from the book that i just had to save they were so you really you really feel struck by the words of this character that you're kind of i don't know more or less not to enjoy right yeah um so they meet And Victor Frankenstein is not thrilled about him, right? The monster now says, I expected this reception, said the demon. Again, let's look at how he's being portrayed. Mm-hmm. all men hate the wretched how then must i be hated who am miserable beyond all living things yet you my creator detest and spurn me thy creature to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us you purpose to kill me how dare you sport thus with life do your duty towards me and i will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace. But if you refuse, listen to this, Nate, I will glut the maw of death until it be satisfied with the blood of your remaining friends. Jesus Christ. Incredible. Oh, that's tasty. Right? Yeah. Okay. Now we skip forward a little bit. And this is where. I'm fully team monster, right? Okay. Remember that I am thy creature. I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good. Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous. Any fair and reasonable plea. Mm-hmm. responded to thusly be gone i will not hear you there can be no community between you and me oh you and me you the one that wouldn't have existed without victor cool cool cool cool we are enemies be gone or let us try our strength in a fight in which one must fall what a jerk victor yeah yeah victor's awful so it was very fascinating throughout the entire book i just was very much more and more... /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38970630

Ep. 22: 'Frankenstein': Guillermo del Toro, Mary Shelley and more Tell a Monster of a Tale 11/13/2025

Ep. 21.5: Lightning Round: Follow-Up on 'Caught Stealing' and 'Deliver Me from Nowhere' 11/07/2025

Ep. 21.5: Lightning Round: Follow-Up on 'Caught Stealing' and 'Deliver Me from Nowhere' Follow us on social media: Hosts: Nate Day, Chris Anderson Producer: Nate Day "Adaptation Theme" Written by: Chris Anderson, Performed by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow, Nate Day ***** Welcome to Lightning Round, the first episode of the Adaptation Mini Podcast. I'm Nate Day. I'm Chris. Anyway, yeah, like I said, our first episode of lightning round. We want to do these mini episodes. This one in particular is to catch some people up on some developments on past episodes, from past episodes, about past episodes, etc. Chris, first of all, has something very exciting to share with us. Chris, what's going on? Yeah, so any keen listeners in episode 18 will maybe remember that I said I emailed Charlie Houston. I did finally look that up as well. Okay, author of Cot Stealing? Yes, yes. I found an interview where they ask him how to pronounce it, and he says Houston, like the city. That's funny. i went back to listen to that episode because i couldn't remember exactly what i emailed him it was something along the lines of besides the girlfriend and the cat am i intended to like any of these characters right and he replied That is so cool. That's so cool. So Charlie, if you're listening, I know our first episode wasn't a gleaming review, but you as an individual out there in LA taking the time to reply to my email, super cool. So thank you. Yeah, amazing. Besides just that he did it, his reply is also interesting. Okay. So I'm just going to read it to you because it was super short. He says, I don't know that I wanted readers to sympathize with him as much as I wanted them to be interested in his journey, which, across all three books, is about him growing up. Cheers, C." Wow. Yeah. What I appreciate about this is three things. First of all, yeah, super cool that this dude that just got his book turned into a movie even stopped to reply. Second, a very interesting answer in and of itself, concise. And three, a book that I didn't terribly enjoy. This genuinely makes me want to continue the series. I was going to say that plug for the rest of the books was sort of interesting. Yeah. I mean, he kind of said, keep reading for more, you know, in the less commercial way. I don't think he's trying to get you to buy the book, but to engage with the story. Yeah, yeah. It's like a, yes, I think you said it far better than I did. He's not saying, well, if you'd kept reading, it's almost in a polite way, like a dismissive, I don't care if you read all three, but here's what's going on. And I appreciate that. Yeah, I do too. And I kind of like, I like that he says, I suppose you're not supposed to feel that way. Or how does he phrase it? um yes yes i don't suppose you're meant to like anyone yes we've talked about this a thousand times yeah well i also like that it seems like he didn't sit down and like mathematically sort of design these characters the fact that he doesn't have this like hard answer to fall back on to that question tells me that it was more about the process of telling this story you know when he says i don't suppose that that tells me that you might be the first person that asked him that question Yeah, like, is it something he's stopped and considered even? Well, and the way that he answers it, it is very much almost like a mathematical proof. We have his own writing, this book, and then a question posed against it. No, I don't suppose you're meant to like them. this little side comment. I wouldn't want that to be a goal of my book anyway. But then he kind of goes through this checks and balance. He is a rough guy. Here are the things against him. I suppose you're not sympathizing. You're just watching the journey. Yeah, I agree. It's a very sincere answer. It is. And it does, like you said, it adds an extra layer of depth and makes me a little bit more interested in the story to begin with. Yeah, agreed. Agreed completely. So Charlie, if you listen to either episode, thank you. I'm sure you won't. Thank you either way. But yeah, super cool. And just, yeah, he's an accomplished author. What's he doing sitting down and reading my dumb question and replying? Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. Yep. We're Charlie Houston fans now. We are, I think. Cool. Well, I had something fun to share, too. Okay, excellent. In follow-up to our Springsteen Deliver Me From Nowhere episode, editing that one was funny because we mostly just talked about Bruce Springsteen instead of the book or the movie, which is very on-brand for the two of us. I knew we would. Yeah, I guess so. I did want to share that to coincide with the release of the movie, I had missed this at the time of recording the podcast. Bruce Springsteen has released a expanded edition of Nebraska, the album. And this particular edition is called Nebraska 82. And it includes the electric recordings of the, is it eight songs that are on Nebraska? Nine songs. Interesting. Wait, so these are electric versions that were recorded in 82? In 82. It's the versions that they threw out, or evidently didn't throw out, but put on the shelf in favor of demos. Man, that's so cool. It is cool. And, you know, you mentioned in the episode that you really like Atlantic City, the song. And that was sort of the standout to me listening to this electric version of Nebraska. It's really weird. It's definitely a different album. He made the right call going with the demos. Nothing is bad, which is hysterical to me because knowing what I knew about the album and then watching this movie, I think I had constructed this idea in my head without knowing it that the Electric album would be fantastic. garbage, but it's not true. It's still a good album. It's just a totally different album. It's just crazy to realize that Bruce saw something else. You know, I, I think that is a real testament to his artistry that he, he didn't just go with the flow. You know, I don't like, I don't, I'm trying to come up with an equivalent example where somebody like really stuck to their guns sort of in pop culture. And I'm, uh, really struggling to think of something, because I just think so many people are like, well, this is what a movie looks like, and this is what an album sounds like. So they wouldn't even stop to think. No, that's very interesting. Yeah, and I think you should listen to it, at least Atlantic City, because I do like the electric version. I think both kind of stand on their own. And now, he must have, maybe it was a live, I know I've heard an electric version of Atlantic City. I don't know if that's probably live. There are a few of those massive, you know, when they used to release those LP sets that were like two or four discs, and it was like a year's compendium. Right here i'm looking at it yes so my buddy michael duffy his dad had that exact one because i've seen it at your house in their basement and it was um it was in the same lp box the big you know we all know what lp sleeves look like but it was four cassettes of it whoa and i'm almost positive i could be wrong i'm almost positive there's an electric atlantic city on that but i i'm terribly interested to listen to the rest i feel remiss that we somehow missed that the first time i know i mean it just goes to show how you know marketing changes and things like that over the years that bruce springsteen like anniversary basically anniversary album not really i guess just to coincide with the release of the movie but kind of yeah yeah yeah does it i mean this is probably impossible to answer given the thought you've already committed to the original but had you heard this album first do you think you'd have a different favorite track oh i mean this is again this is where it gets really different right two pieces of art i guess probably atlantic city it the it's really johnny 99 still a hoot electric oh i bet there's i mean it's just a different album so i i guess the answer would be yes but i couldn't come up with a i couldn't tell you beyond we we talked in the episode about how you kind of fall back on atlantic city because it's known as one of his greatest hits it's it's incredible it's perfect so i guess i would go with that if i had to I think something that's really interesting to me about Springsteen more than any other artist, I don't know if this is a hot take at this point. I think people agree with me. I loathe those unplugged sessions. Really? Which in, in the book Zane specifies, this is not that right. It's not, um, no, I think Nirvana is kind of famously attributed doing like that first MTV unplugged. And then, um, Clapton's Layla acoustic was like famous for that. Yeah. I hated them. I have very strong opinions about electric versus acoustic. Yeah, sure, okay. And Springsteen is the example that I always tell people, this is not electric versus acoustic, but cover versus original. I emphatically, I will physically fight people over this opinion, believe his Blinded by the Light is superior to the original. I think I do too, and I think it's more strongly associated with him than any other I agree. I agree. You know, that happens every once in a while with covers. But then to come back, so these are two examples with this artist alone that I have very strong opinions and now certainly based mostly on how you described it, I think I'll just enjoy the original and this one for what they are. Yeah. Side-by-side instead of in some kind of ranking. And that makes no sense. Right. No sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing does. You've presented me with a quandary, Nate. Well, I kind of am a quandary. Your words, not mine. Yeah, I'm sure someone said them. Yeah, cool stuff. But I hope you enjoyed this episode of Adaptation Lightning Round. We just wanted to, like I said, jump on and give this update, and we hope to do this more in the future. So thanks for joining us. If you have, along those lines, if there are episodes you have questions about, let us know, and maybe this is how we'll answer them. See you next time. Bye! That's the show for today. Thanks for tuning in. Let us know in the comments what you're reading, what you're watching, and what adaptations you'd like us to cover. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at adaptation underscore pod, and on Twitter at adapt pod. See you next time. Books, movies, and books. Books, movies, and books. Books, movies, and books. Books, movies, and books. Ah! /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38951120

Ep. 21.5: Lightning Round: Follow-Up on 'Caught Stealing' and 'Deliver Me from Nowhere' 11/07/2025

Timeline of Authors - 1st 20ish 11/04/2025

Ep. 21: Bruce Springsteen: 'Deliver Me from Nowhere' and Storytelling Through Songwriting 10/30/2025

Ep. 21: Bruce Springsteen: 'Deliver Me from Nowhere' and Storytelling Through Songwriting 00:00:00 - Nate Welcome to Adaptation, the book-to-movie podcast. I'm Nate. 00:00:12 - Chris And I'm Chris. 00:00:13 - Nate And Chris, you're back in the United States. 00:00:16 - Chris Yes. 00:00:17 - Nate Isn't it awesome here? 00:00:18 - Chris We're in the same country again. Unbelievable. I was actually very excited to be back, and then the second I stepped out of JFK, I was like, oh, what have I done? 00:00:29 - Nate Yeah, it's a fresh hell pretty much every day. 00:00:33 - Chris But we aren't in New York yet. We are up in West Haven, Connecticut. Same with some of Blair's family. It is delightful, apartment looking. And you are settled into your new place, yeah? 00:00:45 - Nate Settled into my new place. I'm down the street from a movie theater, so I'm kind of just living the cinephile's dream. I got subscribed to one of those. You pay a few bucks a month and you can get basically free movies, 50-cent movies, as much as you want. 00:01:00 - Chris Wait, what? What is that? 00:01:02 - Nate It's called Regal Unlimited. AMC has one, I know, as well. I forget what theirs is called. But I pay 25 bucks a month, and for a 50-cent booking fee, I can go to any movie I want. 00:01:15 - Chris That's incredible. 00:01:17 - Nate Yeah. You can hold five seats at a time. So I've got a few booked out now for the next couple movies that I want to see. Like I said, it's like 10 minutes away, so it's basically traffic-proof, almost. And I know exactly how long the ads run, pretty much, so I just go late. And last night I was like 20 minutes late, maybe, to the showing, because I kind of was working late and lost track of time and didn't miss a minute of the movie. Wow. Yeah, so I'm going all the time and I'm having a blast. 00:01:52 - Chris Oh my gosh, that's amazing. That is literally built for Nate Day. 00:01:56 - Nate It is. And I love, I mean, of course I love going to movies with other people, but I'm a fan of a solo theater trip too, so I'm kind of on cloud nine over here. 00:02:06 - Chris Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. 00:02:08 - Nate Yeah. But what have you been reading? 00:02:11 - Chris I've had a couple that I've been working through. I've got one I can't wait to tell you about that's also about the same length as that massive one I told you about. I felt like it was recent. Now that I think about it, it was probably two months ago. Pillars of the Earth. Do you remember that? The Ken Follett? 00:02:29 - Nate Yes, I remember you telling me about it. 00:02:32 - Chris And it was like a thousand pages. I actually took a picture and forgot to send it to you. There was a musical version of that playing in Madrid the day that we landed in Europe. 00:02:40 - Nate They make musicals out of the weirdest shit, man. 00:02:43 - Chris They will really make a musical out of anything. Shocker, we did not go see it. Yeah. But this is about the same length, weighing in at like a thousand pages. I'm maybe halfway through that. That's taken me forever. But since we last recorded, I finished The Haunting of Hill House, which I believe they made a show out of. 00:03:01 - Nate I think so. I think it's a show. Yeah, it's a Netflix property for sure. 00:03:06 - Chris Shirley Jackson. Yeah, I wasn't sure if we were gonna record it at some point or not, but I had exactly 20 euros left in cash at the Dublin airport on Sunday. And so I just went and found one. And that and a magazine were 20 euros. Oh, perfect. Cool. And then it was a 25 hour back because we flew Dublin to JFK via Istanbul. 00:03:31 - Nate Oh, yeah, yeah, we were. 00:03:33 - Chris So I just read the whole thing between leaving Dublin and landing here. It was awesome. 00:03:38 - Nate Yeah, we could definitely cover it someday. I didn't realize it was based on a book. I'm surprised you picked up a horror. Isn't it horror? I'm kind of surprised that you elected a horror title. 00:03:48 - Chris Well, I was curious. I was feeling in the mood for it. You know, this time, sort of near Halloween every year, I kind of try to read one. 00:03:57 - Nate Cool. 00:03:58 - Chris You're absolutely correct. It's not my typical wheelhouse, but I know this is a classic. Yeah. And she as a horror writer is a classic. So just wanted to give it a crack. A lot of good reviews from very famous authors. I think there's one on the back from Stephen King that says this is like the classic haunted house tale. 00:04:21 - Nate Okay. 00:04:22 - Chris That's the only book I've finished. What have you been watching? 00:04:25 - Nate I've been watching, well, like your sort of October Halloween kick. I'm trying this month at home, at least streaming at home, to fill in some of my horror blind spots. So I try and watch a spooky movie, you know, I guess every day or close to that. But that's all on my letterbox. The sort of fun new releases, besides, of course, the movie we're talking about today, which is Springsteen Deliver Me From Nowhere. I saw the Neutron movie. Atrocious. 00:04:55 - Chris I was going to say I didn't hear good things. 00:04:57 - Nate No, it was so, there's literally an ad for Honda in the middle of the movie. I just, I wanted to throw it. The movie is about how AI can be good if you use it the right way. And I just wanted to throw up. I watched The Woman in Cabin 10 on Netflix, which I think you and Blair would like a lot. 00:05:16 - Chris I almost turned it on two nights ago, but it's another one based on a book. 00:05:20 - Nate Yes, it is. 00:05:21 - Chris So I want to read the book first. 00:05:22 - Nate Very Agatha Christie. It's like if Agatha Christie lived in 2025. 00:05:27 - Chris Yeah, yeah. Good movie, though. 00:05:29 - Nate Fine. Certainly not bad. 00:05:32 - Chris Okay. 00:05:33 - Nate But fine. And then House of Dynamite is a new movie on Netflix from Catherine Bigelow, who's a director I really like. It was okay. It's about nuclear war, basically. And I said in my Letterboxd review that it's an obvious case of we really thought Kamala was going to win the election. Because it's like a little too real and a little too anxiety inducing. I was kind of like, I don't know if I needed that in my life right now. But it's still a decent movie. So that's what I've been watching. But there was a little piece of news that I shared on our Instagram story that intrigued you quite a bit the other day. And it sounds like you have some questions. The news was that Netflix has acquired the rights to film and television, basically, for the board game Settlers of Catan. 00:06:23 - Chris Yeah, yeah. So my question is, what? A streaming service that also has an in-house studio for seemingly tending to be mediocre movies acquired the rights to a board game? Yeah. For what? Why? Yeah, that's my question in a nutshell. 00:06:42 - Nate Well, basically, ever since the Barbie movie made $1 billion, Hollywood has been trying to mine toys and games. They think that might be the next sort of, as superhero content sort of dies out, they think maybe the next is going to be games, toys. Video games are really, really popular right now. So there's movies about Monopoly and The Sims in development as well. Like Bob the Builder, I think, is getting a movie. 00:07:09 - Chris Well, that was a TV show. 00:07:10 - Nate Right. This is sort of how Hollywood works, is that one thing clicks and they run with it. People didn't like Barbie because it was about a toy. People liked Barbies, actually, for the exact opposite reason, because it was about humanity and women. 00:07:23 - Chris So people aren't going to like Catan because it's a toy. It's because they love sheep and bricks. 00:07:29 - Nate Well, it's fairly close. You're going to scoff when I say this, but hear me out. It's somewhat similar to D&D, just in the fact that there's like, if I said, tell me a story set in the world of Settlers of Catan, you could tell me anything you wanted, because there is no like lore or world building boundaries. 00:07:46 - Chris So that's a great point. 00:07:49 - Nate I think that's what they're going for. Okay. And I imagine also that it will include probably the first thing we'll see is like a reality competition that's like life size, you know, like real build a house Catan. 00:08:01 - Chris Out of rocks and sheep. 00:08:04 - Nate Yeah. 00:08:05 - Chris Stacked one on top of the other. Rock, sheep, rock, sheep. That gets shut down by the EPA real quick, I bet. Yeah, you got to imagine so. 00:08:13 - Nate Anyway, today we are talking about Deliver Me From Nowhere, written by Warren Zane and adapted to film by Scott Cooper. Chris, why don't you teach us a little bit about Zane's book and what it is? 00:08:26 - Chris Yeah, let's talk about Zane's book. Okay, this is a very curious one for us. This is, if I'm not mistaken, our first foray into nonfiction. 00:08:35 - Nate I knew you were going to say that. Yes. 00:08:37 - Chris Is it because it's written in the notes that we share? 00:08:40 - Nate Oh, no, I don't look at your notes before. 00:08:42 - Chris I don't look at yours either. Okay, that's interesting. That came into my mind immediately, not even for the purpose of putting it in the context of our episodes, but because as I went to write out discussion points, I was like, this is totally different. We don't have these fictional characters to track. We have this beloved superstar that everybody knows. Totally different ballgame, right? 00:09:04 - Nate Right, right. Just for the listener's reference, who is that beloved superstar? I don't know if we've said his name yet. 00:09:09 - Chris The boss. Yeah. Bruce Springsteen. If we have to say his name, you should stop listening right now. You're uninvited. No, no, that's not true. Politely, go away. No. We're here to gatekeep. 00:09:24 - Nate Yeah, gatekeep the most famous musician to ever live. 00:09:27 - Chris I know, right? And this is like the third book about him too. I mean, it's okay. Yes, it's wildly fantastic. Yes, Bruce Springsteen, the boss. Yeah. Real fun fact. This is actually, I think I put it later, and I'm going to mess up all my notes here. The first full-on essay, first three-page proper essay I ever had to write for school in seventh grade, you could pick anything, and I picked Bruce Springsteen. 00:09:53 - Nate No way. 00:09:54 - Chris That's cool. It was actually, Ms. Franson, if you ever hear this, it was actually a super cool assignment. You just go look up facts about a person or a place, and you make like 50 index cards, and then you sort them by relevance, and then those become the subjects of your sentences for the period. It's how I was taught to write a full essay. It was really cool, and it was about Bruce. 00:10:14 - Nate Wow, that's cool. I wish I got to write about Bruce Springsteen. 00:10:17 - Chris Well, at 12 or 13 years old, it was one of the CDs. I presume everyone had this. Your dad had like a little handful of CDs that just kind of rotated in the car. Yeah. Yeah, and like half of them were you too, and half of them were Springsteen. 00:10:31 - Nate Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. 00:10:33 - Chris Anyway, goodness gracious, the book, yeah, Deliver Me From Nowhere by Warren Zane, published in 2023, so a couple years old. I guess I had to give him time to make the movie. 00:10:43 - Nate I guess, yeah. 00:10:44 - Chris Basically, about the album Nebraska, and I'm going to say kind of, and we'll explain more later. Sure. Nebraska was Springsteen's sixth studio album, sandwiched between the massive double album The River, and this is what came out. Nebraska is the album that came out before Born in the USA. Yeah. And I mean, at the risk of offending people who are not Springsteen fans, I think there's not much we have to say about that massive, massive album. I think four singles from Born in the USA made it to top 10. 00:11:19 - Nate Yeah, probably. 00:11:21 - Chris Picture, picture of Bruce's butt in some nice jeans on the cover. Everybody loved that. I can see by your face you're going to edit that comment out. 00:11:30 - Nate No, I'm not. I'm making sure that I'm not muted, honestly. 00:11:34 - Chris Yeah, so a crazy point in his career, right? 00:11:39 - Nate Yeah. 00:11:40 - Chris Again, very different read and different to discuss because it is nonfiction. But essentially, the start is Zane, long, long time ago, in a band with his brother and their friends called the Del Fuegos, who I had never heard of, met Springsteen when he was touring with a band called the Del Fuegos. 00:11:59 - Nate Oh, okay. Okay, got it. 00:12:01 - Chris So this is the author, first time he met Springsteen, which was a cool story. But I'm really trying to cut out a lot of details from the story. If you want the details, go read it. There was just so much information. We have to stay much shallower. 00:12:13 - Nate Yeah. 00:12:14 - Chris I was shockingly not excited about this book. 00:12:18 - Nate Wow. 00:12:20 - Chris And I tried, I gave it a lot of thought. I think the issue is that I got a copy of the audio book read by the author. Okay. I was worried about getting a hold of it. This was like while we were transiting from London to Ireland. And I was worried about when a Kindle copy would come up from the library. So I just bought the audio book on Audible. Okay. Which was very frustrating because I got it from the library less than 24 hours later. 00:12:52 - Nate That's how it goes. 00:12:53 - Chris But I got the audio book read by the author, which is usually fantastic. Big bonus. I think for me, books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, the audio book read by the author. Phenomenal. That's the only one off the top of my head. Usually a big, big bonus really brings out exactly how they wanted to deliver the information. Right. In this case, it really just made it feel like a super long form album review on a podcast. 00:13:21 - Nate Yeah, I can totally see how that would be the case. 00:13:24 - Chris I mean, it didn't feel like a book at all. It's a medium length book. It's about 320 pages. But I don't know if reading it myself would have felt different. A different narrator. I don't know what. But for me, I was constantly thinking some editor should have told him to cut about 40% of this. Yeah, sure. But that was my sort of initial and kind of consistent feeling throughout. Okay. It's exactly 20 chapters long. I do not think along the lines of Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, that was a deliberate number. It's just like a round number, which made it easy to keep track of exactly how many chapters in we were before he even talked about the album Nebraska. 00:14:12 - Nate No way. 00:14:13 - Chris I mean, obviously, he would mention it, but you make it seven chapters before he actually starts talking about Nebraska. 00:14:22 - Nate Okay, interesting. 00:14:24 - Chris Which I get it. The context is very important, especially the overall vibe is he's building an intimate world of where was this beloved figure Springsteen at this time? What had just happened? There was a great quote. They were interviewing all five of them. Springsteen, the audio engineer, the dude from The Bear that plays Springsteen. 00:14:49 - Nate Jeremy Allen White. 00:14:50 - Chris Yep. Some dude I've never seen before who plays the sound engineer and the director. Maybe, I don't know. Five of them were on the news last night. And Springsteen said, and this is very much along the lines of this world Zane's built for us in the book, I knew what to do on stage. He was famous for these marathon live concerts, right? Three, three and a half hours just going. Right. Decades, he did not slow down as he got older. He kept doing this and this was such a poignant quote from him Because I don't watch the news. So I was like man, is this what the news has every day? I should watch it It was Springsteen himself saying for those three hours on stage. I know what I'm supposed to be doing It's the other 21 hours of the day and I'm not so sure about yeah yeah, and so in that sense the length of the book very much did paint a picture of Who he was as an individual growing up Becoming a musician What the river meant in terms of an album made with the band and its subsequent? Massive tour to bring us to this album, right? Yeah, sure. Yes So in a sense, I don't blame him, but come on, dude That is that's pretty rough Is that really necessary? Right and again, this is coming from a huge Springsteen fan Yeah, but I want I want a different book about the river. I want the book about the album, Nebraska to be about the album Yeah, which to his credit he does indeed do also arguably ad nauseum So so the thrust of the book is context about Springsteen Particularly and I think probably the most important part where he was emotionally and mentally They really dig into how incredible it was at this time coming off the album. He had just made to release Essentially a solo album not essentially. It's a solo album, right? Right. Yep without the E Street Uh-huh, and even at that I almost said this will be a spoiler. What again? This is the trouble with nonfiction, right? Yeah, what's a spoiler? Yeah It's amazing Because this album was recorded by Springsteen on a home recording device Yeah Made into a cassette a four track. It's like the TAC 9000 or something like that Four track home recording device makes a cassette Intended to be demos, right? Right. This is just I've written these songs I'm gonna get them down and we're gonna figure it out bring the band in and then slowly realizing wait Maybe it's better without the band Yeah, wait, we're trying to record it professionally and we can't capture the same sound wait What if we release the original cassette that you made in this room alone as an out? Yeah Amazing. Yeah amazing, right? I mean it has happened since Macklemore That was a very famous instance of him and Ryan Lewis recording all this this whole album at home You know, that was deliberately out about that You know, that's a huge F you to the industry right right they didn't want to conform Who's the Bon Iver guy Justin Vernon You know is famously done similar this Accessibility that in modernity we've become familiar with you know, the advent of DJs having Ableton on your MacBook, right? Anybody? Yeah, but at this time the way that he did it the same crazy sort of echo slap effect on Everything all instruments and all voices Absolutely unheard of and then to be not just a good album given those circumstances not like as an excuse Oh, it's good. But come on. He made it at home. Cut him some slack. No, it's a great album. Yeah, it's incredible. It is Raw it is intense I think the reason it was chosen as the subject of an entire book is it to an extent summarizes a Massive massive figure in in music today. I mean, he's still making music right? He's still yeah, it's it's incredible. Yeah Um that being said there were only two songs on this album that I recognized Really again as At least what I thought a massive Springsteen fan yet Atlantic City probably of course Atlantic City has been one of my favorite songs forever and then Nebraska I I don't just the that I'm gonna do the harmonica. Yes. Yes, Nebraska is number one and then Atlantic City's too and the that crazy monotone I actually sing that line in my head every time you talk about your family In Nebraska, and I've never told you that yeah, shout out to my Nebraska family well, that's why I have the I have the album on vinyl because my mother gave her collection to me and she got it from I think her cousin gave it to her as a gift and I remember being like, I don't know what this album is and she was like, I don't really either It was just called Nebraska and we lived in Nebraska. So it was... /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38794895

Ep. 21: Bruce Springsteen: 'Deliver Me from Nowhere' and Storytelling Through Songwriting 10/30/2025

Richard Linklater’s 'Blue Moon': Another Classic in Conversation 10/29/2025

Richard Linklater’s 'Blue Moon': Another Classic in Conversation BY NATE DAY ’s latest, ',' is a mostly real-time chamber piece reminiscent of his famed – and is deserving of the comparison in every way. The film follows in the hours after the 1943 Broadway debut of the smash hit ',' a musical with music co-written by his former partner, . Following the rave reviews for the show, Hart relentlessly pursues a much younger woman and his former professional glory in equal measure, hindered only by his self-destructive habits. 'Blue Moon' functions mostly as a showcase for its star, , who gives one hell of a performance. He’s energized, nuanced, intimate and heartbreaking – often all at the same time. Additionally, his capacity to deliver such layered and fast-paced dialogue, all while looking absolutely ridiculous, is something to behold. That being said, many other aspects of the film are noteworthy as well. The costumes and production design flawlessly recreate 1940s New York and allow you to easily sink into Hart’s intricate life – an essential step to enjoying this story. Similarly, the script is razor sharp and often had me laughing out loud – something I’ll rarely do in a theater. On paper, it may seem that highlighting similarities between 'Blue Moon' and the 'Before' Trilogy is all too natural, given that they’re both stories following Hawke having conversations, but it’s that very script that ties the two pieces together more neatly. Yes, both stories focus heavily on the extended exchange between the main character and those bouncing off of him, but it’s the big-picture complexities within those conversations that really make 'Blue Moon' shine as bright as the best of 'Before.' Spending the film entirely in Hart’s company allows us to understand the grandeur of his bad habits, how they affect the people around him, the way he moves through the world, and of course, the self-proclaimed (though not incorrect) immortality of his art. Linklater flicks like this one allow us to examine someone who isn’t ourselves under a microscope – see where we differ, where we’re the same, and where we wish we weren’t. It's worth noting that the script for 'Blue Moon' was written by (and inspired by letters between Hart and his muse, Elizabeth Weiland), while Linklater was the architect behind the 'Before' Trilogy (with help from , Hawke, and ). Where the 'Blue Moon' script differs is that it’s a movie about friendship rather than love or romance – an interesting notion, given that Hart himself encourages an aspiring theater director to focus on such stories in this very movie. Furthermore, this movie will provide plenty to chew on for fanatics of music, theater, and even literature, language and grammar, as E.B. White makes a prominent appearance in the film. The supporting cast is strong too, with anchoring the ensemble as Rodgers, as a charming and humorous bartender, and , once again proving her salt as a star of the silver screen under the tutelage of an auteur like Linklater. It’s surprising this movie isn’t receiving a bigger marketing push from – with the proper ignition from Linklater’s stalwart cinephile fanbase, I could see this being a bigger player in this season’s awards race (I’ll be shocked if Hawke isn’t nominated at the very least). Whether this movie is dripping in awards or box office glory at the end of the day, it serves as a steady reminder of Linklater’s gift for finding the biggest truths in the smallest moments. Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ + 🧡 /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38829045

Ep. 20: 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' Weaves Webs Between Books & Movies 10/16/2025

Ep. 20: 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' Weaves Webs Between Books & Movies Show Notes In this episode of Adaptation: the Book to Movie Podcast, Nate and Chris discuss 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' written by Manuel Puig, as well as its 1985 film adaptation directed by Hector Babenco and the 2025 screen adaptation of the Broadway musical, directed by Bill Condon and starring Jennifer Lopez. Expect conversations about the intricate connection between literature and film, the potent power of storytelling and the stark lack of Lantino representation in mainstream media. Check out . UP NEXT: 'Deliver Me from Nowhere' by Warren Zanes, with a film adaptation directed by Scott Cooper. Follow us on social media: Hosts: Nate Day, Chris Anderson Producer: Nate Day "Adaptation Theme" Written by: Chris Anderson, Performed by: Chris Anderson, Jem Zornow, Nate Day Transcript Welcome to Adaptation, the book-to-movie podcast. I'm Nate. And I'm Chris. And today we are discussing The Kiss of the Spider Woman, which I think will be a very sort of metatextual story to talk about, especially once we get to the movie side. There's a movie within a movie, and they have the same title, and it'll be a crazy one. But before we jump in, Chris, international traveler, how are you? Very good, very good. Went and saw a fun rugby game yesterday. Yeah, the Queens. Yeah, Denver's Big Brothers, the real Harlequins. That's fun, and they won, right? Yes, yes, and it was a bit of a nail-biter. It was the London Derby, because they're both technically London teams, the Harlequins and the Saracens. Super fun. Okay, and it was Quinn's Day, so very, at least here in Denver, Colorado, USA. Yes, I thought it lined up. I mean, I suppose, well, no, the game started here at 3, so it was, well, the boys were probably still at the bar after Quinn's Day. But yeah, I'm sure they were. Game was probably over. Yeah, I thought about that while we were there. But what have you been up to? I've just been getting unpacked and making up for a lost time at the movie theater. You know, last time we recorded, I hadn't been to the theater in a while, but I saw a bunch of movies. But I also read a book, Chris. What? I did. I have to look up what it's called, because I didn't even write it. I do this so rarely, I didn't even write it down. Okay, it's called Cured, Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life by Jeff Rediger, and it's about people that experienced spontaneous healing from chronic illness, and it was recommended to me by a friend that also has a chronic illness and gave me some interesting ideas to sort of maybe try and manage mine just a little bit better. So if you're out there struggling with any kind of chronic anything, and I mean, it was really interesting, because a lot of the people featured in his book like healed themselves from like cancer. Wow. And yeah, and the doctor, their doctors are like, I don't know what happened. And they're like, I just started like eating better and meditating. And of course, they are like rich people that could like quit their job, so they have no stress in their lives. Just not an option for me. But some real strong ideas there. So that was kind of an interesting read. That's very cool. That's very exciting. Yeah. If only you had put it on Goodreads, so I could have seen it and marked it for myself. Oh, I did rate it this. I just finished it this morning. Oh, okay. Okay. So I just see the market. All right. Never mind. I will see all your jets. But I've been to the theater a lot to this place I moved into is right down the street from a movie theater, which is like a dream come true for me. Fantastic. Yeah. So I saw One Battle After Another, which is the movie of the year. It was so fucking good. And I just loved it. It's like part action road chase part stoner comedy, part political commentary, part espionage thriller. It's covering that in like six weeks. Yes, that one is loosely based on Vineland. Yes, that's right. Pinchon. Pinchon. Yeah. Yep. And we're gonna cover that. It's gonna win every Oscar under the sun, I'm sure. So we'll cover it when Oscar season comes around. Yeah. Yeah. It's a pretty, pretty fantastic movie. Oh, that's exciting. I saw The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson, which I loved. There's a post on our brand new blog, by the way, we launched a blog on our website, link in the bio of our social media and down below in the episode description. Smashing Machine was great. I thought kind of a weird movie, but still really good. And it turns out Dwayne Johnson's a great actor. Fantastic. Yeah, I saw Roofman, the real story of a guy that escaped jail and hid in a Toys R Us for a couple months. What? Yeah, it's pretty wacky. It's it's fun. It's like a rom com too, because he of course, meets a lovely local lady. What did no, no, no, that is entirely inappropriate, of course. No, no, an escaped convict who lives in a Toys R Us for a couple months does not obviously meet a lovely lady and develop a spontaneous romance. Yeah, she works at Toys R Us. And you said this is a real story? Yeah, it's a true story. And she figured out who he was and gave him up to the cops. What? Well, yeah, I mean, he was, he was a wanted criminal. And she was a family, family lady, her mom. Wow, not the turn that I was expecting. Goodness gracious. And then a couple streaming movies, Steve, which is a Netflix drama about a reform school in England that loses its funding. Pretty decent. And The Lost Bus, which is on Apple. And that's another true story about a bus driver who drove through the California wildfires of 2018. I believe it was with a bus full of kids. Because those fires kind of started out of nowhere and became chaotic very quickly in a very populated area. So we had to rescue a bunch of kids. So lots of movies, all of them good. Oh, my God, happy cinephile. Yeah. That's what about your menagerie? Yes, sorry. I was thinking about the connection between them. And there's not. No, not at all. It's award season. So it's like, really, you know, or award movie season, I should say. So everything's kind of really ramping up releases are ramping up. Okay. What about you? What have you been reading? Um, I actually also watched a movie on the on the plane ride from New York to Madrid. I marked it on Letterboxd. Shadow Force, maybe? Oh, I saw the mark that one. Yeah, it's the it's the guy from the like, essentially French Sherlock Holmes series. Omar says sigh or see? Yeah, absolutely incredible. And then his wife and the mother of his child is Olivia Pope from Scandal. Yes. Kerry Washington. Yeah. Um, as as far as plot goes, pretty thin. Absolute blast of a movie. So much fun. Good. Could not care less. You get halfway through and you're like, plot who? I don't know her. I don't care. Yeah. You just got cool people shooting guns, action, romance, assassins, a bad guy with a private island, an adorable kid. Love it. Five out of five. Yeah, great. That's awesome. Reading. I actually got another rare five out of five today for my book club. We read Kafka on the Shore. Oh, okay. It's Haruki. Oh, gosh, I'm gonna I'm gonna butcher the name. I literally finished it on the bus back out here to the Airbnb. Haruki Murakami. Very, very well known. Huge book came out just under 25 years ago. People love it. Incredible reviews. Incredible reviews. And it is a wild ride. It's been on my list forever. So I was glad my buddy Michael recommended it for the book club. And it was outstanding. Probably about 75% of the way in I already knew this was a five out of five. I will be coming back to it. Not soon. That's great. But at some point, almost as much because actually, it'll really tie into today's discussion. It's almost as much out of curiosity and knowing that I could take more away from the text. But unlike the book we're talking about for this episode, also just fascinating, hilarious. It's a type of writing, I think that I'm more drawn to. Sure. Okay, highly recommend it. Great. Well, on that note, let's talk about Kiss of the Spider Woman. Yes. Tell me a little bit about Manuel Puig's novel. Okay, and I did look this up today. Puig. Oh, okay. Manuel Puig. Puig. Okay, that probably tracks. I looked it up because I felt so embarrassed listening back to Clockwork Orange and realizing I did not even pronounce the author's name the same way throughout the episode, much less you and I. You didn't? Oh. I think I pronounced it three different ways. I said like Burgess or Burgess or Burgois. I didn't say that, but. Well, at least you covered all your bases, right? Like you nailed it at some point. One of them was correct. But because of that, yes, I looked this one up. Manuel Puig. Yeah. Yeah. First, as I had mentioned it to you, but I think valuable information, or you suggested it was probably valuable information for our listeners. And I agree. Terribly difficult to get a hold of this text. Yeah, the movie, the original movie is not easy to get a hold of. I mean, now it's streaming, but it's historically been tough to find before. And it's one of the only, I should say we chose this partly because we want to celebrate its Latino Heritage Month, at least as a recording. I think this will come out the day after it ends. But in all of my sort of exploration of cinema, I found that there are not very many classics about Latinos. The representation is just not there. So we really wanted to, or at least positive representation. So we wanted to really be sure and sort of shine a spotlight on that. But yeah, like I said, it's tough to find those. And this is one of the only ones I could find. Well, we I mean, we just got we nearly had to scrap this episode. I almost couldn't find a copy. Right? Yeah. A long, long journey first through the classic avenues. Libby is my go to. I mean, we were in we love Libby. We love Libby. We love Libby. And even in Manhattan, looking for, you know, the millions of books available between the New York public library system, nothing, nothing online, nothing on the other channels where I find books, Spotify, audiobooks, audible. Sometimes you'll find PDFs or texts online. And there was one online library, but they had some pretty specific stipulations for why you as a reader needed that text compared to finding it elsewhere, which I did not meet. So I couldn't get that. Ended up going out of the country and seeking access through another country to find a copy and reading the entire thing page by page on my iPhone, which is unpleasant. That's dedication. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's it's wild to now know. I mean, I'm curious about the movie because even in my exploration of Puig himself, which we'll discuss next. I can't tell how ubiquitous this text is. And even amongst people for whom this is a genre, an area that they live, you know, I would be curious to ask someone that lives in Argentina how familiar are you? Yeah, yeah, totally. But yeah, let's actually yeah, let's discuss that because that really gets into it quickly in terms of his life and the writing of this book. So Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig, when you first sent it to me, I absolutely thought it would be part of the Spider-Man universe. Not the case. Oh, no, that's hysterical. Puig was born in I'm almost certainly going to mispronounce this. I would guess General Villegas, a city outside Buenos Aires in 1932. But his family early on sent him into Buenos Aires because his town was so small they didn't have a secondary school. Okay, so pretty early on went in there also pretty early on knew he wanted to be a film director enjoyed. I guess what was this? mid 40s and 50s. I have no concept of where that falls on Hollywood's timeline, but he was enamored with the movies coming out from American age. Yeah. Okay. Golden Age movies and particularly musicals. Okay, which is curious because so he goes to school. He specified I know it was Marilyn Monroe and one other actress who he felt stayed true to what he loved about films and filmmaking. Okay, and the rest of American actors and actresses by the time he was going to school and looking for work himself. He had really become disenchanted with. Okay, and I don't know. Yeah, it was interesting. This fact I also wanted to check with you because I'd never seen it anywhere. But I also see a few facts about film. He went to college first in Argentina and then eventually on a scholarship to Italy to pursue filmmaking as a career. Also, as like a sidetrack stopped off to learn German, French and Italian because they were considered quote, unquote, the new languages of cinema. This would be like 47 to 50. Have you ever heard anything along these lines? Not in such terms, but those are nations that have had sort of a major presence in the art of cinema for generations. So I hit that tracks, I guess. I mean, if he was that dedicated, I wouldn't do that. But okay, fair enough. I thought that was great. I mean, yeah, insane dedication. Right? Yeah. We see this curious timeline here where it really goes off the tracks. And this is why I tied it into I'm curious for whom this would be, you know, core central to their canon, so to speak. Um, he wrote for a relatively short amount of time, at least in comparison to other writers we've discussed. So his first novel, La Tresión de Rita Hayworth, published in 68. And he died very young, 57 years old, I believe, in 1990. So altogether, only publishing for, you know, about 20 years there, not a lot in the last two years either, right? Sure. So a fairly short timeline. And additionally, so he goes to school to become a filmmaker. In 53, goes back to Argentina to do his compulsory military service. And somewhere in here very quickly senses that it is not a nation that's going to be very friendly to his left-leaning views. Brief recap of these two decades in this South American nation. 66, they see their first military coup. Another one in 70. Perón comes back. He's elected as president for his third time in 73. Dies in 74. His wife takes over. More things, but culminating in the dirty war starting in 76, continuing for a long time. A period of very nasty business on the part of the administration and national government at large. Yeah. So he left. Good choice on his part. Went to Mexico. Yeah. And spent the vast majority of his writing career in exile from Argentina. Okay. Which is, again, why I stopped myself. As I said, I'd be curious to ask in Argentina, what's your perspective of Puig? Because he didn't, once he started publishing, both his screenplays and novels didn't stay there for good reason. Ultimately, when he did pass in 1990, he was living in Mexico. And immediately the public assumed that he died of AIDS, even though no evidence has ever been brought forth suggesting that he had HIV. Oh. But this gives a very clear picture of what the public thought of him. Right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Especially after this book in particular. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Right. But I mean, lunacy. Right. I would hope someone would look back now and say, oh, because the writer was gay, he passes away and you assume it was AIDS. That's nuts. Right. Right. Yeah. That's pretty wild. So the book, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Yeah. I've seen a little bit of back and forth, but the majority of sources that I looked at did agree that this was his most famous publication. Yeah. It's the only one. I've not heard of the other ones. I mean, me neither. But I also hadn't heard of this. So I don't know where the barometer is. Yeah. I'm curious, and I assume you'll at least touch on, like, for all of this fairly unawarded author, someone that I had not heard of. Yeah. And how this ended up becoming, I believe they've adapted it twice, right? Yep. Yeah. So how did this become what it became? And we have seen this previously, authors that maybe would not have become as big due to the fact that they are screenwriters themselves, you know, kind of. Right. Yeah. Where if his interest had only been writing, you know, would we have ever heard of this? Would it ever have become a movie? Right. But yeah, let's talk about the book. This was a tough read, predominantly because of how Puig designed the narrative form. The overall story was predominantly dialogue, which is difficult to begin with. Predominantly dialogue between only two characters in one jail cell. Notoriously difficult to pull off in literature and still have a good story, which he did do. Very, very clearly an astonishing author. It doesn't, there's no he said, she said within the text. It's just two people talking back and forth. And the only thing that distinguishes someone else's talking now is a little em dash at the beginning of the line. Oh, interesting. I wonder if that's, you know, Argentinian style or if he just kind of wrote it like a manuscript or like, I wonder what that why. He himself discussed the difficulty in getting across the tone that he wanted. The original was obviously written in Spanish and both the process of translating to English and French. He said it was very difficult to obtain the same tonal quality, especially for Molina. The entire thing began as an exercise he gave himself of writing a romantic female lead. And that's where the character of Molina came from. Wait, wait, wait. Then say that again. He wrote Molina because he was trying to write a romantic woman. Yes. Okay. And and according to Molina and how he talks about himself, that's what we got. Hey, yeah, yeah. But from a narrative from from a reader's perspective, it took once I got into the rhythm, it totally made sense by the end of the book. I didn't notice anymore. But the first 50, 60 pages, it was very difficult to track who's speaking now, which character is which. Okay. And I yeah, I couldn't tell if this was I would have been fascinated, would still be fascinated to see a copy in the original Spanish and see if it's treated the exact same way. Yeah. So like if this was a deliberate literary device that was carried over or if this was his way of making it because it does make some immediate tonal changes as the reader, this familiarity, the stream of consciousness dialogue. There's an aspect that it does, as opposed to inviting you into the conversation, sort of puts a firm hand on your shoulder and pushes you down into the chair in that cell and says, you got to focus. You got to pay attention. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Which is interesting. I mean, it's a it's a cool idea. It's I don't know. Yeah. I don't I don't know how I feel about it. And understandable later on. I still I still don't know where I fall, where my final verdict is on how effective it was. Okay. That is not because this on its own would necessarily be super distracting. It is because there are sort of three separate unorthodox literary devices being used here. Okay. Okay. So we have the somewhat difficult to follow dialogue. Then we have over the course of the tale, we have just these two characters talking to each other. So that helps us a little bit. Right. Yep. They're both inmates in an Argentine prison. Right. Yep. In the meantime, throughout the story, narrative wise, there are these footnotes throughout that are very lengthy. They are nearly as long as the chapters themselves. Some of them. They only happen for about the first half of the book. Okay. And each footnote is a kind of quote unquote scientific discussion of homosexuality in society. Okay. And now again, this was published 40, 60 years ago. And it seemed like a lot of information even from before his time. So it certainly would have become antiquated either way. But one chooses scientists whose findings are certainly in part accepted as shaky now because science continues. Right. Yeah. And two even went as far as making up scientists and studies to add in here. And. Man, well, come on, dude. Well, I couldn't tell. I mean, deliberately. So you're not intent.... /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38571595

Jennifer Lopez Dazzles in Technicolor in ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ 10/11/2025

Jennifer Lopez Dazzles in Technicolor in ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ BY NATE DAY A few months ago, I thought to myself, “the world really needs another musical.” This weekend, ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ fell in my lap and affirmed that very notion. ‘’ follows two prisoners (, ) in 1980s Argentina who pass the time by recounting a fictional movie starring a Latina icon () in dual roles as a woman torn between love and fate that shines a peculiar light on the relationship between the cellmates. The piece of this film that is going to draw everyone’s attention is the musical numbers. Bright, bold and beautiful in Technicolor, they pay homage to classic MGM grandeur and movie musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Age in every way possible: Head-to-toe dance sequences, surreal set design, stunning costumes and a megawatt superstar at their center. While the musical sequences themselves are lush and ravishing, the songs often leave something to be desired, which is a fairly big deal for a song-and-dance musical like this one. I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write this and am finding myself hitting the skip button a few too many times. The title track is a certified banger (and is Lopez’s best moment in the movie), while “Where You Are” and “I Do Miracles” are other standouts. Most of the remaining songs feel stale – perhaps because they exist at the intersection of ‘40s movie musicals and ‘90s Broadway showtunes. Considering the songwriting duo ( and ) behind these tunes was the same one behind ‘,’ however, makes these duds all the more surprising. Condon, a creative force behind musical films ‘,’ ‘Chicago,’ ‘’ (2017) and ‘,’ clearly knows how to put one of these together, training an adoring camera on Lopez during her showstopping numbers, particularly the titular song. Furthermore, his screenplay elevates the material from the as he navigates a smoother connection between the narrative of the fictional film and that of the film itself – that’s to say that Ingrid Luna’s movie nicely mirrors what Molina experiences in real life. Few movies in 2025 (or the ten or so years prior) have been as dazzlingly colorful as ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ giving it a refreshing feel despite coming 40 years after the first adaptation of its source material. Many reviews have pointed out that the Technicolor sequences leave viewers with both visual and tonal whiplash when they end and the movie cuts back to the bland color palette of the South American political prison, where Valentin is tortured and poisoned by the guards, who want information about his revolutionary movement. That whiplash certainly isn’t non-existent, but I believe it’s exactly what the audience is supposed to feel – the prisoners turn to the story when they’re bored, scared, in need of distraction; a true testament to the power of cinema, even when cinema is inaccessible. I did find a snag in the narrative-switching, however, and that was that I wanted to see both movies. I found myself equally invested in both halves of the story – the gritty prison drama and the lush fantasy musical. Each time we cut between the two, I found myself wishing we’d stayed in the other lane. The movie’s technical aspects are nothing to shake a stick at, however, the cinematography offers plenty to chew on, from wide shots of dancers to heartbreaking closeups of the inmates, with striking angles and lighting peppered in between. Costumes, hair and makeup are all also fascinating here, as they ace their efforts to reproduce the glamour of the Hollywood musical spectacle. The performances from the main trio (Tonatiuh, Luna and Lopez) are spectacular, each worthy of individual praise and recognition. Lopez navigates the sub-metatextual layers of her character with a precision that we rarely see from her, all while tapping into her superstar stage persona to bring down the house with dance numbers. For all of the jokes about JLo being overrated or less talented than she’s posed to be, she can really display true artistry when she’s willing to step outside of herself and surrender to the story. Tonatiuh gives a riveting performance as Molina and bravely portrays a character that some will (unfortunately) see as controversial with the charisma of a bona fide movie star. Luna also taps into his best-known on-screen persona (‘’) to play a genuine and open-minded revolutionary, though his vocals do waver a bit next to those of Tonatiuh and even Lopez. Finally, this story is a very timely one, which is a narrative spun around many films these days between political turmoil, climate crises, pandemics, et cetera – but ‘Spider Woman’ offers a unique perspective, highlighting how change and revolution can exist alongside other sweeping emotions like love and passion. ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ isn’t perfect, but it’s a lavish reminder that the movie musical still has the power to dazzle, and perhaps even liberate. : ⭐⭐⭐⭐ + 🧡 /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38552040

‘Roofman’ (dir. Derek Cianfrance) Review: Channing Tatum Reaches for Depth in Uneven ‘Roofman’ 10/10/2025

‘Roofman’ (dir. Derek Cianfrance) Review: Channing Tatum Reaches for Depth in Uneven ‘Roofman’ BY NATE DAY I’m not terribly familiar with the work of , call it a cinephile blind spot, but I greatly enjoyed ‘’ (as much as anyone can enjoy having their heart ripped out and stamped on), so I was very excited to see ‘.’ The movie, based on a true story, follows Jeff, a man who turned to robbery to support his fracturing family. Jeff escapes prison and hides out for several months in a Toys-R-Us, living in the walls of the bike display by day, and wooing a store employee by night. ‘Blue Valentine’ hit me with the same emotional wallop that most viewers walk away with, so I was expecting something similar here. While I really enjoyed the perspective into the loving and compassionate life of a so-called criminal, I felt slightly underwhelmed with the movie overall. This is certainly Cianfrance’s most commercial film – a real-life dramedy starring – which is probably why some of the film’s technical aspects felt flat to me. The camera wasn’t doing very much that was exciting (most shots were static and left me bored), costumes and production design were fairly plain (although for a story set in Charlotte, NC in the 1990’s, that’s accurate), and there were even moments when the sound mixing got on my nerves (again, that may have been for dramatic effect, but when it creates a lesser viewing experience, does that matter?). I also found Tatum to be a bit out of his depth here. He shines a handful of times in the movie (particularly when he’s alone), but I found most of his jokes to fall flat or be somewhat trite in their delivery. He wasn’t helped by a script that relied on the audience being wowed by its protagonist’s actions either, but in 2025, is a man-on-the-run living in a toy store really that astounding? ‘Roofman’ also, strangely, has a very stacked supporting cast. The movie boasts , (again, a usually talented actor in a role that doesn’t quite service him), , , and . For those keeping track, that’s two Oscar nominations and eight Emmy wins (and 15 additional nominations) – all to back up… Channing Tatum? I’m puzzled by what attracted these actors to roles that are so small and often inconsequential to the story overall – was it the chance to work with Cianfrance? Dunst, as usual, delivers a jaw-dropping performance as Leigh. Part of why Tatum’s performance occasionally appears dull is that it’s hard to be anything but brass when you’re standing next to glittering gold. One scene in particular, when Dunst is piecing together the puzzle that her life has been mid-mass, puts her talents on full display. She communicates so many layers of emotion – confusion, pain, understanding, empathy – with just her eyes, as the rest of her is busy singing in the choir. Additionally, her chemistry with Tatum is palpable throughout, which does a lot to lift him up. Although I’ve pointed out a handful of flaws here, I want to be clear, this is still a really enjoyable movie! It’s tender and heartwarming and it’s a story that really did deserve the Hollywood treatment, so you can expect to have a good time with this one – especially if the nuances I mentioned above don’t usually bother you when you watch a film. ‘Roofman’ may not soar to the heights of ‘Blue Valentine,’ but I’ll always appreciate an insightful and tender peek into Americana, especially ones that hold a mirror up to its audience. : ⭐⭐⭐1/2 + 🧡 /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38543125

Ep. 19: A Clockwork Orange Carries Complexities on Pages Screens and Behind the Scenes 10/08/2025

Ep. 19: A Clockwork Orange Carries Complexities on Pages Screens and Behind the Scenes In this episode of 'Adaptation: The Book to Movie Podcast,' Nate and Chris discuss 'A Clockwork Orange,' originally written by Anthony Burgess, before being adapted for the screen by the one and only Stanley Kubrick, the legendary filmmaker behind 'The Shining,' '2001: A Space Odyssey' and many more. They discuss how Burgess created his own vernacular for the characters of his fictitious world, what the title actually means and the biggest difference between the movie and its source material. ***** 00:00:00 - Nate Welcome to Adaptation, the book-to-movie podcast. I'm Nate, and I'm Chris, and today we are talking about a certified classic. What book and movie are we talking about, Chris? 00:00:25 - Chris Yeah, this is A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. 00:00:30 - Nate And the film adaptation written and directed by Stanley Kubrick. But before we dive in, what you been up to? How are you, buddy? 00:00:39 - Chris Um, good, good. I think maybe a little bit better now that I'm done reading this book. We got another hefty one here for ourselves. Not in the same way as Caught Stealing was, but we'll get into that. Yeah, yeah. Still down. We've got a couple more days here in Florida before we head back up. What have you been up to? 00:01:01 - Nate I've just been packing. I'm moving this weekend as of recording. So just doing that and getting in a couple car accidents that are not my fault. And that's an important distinction. If you know me, that's important that I add that extra bit there. Very important, yes. But you've been reading lately besides Clockwork Orange? 00:01:25 - Chris A little bit. I've only finished one. I didn't talk about this last time, right? Tender is the Flesh? 00:01:33 - Nate Oh, I don't think so. Maybe you did, actually. Why does that sound familiar? Is that a famous one? 00:01:39 - Chris This is that one that Ariel sent you and I. 00:01:43 - Nate Okay, no, I didn't read that. 00:01:45 - Chris This came out in 2017. It is an Argentine author. Yes. Agustina Basterica. It's basically a modest proposal on steroids. It's exactly what the title sounds like. It is a wild ride. It made a Clockwork Orange feel a little bit tame. So if that tells you anything, yeah. 00:02:12 - Nate Did you tell Ariel? We were supposed to have Ariel on for this episode, but had some scheduling snafus. So we'll get her on a later one. But did you tell her that you read it? 00:02:21 - Chris I don't think I have yet. I only just finished it a couple days ago, and I've been on such a journey trying to track down our next one, Kiss of the Spider Woman, that I think it kind of slid by unnoticed a bit. 00:02:35 - Nate Oh, well, I look forward to hearing what her reaction is to your reaction. 00:02:42 - Chris I mean, she seemed to, well, I can't tell if she seemed to enjoy the book terribly, but she definitely was trying to get us to read it pretty hard. 00:02:49 - Nate Yeah, I'm just not going to do that. 00:02:52 - Chris No, I know. I knew. But what have you been watching? 00:02:58 - Nate I have been busy, like I said, getting ready to move and whatnot. So I haven't been to the theater actually since the last time we spoke. I did catch up finally and watch the new Superman movie last night, maybe the day before. It's okay. It's fine. That's pretty much all I have to say. 00:03:21 - Chris Makes sense. Again, we've discussed, I've never found you to be a big superhero cat. 00:03:30 - Nate Yeah, exactly. I'm sort of burnt out on it, and I don't love the writer-director. So I think it was one of those movies that I was not going to love regardless, you know? 00:03:39 - Chris Yep. Yep. Yep. 00:03:41 - Nate But that's about it for me. 00:03:44 - Chris Excellent. 00:03:45 - Nate Well, let's talk Clockwork Orange. You read the book, and now it's time for you to teach me about it. A few quick notes before we dive in, actually. Both the book and the movie, A Clockwork Orange, contains some pretty graphic sequences, including psychological, torturous procedures, and violence that's both physical and sexual. And Chris and I talk about those in some detail throughout our discussion here. So please do what you need in order to protect your peace while you listen to this podcast. Also, we felt this discussion about A Clockwork Orange in particular wouldn't be very effective if we avoided spoilers to our usual degree, or try to at least. So please be forewarned that this episode will contains spoilers for both the book and the movie. Thank you for listening, and enjoy our discussion. 00:04:32 - Chris Yes, okay. Well, strap in. As I told you before we started recording, I've tried to pare this down a lot. There is a lot to talk about here. So real high level, I tried to give you the super-fast of the author himself, and then get into the book a little bit. A Clockwork Orange, the novel, was published in 1962 by Anthony Burgess, born in Manchester, UK, born in the UK, which we really keep finding a lot of British authors. Yeah, we do. We should diversify a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Seems to happen a lot. I found a very cool quote from him here to kick off our discussion that I think summarizes a lot of my thoughts trying to talk about him as an individual. Okay. He said, "...I have a feeling that many other people whose trade is in words are not sufficiently concerned with finding out what words are. They are happy to join words together, but not, in my view, interested in analyzing their sounds, forms, and meanings. "And this is from a book that he wrote and published in 1969 called Language Made Plain. He was, near and dear to my heart, a linguist. 00:05:58 - Nate Yeah, that does sound right up your alley. 00:06:01 - Chris Yeah, super stoked. We'll get into that as we go here, but I thought that was so cool finding an entire book of his very far away from A Clockwork Orange, and we'll explain why in a second. Again, super fast, highlight reel. The Crazy Life of John Burgess Wilson, born 1917 in Manchester, England. Mom and sister died during influenza epidemic. Believed his father held this against him that they passed and he did not. Was raised by paternal aunt until here married the landlady that owned the shops. They were a relatively affluent middle-class family because pre-war, war years, they ran basically a booze and tobacco shop. Shocker. Pretty recession-proof, yep. He joined the army during World War II, was stationed in Gibraltar. There was a blackout in England while he was stationed there, and his pregnant wife at the time was brutally assaulted and raped by four American soldiers who had deserted the front, causing her to lose the child and inspiring one of the more horrific scenes of the book we're discussing today. You still with me? Yeah. Okay, he was essentially a professional educator and journalist from here on. They said he had this sort of anti-establishment streak, but nonetheless was picked out in the army for his natural gifts, skills in linguistics, so he ended up becoming a sergeant major, I believe, before retiring. Went back to England, then went to Malaya as part of the British Colonial Service, was moved on to Brunei, which is a little bit further east, while in Malaya, learned Malay proficiently. Very difficult Southeast Asian language. Went to Brunei. A lot of controversy around this. Different sources I found. The primary accepted story is that while there in the civil service, he received a medical examination that showed he had a terminal inoperable brain tumor. He claimed, at least at some point, that this was a false medical report because he had been doing some writing that was not appreciated by all parties while there, and this was their way of getting him out of the service. There's a lot going on. Some others at the time who knew him believed he had – I didn't write down the medical term – that he was a habitual liar, and he faked this entire thing in order to get back to England and begin writing full-time. Regardless of where the truth is in there, an equally wild story of what came next was that supposedly, at least from the public view, he did believe he had a terminal inoperable brain tumor and would die in one year, and spat out five novels back-to-back in order to provide fiscally for his wife, who he believed would soon be a widow. Attaboy. Still with me? Yeah. Okay. That includes this novel, which he called – again, I didn't write it down, crazy French literary term – Esprit de Triomphe, something like that. Supposedly, he wrote A Clockwork Orange in exactly three weeks, just a blazing torrent of pages and ideas. 00:10:07 - Nate That's crazy. That's wild. 00:10:10 - Chris Yes. I mean, even if that's an exaggeration and the truth is three months as opposed to three weeks, that's crazy. But he does go back and begin writing full-time finally after this very sordid career through many other outlets. He's teaching at universities around England, meets an Italian woman who was familiar with his work. They begin an affair, but he refuses to leave his wife. Again, unconfirmed, but supposedly because he was maybe afraid of this paternal uncle who was a cardinal in the church. His wife is an alcoholic, ends up dying from whatever the psoriasis liver failure, the alcoholic disease. And it was crazy not finding these details, but just looking at his marital details. That first wife died in 68, and he got married that same year. It's because he had already been in a relationship with this woman for four years with whom he already had a son. And he marries her and finally officially recognizes the son of his that he had not officially recognized for the first four years of that poor boy’s life. CBT Oh my god. Imagine being the kid that inherits this legacy. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And it's from a second marriage and an illegitimate relationship. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. If I remember correctly, I believe this son has also passed. Yes. Paolo Andrea passed in 2002.Yeah. A lot going on there. So that's the big picture of him. And just this one novel, he also wrote plays. He also did a lot of journalism, writing articles for The Guardian. He wrote a review that I cut from our discussion for time of The Hobbit for The Guardian in like 74 or something like that. Cool. He wrote over 250 musical compositions. What? Musical compositions? Uh-huh. Orchestral compositions. He wished to be remembered as a composer who also happened to write novels, as opposed to what is clearly the truth, that he is known as a novelist. And I would imagine almost no one knows he was a composer at all. Right? I have to imagine that was news to you. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense given some of the stuff in A Clockwork Orange. But how many did you say? Musical compositions? 250.Some being fairly interesting. Oh, you looked some up? I have been listening to him all week. Wow. As of the time of writing these notes, he had roughly 399 monthly listeners on Spotify. So I believe that made me number 400. His discussion of music, as you just stated, they discuss classical music a lot in Clockwork Orange, and it is fairly interesting and astute. Oh, I actually wrote this down as like a little mini question for you. Do they get into that dialogue and analysis in the film? About classical music? 00:13:33 - Nate Yes. Not really beyond the fact that the protagonist is a fan of Beethoven. 00:13:41 - Chris Okay. Okay, that's fair. Yes, Alex throughout the book, yeah, talks a lot about classical music. Okay, that actually seems fair. I really expected it to be along the lines, this will only be interesting for like my buddies, Jay and Tucker and my dad, but that's fine. I thought it would be along the lines of like Arnold Schoenberg or Alban Berg, this weird modern, what the heck is happening? Most of it is fairly interesting. He's been compared to Hindemith. And shoot, there was a second one that I can't remember off the top of my head now. And itis along those lines. He has some weird stuff. He has some guitar quartets and the Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard, which is a mildly humorous allusion to Bach's famous, The Well-Tempered Clavier. But okay, yeah, absolutely fascinating. He wished to be known for that. Me and 399 other people have listened to him this month, and that's it. Crazy. 00:14:42 - Nate Well, a lot more people probably read Clockwork Orange this month. 00:14:46 - Chris Oh, yeah. And again, we will get to that. So wrote a whole bunch of music, wrote just north of 30 novels besides his nonfiction work, taught himself piano at the age of 14 because he wanted to be a composer and his parents said there's no money in it, so they wouldn't pay for lessons, taught himself Persian, and getting back to what we almost nearly just touched on, ultimately detested unquestionably his most famous work, A Clockwork Orange. Really? He compared it to Rachmaninoff's Requiem and one of Beethoven's pieces that they were both very well known for, but they were pieces written very much in those individuals' youth before they really came into their own, and essentially considered people ignorant consumers. Exact same thing. This was something he wrote literally because he needed the money. He was not very proud of it. It sounded, his description smacked of the lead singer of Flock of Seagulls complaining that everyone wants to hear their one hit and that's it. It's like, hey dude, you did something that people love, what do you expect? So that was pretty fascinating, yes. Not pleased that that is the piece that he became known for at all. 00:16:23 - Nate That just blows my mind. I would just simply shut my mouth and take all of the money that I would have gotten from this and move on. 00:16:33 - Chris Well, he very much believed that the book's success was in large part due to the Kubrick film adaptation, and we will get into why that particular motive really rubbed him the wrong way. But I will give my final notes on him as an individual and transition from here into the book description. So Burgess was a polyglot, which means you are proficient in six languages. He spoke over ten. He invented NADSAT, the slang sort of youth language used throughout A Clockwork Orange. 00:17:13 - Nate Oh, he invented it. Okay. 00:17:17 - Chris Yes. That was why I went down the rabbit hole of seeing if there was any connection between him and Tolkien, another author that we've obviously already discussed who made up languages for his books. 00:17:28 - Nate Yeah. 00:17:29 - Chris Okay. 00:17:30 - Nate That's interesting, and that will probably come up later. 00:17:34 - Chris Oh, it fascinated me to find out because the entire time it was really tough initially. I had to go very slow. I did the audio book of this one, which is super cool. One had an incredible, I think it was the 88 version, had an incredible preface by Burgess himself, which is where a lot of my facts here came from. The book itself is read by Tom Hollander, and then the end of the recording that I had from the library, about an hour of it was Burgess himself reading excerpts from the book. 00:18:13 - Nate Oh, cool. 00:18:15 - Chris So it was a banger of an audio book edition. Usually I'm not one to recommend a particular printing or reprint of a book, but this was anyone listening interested in the audio book, if you can get your hands on this one in particular, it was incredible. 00:18:30 - Nate Yeah. 00:18:31 - Chris This was, first of all, not the first language that he invented for a book. I found at least one other one, and he also deliberately chose to make up his own sort of youth vernacular slang as opposed to just copying whatever would have been current in early 1960s England, because he knew that whatever the slang of the day was would immediately become outdated. 00:18:59 - Nate Yep. Makes it timeless. 00:19:01 - Chris Yes. 00:19:02 - Nate And he's 100% correct. 00:19:04 - Chris You can't pin this down to one time. You don't read it thinking, oh, this is what people said50 years ago, you know, which I think happens in—I immediately evoked the Beatnik, The Road, some of the books like that, where you absolutely are like, all right, I'm on board with the writing, but this slang is just corny. 00:19:28 - Nate You know what I mean? Yeah. 00:19:30 - Chris Yeah. Yep. So I think he obviously made a great call there. He also said of the story more broadly that to show people changing is to create a novel, and when it lacks this, it becomes a fable or an allegory, and that's going to come up in reference to the movie, because he considers Kubrick's rendition and creation exactly that, a fable, where what he set out to make and did make was a novel. 00:20:06 - Nate Huh. Okay. Okay. 00:20:09 - Chris I see. 00:20:10 - Nate I see what he's saying. I'm just deciding if I agree. 00:20:13 - Chris Keep that—just keep it in mind. Keep it in mind. 00:20:15 - Nate Okay. I think you're going to come around. 00:20:17 - Chris Okay. And then the book itself, finally, the book itself, he described it as a cash grab. He needed the money at the time. He had just been diagnosed with the tumor, given a year to live, cranked these books out to raise funds for his soon-to-be widow, right? 00:20:37 - Nate Right. 00:20:38 - Chris Yeah. It is the tale of a youth, Alex, who we follow, or I guess, is that his name in the movie? 00:20:43 - Nate Yes, it is. 00:20:45 - Chris Okay. 00:20:46 - Nate Yes. 00:20:47 - Chris He pursues his daily fancies of committing ultra-violence and general mischief, essentially as far as we can tell, mischief for the sake of mischief, right? 00:20:57 - Nate Right. 00:20:58 - Chris One of the early scenes, I'm curious if this is what they start with in the movie, he and his friends, his three buddies, what does he call them, his Droogs, have plenty of money on them, but they go to the bar, buy a bunch of drinks for these old ladies, basically as an excuse to spend all their cash so that they can go rob a convenience store to get more cash. 00:21:22 - Nate Oh, no, it's not. That scene isn't in the movie, but it would fit in perfectly. Interesting. 00:21:29 - Chris It seemed like such an appropriate opening. Okay. But yeah, you see what I mean. 00:21:35 - Nate Crime for the sake of crime, yeah. 00:21:40 - Chris He was very particular about the symbology of writing the book in 21 chapters. So he deliberately wrote the book in 21 chapters because 21 is the age of majority in the UK at the time where you can go out and make your own decisions. And regardless of how fast this was written, how much he tried to ignore it or disown it later, this is very much a book about free will and you making your own decisions and how that interacts with society, right? 00:22:19 - Nate Totally. 00:22:21 - Chris So 21 chapters, deliberately so, because in the 21st chapter, and I think this will be a massive shock for you. So sit back, get stable, Nate. 00:22:33 - Nate Okay. 00:22:34 - Chris Four on the floor. He completely renounces his ways, suddenly decides, oh, this is dumb. Why am I committing crime? I want to settle down. 00:22:43 - Nate I want to have a family. That's how it ends. 00:22:47 - Chris Yep. And he walks away from the life of crime. 00:22:50 - Nate Yep. 00:22:51 - Chris That's crazy. Uh huh. Right. And here's why that is a shocker for you. Having only seen the movie, the American publishers did not want that. The 21st was removed from the American version. 00:23:09 - Nate That's kind of a bummer to do to his vision. 00:23:13 - Chris Isn't that crazy? 00:23:14 - Nate I guess I didn't realize that like, like international, that they could just do that. 00:23:22 - Chris Yep. Well, they had such a fiscal incentive for him. He was like, I needed the money in 61. And so this was completely changing the story. But I said, okay, because it's what they demanded. 00:23:34 - Nate Oh, I guess. Okay. 00:23:36 - Chris I guess that tracks. And then even though I believe he said Kubrick filmed it in the UK, he still... /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38512440

Sibling Rivalry: The Safdie Brothers Explore the Same Heartbreaking Themes in Separate Films 10/08/2025

Sibling Rivalry: The Safdie Brothers Explore the Same Heartbreaking Themes in Separate Films BY NATE DAY and both released films in 2025 – just mere days apart – but for the first time in their careers, they did not collaborate. Josh Safdie’s ‘’ made its world debut at the 2025 New York Film Festival to online from the lucky few in attendance. The screening allegedly took place mere hours after Josh completed it – and mere days after Josh’s brother, Benny, opened his own film, ‘,’ to less-than-stellar audience scores and box office returns. Josh, 41, and Benny, 39, have co-directed several feature films, most notably ‘’ (2017) and ‘’ (2019). These two films cemented the brothers not just as up-and-comers to watch, but as high-octane storytellers who had mastered the induction of anxiety and the catalysts of chaos in their films. A side note to keep in mind: Both of those films helped to rehabilitate the images of their stars, (known as the heartthrob star of the cringy ‘’ films) and (the once-respected ‘’ alum who had resorted to streaming-only paycheck gigs), respectively. Now, the brothers have embarked on their first solo films amid rumors of a rift that bubbled up as they , and about the world of baseball card trading (God, I hope we see that movie someday). Feud rumors were mostly squashed during the ‘Smashing Machine’ press run, when Benny clarified that he and his brother never intended to make movies together forever before he at the film’s premiere. When their movies are put next to one another, however, it becomes clear that the two brothers had similar ideas on their minds, as ‘Marty Supreme’ and ‘The Smashing Machine’ appear to be very similar stories, albeit told very differently. Disclaimer: I have not yet seen ‘Marty Supreme,’ but early reactions paint a vivid picture. That said, we know that ‘Marty Supreme’ is the globe-trotting story of a fictional ping pong champion determined to leave his mark on not just the sport, but the world at large. ‘The Smashing Machine,’ on the other hand, is a tender portrait of , the real-life UFC pioneer who struggled with substance abuse and toxic relationships while trying desperately to make a name for himself doing what he loved. They sound similar enough, right? In fact, I can describe both films in a single sentence: An athlete struggles with the pressures and desires to be the best, literally unable to fathom not achieving their dreams. Allow me to elaborate. In ‘The Smashing Machine’ (, by the way), Kerr – played by Dwayne Johnson, another actor whose career needed a serious credibility boost – is asked by a journalist how he’d feel if he loses his upcoming fight. Kerr is unable to answer the question. Having never lost a fight before in his career, Kerr has unknowingly crafted a titanium self-image that made the idea of a loss impossible to process. As he often did with those adjacent to his sport, Kerr eloquently explained to the journalist that his question was simply impossible to answer – Kerr had no idea how he’d react because not winning was not going to be part of his story. Of course, this made his first loss in the ring a gladiatorial effort to move beyond once outside the ring. In the trailer for ‘Marty Supreme,’ Timothee Chalamet’s character, loosely based on table tennis pioneer , asserts himself as the next big thing before being asked a similar question: “What do you plan to do if this whole dream of yours doesn’t work out?” “That doesn’t even enter my consciousness,” he replies. Fascinating that the movies the Safdie brothers split up to make on their own deal with the same central idea, isn’t it? But is it a coincidence, or is it an indicator of how these two individual movies came to be? We’ve seen the paths of the Safdie Brothers diverging ever so slightly for a while now, with Benny taking on more acting roles in movies like ‘’ and television shows like ‘’ while Josh has stayed behind-the-scenes. Speaking of television, Benny wrote and starred in '' for Paramount+ (he executive-produced the show with Josh, but it’ll suffice to say Benny left a bigger fingerprint on the project as a whole). Meanwhile, their movie about baseball cards seemed to be moving full-steam-ahead at Netflix until an abrupt and unexplained production stop that left fans with broken hearts and fingers crossed (not to mention, probably opened up Sandler’s schedule for ‘’ and a potential Oscar nomination). Feud or no feud, rumors or truth, what exactly is the result of this halt? Two movies about men at the top of their games (both played by high-grossing box office-toppers to boot), masters of their craft, so driven by their individual visions that it puts their relationships with others at risk – all for a shot at success they cannot imagine their lives without. I’m not exactly talking about the protagonists of the movies, if you catch my drift. We have yet to see how ‘Marty Supreme’ plays out, but we know that Mark Kerr’s marriage, the subject of ‘The Smashing Machine,’ eventually ended. And we know that Benny sees that story as a tender and heartbreaking one – one heavily influenced by the toxicities of hypermasculinity and addictions, cravings, and obsession. Based on the early reviews of ‘Marty Supreme,’ it seems that history will likely remember that movie more fondly than ‘The Smashing Machine.’ C’est la vie in Hollywood, I suppose. Or perhaps it can be chalked up to Chalamet’s meteoric rise in contrast to Johnson’s own semi-downward spiral. What I think is more fascinating, however, is how they’ll exist as companion pieces for ages. These brothers split from their creative partnership, only to make movies that tell us exactly what was going on in their heads and their hearts in the lead-up to both movies – a rare and exciting peek into the minds of Hollywood’s mad geniuses. Will the brothers ever reunite? Will they remain solo creators for the rest of their careers? Will one inherit the Safdie trademarks more than the other? And will the stories each brother creates going forward continue to hint at their self-inflicted torment at having sacrificed a partnership for the sake of their individual greatness? /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38512365

Welcome to the Adaptation Blog! 10/07/2025

Welcome to the Adaptation Blog! BY NATE DAY Welcome to the official companion blog for Adaptation: The Book to Movie Podcast. This is where you'll be able to find complete transcripts of each of our episodes going forward, as well as special announcements and bonus content. Chris and I are excited to keep bringing you content, even as he travels Europe on an extended honeymoon with his wife! Here's a look at our schedule for the months ahead: 10/16: "Kiss of the Spider Woman" by Manuel Puig, films directed by Hector Babenco and Bill Condon. 10/30: "Deliver Me from Nowhere" by Warren Zanes, film directed by Scott Cooper. 11/13: "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, film directed by Guillermo del Toro. 11/26: "The Running Man" & Stephen King's 2025: "The Long Walk" (dir. Francis Lawrence), "The Monkey" (dir. Oz Perkins) and "The Life of Chuck" (dir. Mike Flannigan). 12/11: "Wicked" by Gregory Maguire, films directed by Jon M. Chu ("Wicked" and "Wicked: For Good"). 12/31: "The Housemaid" by Freida McFadden, film directed by Paul Feig. Chris and I are dedicated to making this podcast as accessible as we possibly can, which means we're also trying to get transcriptions on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. If you need a transcript and it's not showing up on your streaming platform, please , and I'll make sure you get a copy as soon as possible. Next, I want to share some exciting news about Adaptation: We're planning to start offering bonus content! As I'm sure you can tell, Chris and I have a lot to say about books and movies, and not all of that fits perfectly under the umbrella of book-to-movie adaptations, so we'll be introducing mini episodes, called Adaptation: Lightning Round. Each episode of Lightning Round will feature a shorter, more specific conversation between Chris and I -- maybe we'll pose a question for the other to answer, talk about a movie that isn't based on a book (or a book with no film adaptation), maybe Chris will rant about his favorite author because we'll only have limited opportunities to discuss them on the main podcast. Regardless of the topic, we're looking forward to bringing you Lightning Round, and we're working hard to source ideas and write episodes. You'll be able to find episodes on the main Adaptation page of your preferred streaming service, it will simply have different cover art. See below! Lastly, I want to offer a plug to , who helped compose our theme song that plays at the beginning and the end of each episode. Jem is a talented musician and recently released his debut album, "." Chris (who plays bass on some of the tracks) and I cannot recommend this album highly enough and we encourage you to take a listen! Thank you for reading the first post on the Adaptation Blog! As usual, please be sure to follow us on social media at the links below, and if you enjoy our content, share it with your loved ones and give us a rating on streaming apps. Follow us on social media: /episode/index/show/d771c001-1614-4d89-801d-f1c764b84799/id/38502135

Adaptation: Book to Movie

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