For the Birds

This Halloween I watched Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds (1963). I had seen parts of it before, but I realized that I had never seen the whole movie from beginning to end. I remember people telling me how much it frightened them, but I honestly didn't find it find it that scary and would have a hard time classifying it as a "horror" picture. The scenes where we are all waiting for the birds to attack are quite suspenseful.

It had its moments, and it was an enjoyable film overall, but I won't include it in my any of my top-movies-to-see lists. My favorite scenes are the ones where the characters are walking to and from the school house with all of the ravens or crows perched on the monkey bars in the playground. Watching. Waiting. Creepy.

According to IMDB there is a remake in production that is due in theaters in 2009, starring Naomi Watts and George Clooney. It would be interesting to see with better special effects (visual and sound), but I don't have high hopes that it will be better as Hollywood doesn't have a great track record with remakes.

I searched for, found, and read the 1952 short story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier it was based on. I should say inspired by. Both had a coastal town attacked by birds, neither had an explanation for the birds behavior, and the endings of both left things unresolved. I am not saying that any of these are bad, it is just how it is.

Being a short story, it needed some padding to be a full length feature. Hitchcock added a few elements and made some changes that you typically find in movies made by Hollywood. Luckily he didn't slap on a happy ending or a pat explanation tied up in a nice little bow.

As to the additions and modifications, first there is a love interest. The book actually follows a man and his family and doesn't stray very far from his house the entire time. None of this man with a mysterious past (and possible mother issues), or single woman with too much money and time on her hands.

Second, the action was moved to the United States from Great Britain. Why we feel the need to Americanize things is beyond me. Orson Welles moved H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds in his 1938 radio program, as did Steven Spielberg in the most recent movie version. The first Peter Pan (1924) movie based on J.M. Barries' play and book actually did the same, completely loosing the British elements that are core to the story (but doing a pretty good job with everything else). Maybe they don't believe that we would watch a movie that didn't have the United States as the center of the universe - saving the world.

The only thing that the book had more of than the movie is types of birds. Probably due to the cost of the special effects, the movie really only had seagulls and crows (or ravens), while the town in the book was being attacked by all types of birds, from the sparrows to raptors. In the original story the characters learned from the radio that similar events were taking place through out the country as well.

I thought the Simpson's might have done of spoof of The Birds, but I realized it was actually from an episode of Arthur (based on Marc Brown's children's books). In it Arthur, Buster and their friends all watch The Squirrels on TV and become frightened of squirrels. (It even had a scene with squirrels gathering on monkey bars in a school yard.)

I tried to think of some other books or movies with nameless flocks of birds and really couldn't come up with much. I just finished reading Sabriel (1995) by Garth Nix, Sabriel herself is attacked by a flock of dead, black birds who are being possessed by the spirit of a dead magician. There are also some scenes in The Messengers (2007) starring a pre-Twilight Kristen Stewart with black birds watching and eventually attacking.

So there you have it. If you haven't seen the The Birds, or if it has been a few years since you have, you could start a tradition of watching it on Thanksgiving - a holiday that is even more fitting than Halloween if you ask me.

And now, the rest of the story ... (part I)

Jane Belson, Douglas Adams' widow, authorized Eoin Colfer, the author of several young adult and children's books including the popular Artemis Fowl series, to write the sixth book in the even-MORE-increasingly misnamed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy.

The announced title is And Another Thing ..., and you can read Belson's and Colfer's thoughts on this here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/17/douglasadams

This got me to thinking about other stories officially sanctioned by a writer's estate, or by the legal copyright holders.

While some estates would sanction this type of work to appease the fans, especially in the case where the originally published work is unfinished, most of the commissions are made because the estate and the publisher think they can make some money. That isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as the new author produces something the readers enjoy.

I would imagine it would be difficult for a writer. First the writer would need to be a fan of the original, or perhaps is just looking for a challenge or possible notoriety, or he or she may just need some cash. Second the writer would need to decide if they were going to write it in their voice or try to imitate the original voice of the author. Both paths are fraught with danger. To some extent, this would probably depend on how much the author left behind. Were some parts already written? How much of an outline did the original author provide? The new author would also have to take into consideration how different her or his style is from the original author's.

In some cases, the new author is left to use the character(s), world(s), and ideas however they like. These are probably the types of continuations I am less of a fan of. I don't know if Colfer is basing this new book on notes and ideas the Adam's left behind or not. That will probably push me a little in one direction of the other. The fact that I have read some of Colfer's other novels makes it more likely that I will read this one, but I will still probably wait to get a feel for the response of others. I just don't have time to read everything, or maybe I am just a literary sheep.

Much like the movie versions of a book, my opinion is the original is still there to love, enjoy, ignore or loath regardless of how I feel about the new prequel, sequel or adaptation. If I really don't like it, I can just compartmentalize it as non-canonical. There is not any guarantee I would have even liked the prequels or sequels written by the original author had he or she lived - there are times I wish the original author would have left things well enough alone as they were. We have WAAAYY too many unneeded sequels and story extensions with living authors.

Using the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy as an example, I really liked the first two books [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)], and I thought the other three books had their moments, but for me the went sequentially down hill and I found Mostly Harmless (1992), the fifth book, mostly neh. (Interestingly, the books were based on a radio program (1978), and a TV series followed in 1981, with the movie in 2005. Adams was directly involved with the radio and television programs, and the movie followed a treatment he worked on before his death, and still all of these differ from the each other and from the books.)

Anyway, as I mentioned somewhere near the beginning, this announcement got me thinking of some other authorized completions, continuations and prequels:

• Lee Nelson finished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians (2003), a recently found, half-written sequel to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
• The Special Trustees of Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, who hold the copyright to J.M.Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911), selected Geraldine McCaughrean to write the official sequel - published in 2008 as Peter Pan in Scarlet
• Margarett Mitchel's estate authorized Alexandra Ripley to write Scarlett (1991), a sequel to Gone with the Wind (1936)

(the list and discussion continue in the next post)