▲ Focused on a different job … director Sam Taylor-Johnson shooting Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015. Photograph: Focus/Universal/Rex

EL James’s battles with director Sam Taylor-Johnson are part of a long tradition of conflicting ‘visions’. She is one of a small elite to beat the studios.

Ever since Joe Gillis ended up face down in a swimming pool in the opening credits of Sunset Boulevard, it’s been clear that, Hollywood prefers its writers silent.

It’s a rule that Sam Taylor-Johnson clearly wishes EL James had heeded when she directed James’s lashing love story Fifty Shades of Grey. This week, Taylor-Johnson told trade magazine Hollywood Reporter that clashes between the two saw her unceremoniously dumped from the franchise. Likening the experience to “wading uphill through sticky tar”, the director stuck the knife in. “Every scene was fought over. It was tough,” she said of their clash. “Her thing was: ‘This is what the fans expect.’ I’d be like: ‘Well, let’s try and hit those marks but create a new universe at the same time.’”

Though James won, she is one of only a handful of writers – JK Rowling being another – with the power to protect their “vision” from meddling Hollywood types.

The list of authors wounded in the cutting room is long: Anthony Burgess and Stephen King both hated Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of their books, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining respectively; comic book writer Alan Moore is famously dismissive of all film adaptations of his work, to the point that he refused royalties for Watchmen and V for Vendetta.

After Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl damned director Mel Stuart as having “no talent or flair whatsoever”. Truman Capote famously un-endorsed Breakfast at Tiffany’s after asking for Marilyn Monroe as Holly Golightly and getting Audrey Hepburn instead. And after the film of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho was directed by Mary Harron, his criticism of her could have come from the mouth of Patrick Bateman: “There’s something about the medium of film itself that I think requires the male gaze. We’re watching, and we’re aroused by looking, whereas I don’t think women respond that way to films, just because of how they’re built.”

Douglas Kennedy’s debut Dead Heart is a darkly comic tale of a US journalist cut adrift in the Australian outback. But in the hands of Stephan Elliott, fresh from his success with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, it morphed into a New York tale about an exotic bird salesman (complete with 22 Rogers and Hammerstein songs).

On the steps of the screening in Cannes, Kennedy was finally introduced to the director, who also wrote the adaptation. “Douglas Kennedy!” Elliott called out. “Nice to meet you. You know, I’ve got to read your novel sometime.”

In the cold, dead heart of Hollywood, cash is king: studios will do what they want with a book as long as it stands to make money. JRR Tolkien understood this. In a letter to his publisher when film rights were first up for sale, the Lord of the Rings author was blunt: they should go for “either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations,” he wrote. (A pity he was not around to spare us from Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy).

Some have better luck by just cutting out Hollywood altogether; John le Carré prefers to work with British film and TV studios over LA players. Back in 2005, when the adaptation of The Constant Gardener opened to rave reviews, he told me: “There has never been a more difficult time for authors to deal with the film industry, because there are so many arseholes functioning in it who should not be near it.”

His novel, about big pharma exploiting the developing world, survived adaptation, because original producer Sony Colombia pulled out over “the A word”. When Le Carré asked what that meant, the simple answer was: “Africa”. “Thank God I didn’t go with them,” he said. “If I had, I would have had to put up with a saccharine film. You don’t get controversy out of Hollywood studios.”

Still, sometimes a director’s vision is what a writer needs. When Howard Hawks bet Ernest Hemingway he could turn his worst book, To Have and Have Not, from a “bunch of junk” into a great film, he went ahead and made one of the greatest pictures of Hollywood’s golden age. Perhaps it is less trouble – and more lucrative – for authors to follow the advice of George RR Martin’s editor Jane Johnson: “Let the director do their thing, and take your money to the bank.”


来源：英国《卫报》（原文链接）