More on Hollywood Novels

I spoke with my movie business son in law about There will be blood and he told me about the writer,Paul Thomas Anderson, and his attempt in this movie. Evidently the writer director was suffering from a writer's block and saw a copy of Sinclair's novel in a bookstore, read a couple of chapters of it and then wrote the screenplay. If that is true I wonder how much of a novel one needs to use to claim it as an inspiration. I guess that depends on the author. It says a lot about the current uneven state of copyrights - but that is another topic.

The reviewers I read, from Movies.com gushed about the first several minutes of the movie which were done without a great deal of dialogue. I thought that was a creative part of the movie, showing the hard life that prospectors had in digging for oil in the very early days. And indeed, one reviewer commented that the music was "haunting" and designed to create a mood. I found it annoying. Other reviewers commented that the main character, Daniel Plainview (as opposed to Joe Ross in the book), lacks "soul." In the novel Ross is a driven man but the relationship between father and son (Bunny) is key to the story, in a way that the movie seems to put to the side. Anderson's son in the movie is almost one dimensional.

The original novel has some great interplay between the soul of the son (who discovers socialism) and the role of the evangelist. Sinclair was great at starkly setting issues - Oil follows the tradition of The Jungle in telling an interesting but complex story. But unlike the Jungle, the characters in Oil are a bit less one sided. Thus, in the original story you have some great conflicts between father and son, between rich and poor, between moral and immoral. Anderson's derivative work is much more unidimensional focussing on Plainview. In the end the movie rests on whether you care that Plainview is a driven man. And in that case I did not. For my taste I would have preferred the complexity.