This past June, The New York Times Best Seller List for mass-market paperbacks featured an outlier among its usual list of suspects. After Inferno by Dan Brown and several books in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, sat a book adaptation of the blockbuster film Godzilla, written by Greg Cox.
Cox’s book is what’s known in the business as a movie “novelization.” The term means exactly what you think it does: it’s a novel based on a film, one fleshed out with a greater attention to character backstory and more descriptive action sequences. If you are unfamiliar with the world of novelizations, your immediate reaction to their existence is likely one of incredulity. To quote my mother during a recent phone conversation we had on the subject, “People buy these books?” Yes, Mom, they do. (Apparently, she did not remember purchasing the novelization of Home Alone by Todd Strasser for me when I was a kid.) Not every novelization is a hit like Godzilla, of course, nor is it a growing part of the book industry. As studios have made bigger bets on a smaller number of films, the quantity of novelizations produced annually has decreased. But Hollywood hasn’t dropped them completely.
The novelization itself has a surprisingly long history, having popped up almost 100 years ago with silent films like Sparrows and London After Midnight. According to Films into Books: An Analytical Bibliography of Film, Novelizations, Movie and TV Tie-Ins one of the first mainstream talkies to get the book treatment was the 1933 classic King Kong. As the film industry continued to grow, publishers began producing more of these properties. By the late 1970s, studios were reaping the benefits of global franchises, including Star Wars and Aiien, both of which had novelizations that sold millions of copies. The 80s and 90s brought their fair share of tie-ins too, including everything from Howard the Duck, to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to Batman & Robin. Today, tie-ins are mainly reserved for science-fiction and fantasy films––tent poles that translate easily into other media and come with built-in audience interest.
Novelizations may have made more sense before the advent of home video. Back then, films were released in the theater and often not heard from again. The best way to relive those original memories was to read them in book format (or to use your imagination). So, in an age of DVR and digital outlets, why do people continue to buy these books? It’s the same reason they read 5,000-word TV recaps every week. It’s a way for fans to feel more connected to a story or property they love. When you have a novelization, you get to remember at least a piece of that enthusiasm you experienced the first time around.
“People just see it as one other element of the entertainment experience,” says Katy Wild, the editorial director of Titan Publishing Group Ltd., which publishes movie novelizations, including Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and the soon-to-be-released Interstellar. “I think people who read movie novelizations are the people who go see those movies.”
Novelization authors are typically paid a flat fee in the low five-figure range to complete the work (if they’re lucky, they may get 1 to 2 percent royalties). The money, however, is only one reason writers sign up in the first place.
“I took it for two reasons,” says author Alan Dean Foster, about his decision to get into novelization writing, which has included everything from Star Wars: Episode IV to Terminator Salvation. “First, because I was a young writer and I needed to make a living. And because, as [a fan], I got to make my own director’s cut. I got to fix the science mistakes, I got to enlarge on the characters, if there was a scene I particularly liked, I got to do more of it, and I had an unlimited budget. So it was fun.”
Like many novelization writers, Foster is also an accomplished original fiction author, which is how he ended up falling into the movie tie-in game to begin with. The first novelization he wrote was for Luana, “basically a female Tarzan movie,” from Italy, made in 1968. Since Foster had a Master of Fine Arts in Film from UCLA, and since he had already written three original titles, his editor asked him to take a shot at doing the novelization. The request was easier said than done.
“I went down to the office of this sleazo producer who was four floors up and off Hollywood Boulevard and sat down to look at the film, which was all in Italian with no subtitles,” says Foster. “This left me in bad shape. I had no idea what to do.” Without even a script available to work from, Foster improvised, using a custom advertisement created by legendary science-fiction artist Frank Frazetta as his source material. Says Foster, “The star of the film who only appears on screen for about 10 minutes is this very little diminutive Vietnamese girl, and if you know anything about Frank Frazetta you’ll know that Frank did not paint very little diminutive Vietnamese girls. So my female Tarzan was a little bit more Tarzan-ish than in the films.”
It wouldn’t be the last time Foster encountered studio trouble while adapting a film. One infamous story involves his work on the novel for the first Alien movie. During the writing process, 20th Century Fox wouldn’t show him pictures of the alien, so Foster had to do the entire book without knowing what a Xenomorph looked like.
The half-dozen authors I spoke to all had their fair share of difficulties when it came to dealing with the bigwigs behind these properties, from being given a lack of information about the film to impossibly quick turnaround times (try writing a book in a nine-day span, like Max Allan Collins did on In the Line of Fire) to last-minute rewrites of the script. Terry Brooks was forced to deal with the latter situation on Steven Spielberg’s 1991 flick, Hook.
“They brought in people to fix the script, and that’s when it started to go downhill,” says Brooks. “They started out with a baseball game in Denver in winter. Like, what are they thinking? There’s no baseball in Denver in winter. For god’s sake, there’s three feet of snow out there!”
Collins, who’s written novelizations of Air Force One and Saving Private Ryan among others, faced his own difficulties back in 2002. He wrote the novelization of Road to Perdition, which was based on his own graphic novel; even though Collins was the reason the movie existed in the first place, he was forced to write a novel based exclusively on the film.
“I couldn’t write anything about the characters that I had created that wasn’t in the script,” says Collins. “It’s one of the great frustrations of my career. I turned in about a 90,000-word novel that kind of fleshed everything out and brought it in sync with the graphic novel. I was very proud of it. And after it was cut, it was about 40,000 words, and that was not pleasant.”
As Foster adequately described the process, writing a novelization “is a work for hire. If the owner wants the house painted bright orange, you paint it bright orange.” But even amid the horror stories, there are thrilling encounters with the filmmakers themselves to make up for it. While writing the novel for Pacific Rim, author Alex Irvine got to see an early cut of the movie and had a long conversation with director Guillermo del Toro about the story. Terry Brooks had a similar experience with George Lucas, when he worked on The Phantom Menace.
“I talked to George on the phone. I got this sentence out: ‘It would really help me in writing this book to put in some background on the Jedi and the Sith,’ and that was the last thing I said for half an hour,” he says. “He just went off and gave me this huge description of the background story. It was a really good experience. I finished it in 90 days. He didn’t change a word of the book.”
No matter how positive the process is, or how well the book ends up turning out, novelizations still have a stigma about them. To some, even the word “novelization” sounds like an insult, as if it were just a shell of a novel.
“It’s always amusing to me, you take a book, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, throw away three quarters of it and win an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay,” says Foster. “But if you take a screenplay and add three quarters of original material to it––which is a much, much more difficult piece of writing––well, that’s by definition ‘hackwork.’ And it’s much harder, having done both, to take a screenplay and make a book out of it than [to] take a terrific book and make a screenplay out of it.”
Adds Collins, “Some people may view [writers of novelizations] as hacks, and some of the work may be hackwork because there’s hackwork in every field. But these are pros who generally care about the work and are doing their best.”
Collins and writer Lee Goldberg have even taken the extra step of creating an organization called the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers as a way to help recognize these authors and the work that they do. The group currently hands out annual awards called the Scribes, each year at Comic-Con. This year’s nominees for best adapted novel included Cox’s Man of Steel, Irvine’s Pacific Rim, and 47 Ronin by Joan D. Vinge, with Irvine taking home the grand prize.
Digital publishing leaves the future of novelizations very much up in the air. However, both the authors and the studio representatives I spoke to all seemed hopeful that the medium would continue to grow. “You might be looking at an enhanced e-book, or at some point looking at an app,” speculates Dave Rupert, the senior vice president of global publishing at Warner Bros. consumer products. “If you start to think about how a property can use digital publishing to expand into side stories, connect bridges, and follow-up novels, the format can become a lot more interesting and engaging.”
The trick is to make sure studios continue to find not only experienced authors to write the material, but ones who have fun doing it. It’s also important to continue to harness the fans who enjoy reading and collecting these tie-ins in the first place. There may be people out there who laugh at the idea of a Battleship or a Men in Black novelization, but rest assured, there are folks who read them, whether they are award-worthy or not. Just take a quick scan of an Amazon review section of a novelization and you’ll realize that some readers take them just as seriously as any other piece of fiction:
“One of my quirky traits is that I often act out the dialogue in books out loud while reading them, and this one was one of my favorites to ‘perform,’ ” says Amazon reviewer Alex Szollo, in his evaluation of the Pacific Rim novelization. “Mr. Irvine exhibits an awesome ability to flesh out characters and bring about an air of credibility to a movie adaptation. I felt like the story was much more believable in the novel due to the use of reports throughout it. Five out of five! Thank you, Mr. Irvine, one hell of a job!”
A previous version of this article incorrectly referenced a novelization of Jaws. We regret the error
