Novelizations

There’s a forgotten form of writing, often ostracized by the publishing world, that deserves a reclamation–the novelization, 

In this essay episode, Luke Ferris dives into the "pulpy" and often misunderstood world of novelizations. Far from just being simple marketing gimmicks, these books offer a unique way to engage with our favorite films, filling in lore gaps and letting us spend more time with characters we already love.

In this episode, we’ll dive into:

• A Brief History of the "Pulp" Industry: Why these books became a marketing powerhouse in the 1950s paperback era and why writers often used pseudonyms.
• Lore and Gaps: How the Halloween novelization by "Richard Curtis" actually shaped the future of the film franchise’s Celtic lore.
• The Reverse Adaptation: A look at how directors like Michael Mann and Quentin Tarantino are using the written word to expand their cinematic universes.
• The "Book vs. Movie" Tension: Why seeing a young Al Pacino or Val Kilmer on the page can actually make the original Heat movie even better.

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Sources for this episode:

• Royalty-free music and sound effects via Artlist.com
• Heat Trailer HD (1995)
• "These Are Fun. I Should Do One." - Quentin Tarantino On The Decision To Novelise His Latest Film 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Recently, we had a dear friend visiting us for a long weekend, a long spring weekend here in Michigan. On a Saturday morning, we were about to head off to do some strolling, shopping, and some sips along the corridor of Wealthy Street. As the ladies were getting ready, I decided to pop open a book I had started reading with my friend Josie the day before. I had picked her up early on a Friday morning from a bustling and chaotic train stop in Kalamazoo, Michigan. We spent most of the afternoon just chilling on the couch reading our books. My book happened to be Heat 2. Now Heat 2 is a book. Actually, it's the sequel book to the 1995 film Heat, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino facing off as a master thief and crime detective. He's here.

SPEAKER_04 1:32

I do what I do best. I think it's good.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

This film, directed by Michael Mann, was a success at the box office and critically, and it's seen a new life in the last half decade, mainly due to the Ringers Rewatchables podcast, and it's really helped cement this as one of the most pristine action genre movies of all time. In 2022, Mann decided to write a sequel of this original film. Now, this is pretty unusual for a director or writer director like Michael Mann to take aspects of his original story and put it together into a book. Typically, it would be a spec sequel, that would be normal, but to release a full novel is pretty unique. Well, that afternoon, while I was waiting for the ladies to get ready, I was tearing through the last hundred pages of the book. It felt like watching a movie, watching the sequel to heat. It was one of those experiences when you read a popcorn book and you really just want to jump to the next page without finishing the first page. That's how fast you're reading. Well, it ends up the girls waited on me because I was sitting in my chair, just about to flip through the final last pages, and they graciously let me conclude the story. Being major bookworms themselves, they understood. After I finished, I was just sitting in the car, and I remember feeling a mixture of overcaffeinated and high heart rate. Like I was actually having anxiety from finishing this book. The tensity of the story of trying to finish so we could go have our afternoon fun. Pretty crazy for a normal spring Saturday afternoon. Now that doesn't happen to me very often. I'm a huge book reader, but a lot of the times I don't really have the space to immerse myself like I did with Heat 2. I typically am more of a prodding, plotting book reader, and I either read right before I go to bed and end up falling asleep, or read in the early mornings. But it was pretty fun to completely lose myself into a book where the only thing I wanted to do was finish the last hundred pages. Now the credit for this experience goes to man. He created the characters, wrote the story, made the first movie to be able to market the second story, and of course his writing partner, Meg Gardner. But the reason why this story works is this unique form of writing in relationship to movie making. It's called the novelization. The novelization has a long history throughout Hollywood and book writing. The idea of putting picture to pen started in the moving pictures era when people didn't have an opportunity to watch this new technology. But this form of writing really became an industry starting in the 1950s paperback era where mass-producing books was cheap, hence the term pulp fiction, due to the pulpy quality of the wood used in the thin paper. Go back and listen to my season one episode on book covers for a deep dive on the production process behind books and the materials used in them. Really, the novelization is a marketing tactic. It's a way to get people excited about the upcoming movie. A lot of these writers went by pseudonyms because they were embarrassed. It was looked upon negatively by traditional writers, traditional book industry people. Novelizations historically have just been a blue-collar journeyman just making a buck type of writing job that a lot of people have just done to get into the industry. And typically, these authors or ghost writers would get a spec script from a director. That's an early script in the creation of a movie process, or they'd get it from a studio, and they would just write it based on that script they're given and release it ahead of the movie to promote the movie. People would maybe buy the books, they would be intrigued by it, or they would just see it advertised in a bookstore and it would bring hype for the movie. The interesting thing about these novelizations, these spec scripts that were given, a lot of times would not actually end up being the final movie. So a lot of times you'd have these novelization books with extra scenes or deleted scenes or information, most famously in the Halloween novelization by Richard Curtis, Tsunudim, that would sometimes have to build bridges or gaps in the knowledge of the film. Curtis used a spec script from the independent horror movie, which changed a ton during production. And so Curtis, writing his novelization, had to fill in some gaps of Michael Myers' timeline at Smith Grove Sanatorium, as well as he brought in this whole Celtic lore element that the sequels of Halloween actually ended up using in their films. And there's been a reclamation of this often cast aside art form or writing form, so much so that they have reprinted and republished the Halloween novelization because of its lore and its popularity amongst diehard fans. In 2006, they actually started an international association of media tie-in writers. Uh, I don't know if the acronym works for this, Amtua I A M T W. Basically, they used it to recognize the craft. Pretty amazing. I've got a couple novelizations myself. For those watching on YouTube, you can see the covers. Heat2 is one of them. But Heat2 isn't really officially a novelization. It's more of a sequel. It's more of a book written from the movies. It's kind of like an adaption in reverse. Instead of making a movie based on the book, you're actually writing a book based on the movie. Now, this form has become so popular, and I I mean I say that loosely so popular, uh, and I actually enjoy it a lot. But even Quentin Tarantino decided to write a novelization of his movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that includes extra bits and pieces of storytelling of the characters, especially Cliff Booth. Here's Tarantino talking about the genre of novelizations on the recently, sadly, off-air The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, love you, Steven, and why sometimes novelizations are actually better than the movie they're based on.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Now, for the people who don't know what a novelization is, I read a bunch of them when I was a kid, big Alan Dean Foster fan. If you read any of the king, and how how did what are they and how'd you get into them?

SPEAKER_02 8:17

Well, you know, it's it's funny because actually novelizations were the first don't novels that I might when I was a little boy, sure. Because you know you you go into the the uh the drugs or the 7-Eleven or whatever it was, and then there was like the comic book spinner rack, and that's what I always went to. But next to it was the paperback spin-orak. And that's point the paperback spinner rack drew me away from the comic book spinner rack. And um the first novelization that I bought was a novelization uh for the Brooke Reynolds movie WW and the Dixie Dance King. And I didn't like it anywhere near as much as I like the novelization. Then when Thomas Rickman won the script for uh Commodore's number, they did an interview with him. And they asked him how many got his number and he goes, Well, the first script that I ever wrote that that got made with a movie called WW and Dixie Dance King. I thought they really messed it up. But then they asked me if I wanted to write the novelization. And I said yes. And I said yes because I thought, well, at least one person will know what I intended. I'm that one person.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Ironically enough, these two novelizations I'm talking about, Heat 2 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, are both getting sequels. Yeah, movie sequels. It's crazy. The Cliff Booth sequel is coming out on Netflix this year, and Heat 2, based on this book that I just vivaciously read, is starting production later this year. I've talked on the show before about the age-old question and tension question of is the book better than the movie? I kind of think that's a boring question. They're two totally different art forms, but I really think the novelization is actually a special place for understanding what a character is thinking based on how you viewed them in the first place in the movie. Sometimes it's easier to jump into a novel like Heat 2 if you recognize the characters as young Al Pacino in Chicago before the story of Heat or Val Kilmer posts the story of the first film, Living in Paraguay. Or in Tarantino's example, a novelization can be more of a fleshing out of the movie, which is ironic because it's a wild thing when the book is better than the movie when the movie first comes out. Now, book people, I include myself in that, might feel like this is controversial. Luke, why do you need to have an IP based on a movie to read a thrilling action adventure mystery book? I believe there is beauty in understanding and generating and creating the character from your own mind. We talked about that a little bit in my spring break episode, specifically how Ryan Gosling and the creators of the Rocky character really brought to life what how I pictured them when I was reading the book. So I understand that it's definitely overall better for writing for movies if we have really great original written works that movies are based off of. It's worked out pretty well in the history of Hollywood, but I think there's a actually a market for taking a movie, an original movie, and creating a book based off of that, whether it's a novelization or a sequel. Besides the argument of what's better, the story as a movie first or the story as a book first, I think the novelization genre is special for young kids. I mean, I still have my Star Wars Episode 1 novelization for The Phantom Menace. It has a really cool slip cover. Oh man. I I remember, even though I had watched the movie twice in theaters, I remember first and second grade reading this novelization. Even though I already knew the story, I just loved the idea of having this special book of one of my favorite movies as a kid. And it's a powerful thing, I think, to extend a story that you love. And I think it's a way for kids to get involved into movies, to understand movies, to understand stories. And I think there's definitely some dangers here of bringing in adult IP into children's books. But as I said on my soundtracks episode, it's with these novelizations that we can extend the story just beyond what you watch on the screen. The era before the internet, where we could learn and know everything about a movie or behind the scenes, or we could watch a five-hour YouTube compilation series about the Dune novels, so we could prepare for the third movie coming out later this year. The novelization, while gimmicky, yet it really is an enduring aspect of how a new original story comes out in a movie form where you can learn something new, expand upon the universe, quote unquote, and just gather a sliver of information that you create as canon or not canon of what the filmmakers really wanted. I mean, most filmmakers in studios could give two rips what the novelization said or what is said, and I think that's probably why, especially novelizations in the in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s are so special now because people love this idea that these hired gun writers created their own lure around a story with really no oversight, they were just creating a marketing piece. Over time, I think this is a genre that has become something of itself. I think about all these Star Wars expanded universe novels, those are essentially novelizations of an original story or sequels or extension. Think about all those Star Wars novels that were created in the 80s, 90s that kept people hooked on Star Wars before the Phantom Menace came out. Now it's an entire way to engage with Star Wars lore and fandom. I think about even for kids, all the frozen types of books and all the Disney type of extension books that are created from book on tape from my era that I used to listen to to coloring books now. They are just way more ways to share about the story of the movie and the characters within the movie. These extensions of the written word of what we see on screen is an important part of how we engage and how the studios do sell movies and IP. And while this is a consumeristic aspect of this genre, this very specific genre, I think there's something special and raw that you can love a movie so much that an extension of it is in the written word, where you can get more of the story, a piece of that story that can draw you in and make your friends late for an afternoon out in the sun because you gotta know how it all turns out for Vincent Hannah and Chris Solaris. And in that sense, the novelization can make the movies even better. Thank you, friends, for listening and watching Least Important Things is a podcast about movies, friendship, and finding meaning in the most important of least important things. You can learn more about the show at patreon.com slash least important things. Follow us on the social links and the episode notes, and stay tuned for many more surprises and special episodes to come. You can reach out wherever you find us, email, social media, go to our website, leastimportantthings.com, and I'll talk to you next time on least important things.