Modern Fiction in Hollywood

Abstract

The modern American novel and the Hollywood feature film have historically made for a rocky marriage. Both, at their core, are narrative forms that depict events and characters causally linked to those events, but their respective methods of delivering that narrative to the audience are often colored by different sets of economic, cultural, industrial, and artistic concerns. While the American movie industry has always been attracted to pre‐sold properties – commodities with a familiar set of story elements and a built‐in potential customer base – the process of adapting modern novels to the screen has often posed technical challenges, raised questions of faithfulness to the source material, and stirred up concerns about mass culture's threat to elite culture. In general, the realist novel and genre fiction, modes which place a premium on plot and physical description and encourage audience identification, have been better matches for Hollywood than have modernist texts that chart inner states and seek to intellectually challenge the audience.