…is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a…VRRROOOOM!!!
The difference between literature and Hollywood is most easily expressed through numbers. Where Hemingway could spend a whole book talking about some old guy wanting to catch a fish, Hollywood would just grab the old man, give him a tunic and a helmet, put him way at the back of the advancing Persian army at Thermopylae and kill him off with one careless arrow within the first ten seconds of the first action scene.
Or, take a poet – Hell, take two:
Here you have Wordsworth, in his one-man-and-his-cloud poem, going barmy about a bunch of daffs that were:
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Here you have Gertrude Stein with her famous and, to be honest, quite annoying and insane bouquet of roses:
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters,
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Pages ages page ages page ages.
Like Hemingway with his old man, these two poets would have been happy enough to remain forever locked in an intimate embrace with their daft daffodils and roses.
Hollywood however, if it got its paws on the movie rights to portray the lives of those poets, would first replace Wordsworth with Brad Pitt and Gertrude Stein with Angelina Jolie.
Then some pair of villains (probably very much looking like Wordsworth & Stein) would shoot the hero (who would, temporarily, lose his memory but not his looks) and kidnap Jolie (who’d lose almost all of her clothes in the process but not – yeah, you guessed it). Then, with a florid flush of violins, a cutely bandaged Pitt would leave his hospital bed to go rescue the beautifully under-dressed Jolie, before this perfect pair would happily adopt all kinds of weird and photogenic life-styles for the rest of their lives (and perhaps, at the close of day, stare into space a bit with dreamy looks and the quivering tip of a quill resting on their half-open lips – which is all that Hollywood poets need to do to live up to their rep.).
AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE FLOWERS, THEN??!!
Ah yes. Not to worry. In the penultimate, cliff-banging scene, the villain is chased by the virtuous Pitt, who is riding an enormous, heavily armoured lawnmower, through a field of flowers (daffodils and roses, yes: very good!) shredding them by their millions – which makes for nice, quasi-apocalyptic visuals.
So there, the difference between Hollywood and literature, brought to your screen in a decorous & decidedly modest 470 words!
Not to boast, of course, but many a movie has been forged from baser materials.
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