Thursday 26 May 2011

The Classic-Novel-Film-Adaptation


Still on the topic of the classic-novel-film-adaptation, I considered the American writer J.D Salinger's epic The Catcher In The Rye. In June 2010, just after Salinger's death, it was reported that Salinger's beloved masterpiece wasn't as untouchable as he had hoped it to be.


According to an article from 2010 in The Telegraph, JD Salinger has always insisted The Catcher in the Rye was "unactable" and refused to let Hollywood anywhere near his masterpiece. Salinger rejected various attempts from filmmakers such as Sam Goldwyn, Jerry Lewis and Billy Wilder to film the novel, along with Elia Kazan's effort to put it on Broadway. The irony is that Salinger himself was a film lover yet he undoubtedly vowed never to allow others to interpret his work for the big screen.


Salinger supposedly wrote a letter in 1957 indicating that the rights to this 'unfilmable holy grail' of scripts could be sold after his death. Unfathomed, he later explained that he wrote for his own pleasure and wanted to be left alone at his 90-acre home in Cornish, New Hampshire. Ultimately no official adaptation of Salinger's The Catcher in The Rye has been made so far and the rights remains untouchable to this day.

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