I've read
The White Hotel
three or four times (for a college course) and have enormous respect for it, but it took a lot of work to get to that place. And I seriously cannot imagine anyone turning it into an even remotely coherent screenplay, let alone a finished film.
Really, truly -- now I'm racking my brains and scanning back over the who-knows-how-many-thousands of pieces of long and short fiction I've read so far in my life, and TWH is right there in the top three most unfilmable of any of them.
Catcher seems pretty darned unfilmable, too.
I couldn't imagine how anyone could film Catch-22, and yet they did, and I liked it.
I dunno. Jumping from therapy sessions to a WWII massacre, recounted in horrifying detail, to an afterlife that plays off of the wedding feast at Cana. Rape and terror porn, the horrors of the Holocaust as the vehicle for one person's enlightenment, Freudian RPF (actual Freudian, with Freud) and a hearty helping of woo.
Not that I hated it, because I didn't, but I can't think of any way to translate it into film that wouldn't turn any or all of the above into a whole lot of fail.
Wikipedia says that one of the attempts to film it was by David Lynch working with Isabella Rossellini, and I can kind of just barely see that, if I squint; but even so, it's a very "Yes, indeed, that failure would have been a less ghastly failure than the other failures" squint.
Catcher
at least has a nice distinctive narrative voice and a ton of vivid episodes, and
Catch-22
has some screamingly comic and horrifying dialogue that would be just fun to hear gifted actors doing. But
The White Hotel?
I... just... no. I might possibly see Lynch's version, or Guy Maddin's, if such a thing ever came to exist; but even so I'd do it out of obligation. Much good as there is in the novel, there's nothing in it that would make me want to see it as a film.
Wikipedia says that one of the attempts to film it was by David Lynch working with Isabella Rossellini, and I can kind of just barely see that, if I squint; but even so, it's a very "Yes, indeed, that failure would have been a less ghastly failure than the other failures" squint.
What? Catch-22, because [link]
Ah, I see you were talking about TWH.
However this does sound like something I would cringe at
There was also a brief television comedy series based upon Catch-22 made and televised in 1973, with Richard Dreyfuss in the starring role of Capt. Yossarian.
Larry Gelbart could have done it.
But that's why he's a legend.
I'm sure they pitched it: M.A.S.H. meets Hogan's Heroes.
I'm with megan--The Alienist would make a great film, and it's too bad no one has managed it yet.
