Word: novella
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first film to show at the new Galeria cinema, is based on Harlan Ellison's Nebula award-winning novella of the same name. The L.Q. Jones film version fails from the start; it's bad science fiction as well as bad cinematography. Ellison's story does not lend itself to the camera as there are immediate and plaguing flaws in adaptation. A Boy And His Dog is set in 2024, in an America ravaged and torn by the nuclear warheads of the Third World War. The survivors, either alone (solos) or in marauding groups (roverpaks), eke out a savage existence...
...Street. Their first film, A Boy and His Dog with Don Johnson and Jason Robards, is also about the space-age. The hype for the movie warns "no one admitted after the performance starts...it has to be seen from the beginning!" It's based on a science-fiction novella by Harlan Ellison of the same name. Blast...
...complains that success can be lethal. "People always want to collect you for cocktail parties and take you to bed," she says. They have also inundated her with letters spelling out ultimate secrets. Notes Jong: "The whole thing makes me feel like Miss Lonelyhearts in Nathanael West's novella." A self-styled feminist, she recalls the day a high school boy asked her if she wanted to "grow up and be a secretary." Actually she always wanted to be a writer. Deeply affected by the suicide of her friend Anne Sexton, Jong is determined to be a survivor...
Bogdanovich is absolutely aware of how his faithfulness to the novella's dialogue makes the film slow-going. (To be fair, he's done an amazing job with James's ostentatious, overblown verbiage.) He knows how to tantalize in his own medium as much as James did in his through surprising cuts between scenes...
Henry James originally subtitled Daisy Miller as "A Study." Later on, in a 1909 preface to the novella he suppressed the subtitle, claiming it was mere poetic artifice. But he also wrote then that readers might have mistaken the subtitle for a literal epithet to his "poor little heroine's" name, characterized by flatness. "Flatness indeed," wrote James, "one must have felt, was the very sum of her story; so that perhaps after all the attached epithet was meant but as a deprecation, addressed to the reader, of any great critical hope of stirring scenes." If the film had used...