| Posted: 26 April 2012 at 10:18am | IP Logged | 4
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HOTEL - Arthur HaileyHaving watched the movie all the way thru for the first time a week or so back, I decided to check out the novel, and found a second hand copy of the paperback cheap on Amazon. As it happens, this was the 35th Anniversary edition, published in 2000, with an introduction written by Hailey. There he immediately notes, and apologizes for, certain dated elements. (As with the movie, made in 1967, Black people are still called "Negroes". Somewhat startlingly, in the book the word seems to crop up on almost every page. Also, he apologizes for how much and how often people smoke in the book!) My curiosity was mostly directed to how much of the book was translated into the film. A few chapters in, I can already answer "Not much". This is one of those operatic potboilers, with a large cast and multiple plotlines, weaving around and occasionally bumping into each other. The movie captures that, to some extent, but many characters are completely deleted, while others become composites. In one of those things that generally annoys me about "adaptations", we also seem to have already evidence that some characters and their storylines were dropped, while the screenwriters created their own. Enjoying the book, perhaps somewhat more than the movie -- tho it must be said, for all the attention paid to the source, the movie might as well have been about an entirely different hotel with an entirely different staff and collection of guests!
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