Hollywood has always taken a permissive approach to adaptations. When Sam Zimbalist, an MGM producer, wanted a new movie of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur, he summoned Karl Tunberg to his office. Tunberg had served as president of the Screen Writers Guild, and Zimbalist wanted him to do the script. Tunberg demurred, saying he knew nothing about Ben-Hur. He hadn’t even read it. Sam waved him off. “Don’t worry about that,” Sam barked. “It’s a classic! That means nobody’s read it! We can do what we want with it!”
The system generally worked, even if it meant that you couldn’t watch the movie in order to pass your test in English class. Boris Karloff’s monosyllabic monster wasn’t the Milton-analyzing literary whiz of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but he was iconic all the same. The Philip K. Dick story about memory implantation featured no Martian syndicate selling air, no rebels, no vanished alien civilization, not even a single scene on Mars—but the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall did it a sleazy kind of justice anyway. Producers weren’t selling faithful literary adaptations. They were selling the magic of Hollywood. There were some clunkers, but audiences bought in. If you loved Shakespeare, you were excited to try Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. It was freewheeling but you expected nothing else. If you loved the Iliad, you wanted to go see Troy, even if it was absurd to see Menelaus killed dishonorably by Hector a third of the way in. That was part of the fun: You had no idea what crazy thing the screenwriters would do with the story.