Filming Jane Austen

[Jassy Melson]

Hollywood has done a pretty good job with the films it's made of Jane Austen's works. It has stayed pretty close to her books. There is one book of Austen's however that I believe Hollywood has not filmed, and that is Northanger Abbey. Hollywood would do good to film this book. It's full of satire and irony and it's kind of a put-down of the romanticism and Gothic romances that were so prevalent in Austen's time.

[hannah_arendt]

There is a dramatisation made in 2007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northanger_Abbey_(2007_film)

[WICKES]

Hollywood has done a pretty good job with the films it's made of Jane Austen's works. It has stayed pretty close to her books. There is one book of Austen's however that I believe Hollywood has not filmed, and that is Northanger Abbey. Hollywood would do good to film this book. It's full of satire and irony and it's kind of a put-down of the romanticism and Gothic romances that were so prevalent in Austen's time.

I'm always pessimistic when I hear some classic work of fiction is to be made into a film. One of the problems is that Hollywood is very PC, while most classics were written by dead, white, European males (the only people acceptable as baddies in Hollywood films- if you're white and have an upper class English/ British accent you can make a fortune in Hollywood playing psychopathic snobs). Potentially good films are often butchered in the name of political correctness and the result is a dumbed-down, politically correct piece of garbage. I admire Jackson for not doing that to the Lord of the Rings- he quotes much of Tolkien's books in the film and keeps it quite intense and serious (I was half expecting there to be a character talking in idiotic, 21st century ghetto slang...some tedious 'comic relief').

[Jackson Richardson]

The element that sets Northanger Abbey apart from JA's other works is the sustained parody of Mrs Radcliffe's Gothick novels. The parody is so good that I didn't feel I needed to read Mrs Radcliffe when I read NA as a teenager to get the joke - JA told you just what it would be like and why she found it a hoot.

The obvious thing to do in making a movie is find a cinematic equivalent of Mrs Radcliffe, which shouldn't be too difficult. (Although I am abysmally ignorant of movie conventions - I'd always rather read a book.) But to do that would involve updating the book, which would remove the social setting which JA delineates so accurately.

I think it probably best to regard books and movies as completely separate creations, to be enjoyed and appreciated on their own terms.

There are more cutting ironic authorial asides in Northanger Abbey than the later books, which also would disappear in a movie. (Note how this British writer knows American usage and avoids saying "film".)

[cafolini]

Excuse me, important. Significant change in Saudi Arabia's law for women. Saudis can now report domestic abuse anonymously, which frees women who previously could only go to police stations with male relatives.

[kiki1982]

Can't say that any Austen film from across the Atlantic ever moved me. They were all too sugary and lost the point of the novel.

That about political correctness: the BBC also suffers from that, cue their last adaptation of Emma. Either they didn't have the money to get extras to pose as servants (probably not), or they genuinely found that having servants pass you the salt and putting a log on the fire for you, handing you into a carriage is to be shunned. I'm very much afraid it's the last one.

As to NA: it's probably more hilarious if you have actually read that Udolpho thing, but to me it was quite funny how Catherine as a teenage girl totally loses herself in that book and starts imagining things from it in real life.
You could make a good remake with somehing well-known like Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and a nerdy teenage girl on a train or long-haul flight or something.

[WICKES]

Can't say that any Austen film from across the Atlantic ever moved me. They were all too sugary and lost the point of the novel.



There seem to be 4 golden rules in Hollywood when turning a novel written by a dead, white European into a film: 1) Set it in America if possible, 2) dumb it down and replace the original language with modern American teenage slang (if possible), 3) have a cowardly, arrogant, snobbish, white European character (even is he or she isn't in the original novel), who dies either running away from danger or betraying everyone else 4) have a smart, heroic black or Asian character (even is she or he isn't in the original novel).

For example, H G Wells' classic The Time Machine was recently made into a movie. The novel is set in late Victorian England, with a hero who is a sort of decent English gentleman and amateur scientist. The film is set in New York with an American scientist as the hero. That is perfectly acceptable of course because Wells is a dead, white European male and therefore anything goes; if it was a novel written by a Japanese or African author there would have been accusations of racism and cultural theft and so on.