Season 6, Episode 2: The Book Was Better... Or Was It?

May 15, 2026

In this episode, podcast hosts Daniel Pewewardy and Jenny Durham interview KMUW film critic Fletcher Powell to discuss the age-old question: which is better, the book or the movie?

This transcript was generated using Adobe Premiere Pro and was reviewed for accuracy by a member of the Library's Digital Services team before publishing. If you find a transcription error, please contact us with any corrections and we will make those corrections as quickly as possible.

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[music]

Daniel, voiceover You're listening to Read Return Repeat. How's it going? It's episode two. My, I'm Daniel Pewewardy.

Jenny, voiceover I am Jenny Durham.

Daniel, voiceover And we are adult literacy librarians at the Wichita Public Library. And that was a fun show, our first—thank you. I learned so much about libraries from you. Thank you. I like our new format.

Jenny, voiceover I do too. I'm really excited, though, to talk about book adaptations today.

Daniel, voiceover Yeah, I'm really excited. I saw Project Hail Mary. I did not read the book, but my brother read the book and he loved the movie. I'm excited to read the book now. And, like, I realize everything I'm watching right now is like an adaptation, like everything on television.

Jenny, voiceover There's a lot of that going around. I have heard a lot of good things about Project Hail Mary. I definitely want to read the book first.

Daniel, voiceover Baby goose, Ryan Gosling, shoutout. He makes it. He makes it. Before we jump into the episode, I do have a quick update. We kind of reached out to you guys to see if you guys wanted t-shirts. And a couple of you guys actually got back to us, so thank you. We were like, I was like, oh, people are listening. Yeah. Keep e-mailing us. It's nice to hear from you guys that listen to the show. And let us know what you think of the new format.

Jenny, voiceover Yeah, we're going to have to get on, like, finding an easy way for people to contact us.

Daniel, voiceover So we're going to talk about adaptations.

Jenny, voiceover Mm-hmm.

Daniel, voiceover And I guess the age-old question is, is the book better or the movie?

Jenny, voiceover Yeah. And is it better to read the book first or watch the movie first?

Daniel, voiceover To give us the movie side of things about the adaptation wars, we have KMUW's film critic Fletcher Powell coming to talk to us today about adaptations. So let's just go ahead and jump into it.

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Daniel All right. And we're back with our guest, Fletcher Powell, movie critic from KMUW. And we're here to talk about, this episode, we're talking about adaptations.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny Yeah.

Daniel So...

Jenny Was the book better?

Fletcher People usually think it is, right?

Daniel Or is there, is the movie better? But before we jump into that, I guess, like a little about you. So, you have been reviewing for KMUW for a few years now.

Fletcher For oh, gosh, probably almost ten years. I think. It may be almost nine years. I can't remember. But before that, people may remember Jim Erickson, who was our long-time film critic. And so I was his producer for five or six or seven years before I took over for him. So I've sort of been doing something with the movie review there for, for quite a while.

Daniel Jim Erickson actually was a Friends of the Library volunteer.

Fletcher Oh, I'm sure.

Daniel Pretty regularly. Yeah, he's a... for those that don't know, Jim Erickson was a film professor at Wichita State and he was a movie reviewer. He passed a few years ago. He was a great guy. I knew him through Lance Hayes. But yeah. And so you've, you've taken on the role of the film critic. Has it been big shoes to fill?

Fletcher Well, you can't fill Jim Erickson's shoes. People who remember him know what a personality he was. So I kind of just tried to take things in my own direction and just, you know, do the best I could talking about movies, but also do the best I can to serve the public radio audience. I guess that's a big part of it, too.

Daniel So are you a movie fan at least? [Daniel laughs]

Fletcher Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't take it over hating movies.

Jenny I was gonna say I couldn't imagine not liking films, but being, you know—

Fletcher You know, I've known some people.

Jenny —forced into... but then again, there's librarians that don't read.

Daniel I was a sports media—

Jenny At least don't read for pleasure.

Daniel I was like a sports media scholarship student for a while at Butler. And I just, you know, you just do the job sometimes. [Daniel and Fletcher laugh]

Fletcher Yeah, I guess so.

Daniel I feel like doing color commentary. I'll be like, "Look at him go!"

Jenny I imagine it's a lot more fun, though, doing the job if you enjoy film.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel So I've kind of worked with you, we've known each other through the Academy Award shorts and things. So like, what have, so 2026 has been kind of a pretty decent year for movies so far. Do you have any favorites so far?

Fletcher Oh gosh. For the year so far, that's a good question. I watch too many things to call something up just in my brain, so I would kind of have to look at what I had watched so far this year. And I've, now I've turned my phone off so I can't pull up my Letterboxd.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher So that's a terrible answer. I'm sure there's good stuff that I'll think of later.

Daniel Yeah, we can just come back to it. Yeah. And, also, do you read a lot too?

Fletcher I do not read a lot. I would love to read a lot. There are a number of reasons for that. I used to read a lot, like when I was a kid and through college and after college, but now I have two small children, so reading is almost never an option. And also, I fell asleep whenever, whenever I really try to read a book, I fall asleep. I read Middlemarch for the first time a couple of years ago, but it took me about a year to read.

Daniel Oh, wow. Yeah.

Fletcher I mean, it's that thick, right?

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny And like the language, even though it was still, you know, in modern English, still it was kind of that, like stilted Victorian.

Daniel What is Middlemarch? Is it...?

Jenny That was George Eliot.

Fletcher Uh-huh. Yeah. It's like the sprawling novel about this town, the town of Middlemarch. And sort of the relationships that go on. And I loved it, and it was instantly one of my favorite books. But yeah, it took me a long time.

Jenny Yeah. It's like classic English literature, though. So definitely if I went a while without reading and then I was going to go back to reading, that is probably not the one I would start with.

Fletcher Don't ask me why that's what I picked up. Especially, you know, COVID kind of took most people out of reading in one way or another. It just kind of messed up our brains. And Middlemarch was one of the first books I read after that. And yet probably not the best decisions as far as all that goes.

Daniel I always like I haven't listened, I haven't read a physical book in like over a decade. I mostly just do audiobooks now. Graphic novels and stuff, I can read and stuff. And there's like, there's a couple of nonfiction books I read, like 80 percent of physical, but like, my book is House of Leaves.

Fletcher Oh, sure.

Daniel It's like the one that, because you can't get an audiobook version of it.

Fletcher That makes sense.

Daniel And that, speaking of like, adaptations, that's like kind of, it's unadaptable is what I've been like—

Fletcher I think somebody is doing it, though, or I think somebody is trying.

Jenny I was wondering about that, like when we were coming up with thinking of questions to ask too, there is that question of, are there some works that are just like, would be impossible to adapt? People used to think Dune was like that.

Daniel I know the one right now that everyone's like, the big hubbub is Blood Meridian.

Fletcher Oh, sure.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher People have been trying to do that for, for quite a while.

Daniel Yeah, since like the '80s. Yeah. So, I guess, like, so I'm trying to think we need to... like, if I know, I guess the, like, the next question would be is like, do you want to jump into talking about adaptations?

Fletcher Sure.

Jenny Yeah, we can do that.

Daniel Okay.

Fletcher I see you wore your Dune shirt.

Daniel I wore my Dune shirt.

Fletcher I wore my Barry Lyndon shirt.

Daniel Oh that's—wait, was Barry Lyndon a book?

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel Okay. Wait, I think a good chunk of Kubrick stuff was—

Fletcher Yeah, a lot of it was adapted.

Daniel So, that's, I have not seen Barry Lyndon.

Fletcher It's gorgeous. Yeah.

Jenny I had to be the weird one. I didn't think about a movie tie-in.

Fletcher You just wore a regular book shirt.

Jenny And it's National Poetry Month, so I'm wearing my Edgar Allen Poe shirt that says, "When It Rains, It Poes."

Daniel Obviously like the best adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe work was, like, Treehouse of Horror, The Simpsons episode. [Fletcher laughs]

Fletcher That's hard to argue with. Yeah.

Jenny Yeah.

Daniel I think maybe, like, yeah, I don't know, I feel like Edgar Allan Poe is one of those things that's like... I know that, like, I know they made full-length movies of his works, but yeah, you know...

Jenny Unless they made, like, not really adaptation, but biopics [bi-opics]. I'm like, have they ever done an Edgar Allan Poe biopic? I feel like they had to have.

Daniel I've been saying biopic. [bio-pic]

Jenny I always say biopic [bi-opic]. [Daniel and Fletcher chuckle] I don't care.

Daniel So like, what? Like so like are there like you said, you don't read much. Is there, is there a book that you've read that you like watch the movie of later and like was like—

Fletcher I mean, that's happened a lot and partly, I, partly why I don't do that anymore.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher Because earlier in my life, I would often read the book before I saw the movie, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher But what I end up doing is I spend the entire time, like, sort of jumping back and forth between the two and comparing them.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And that really bothers me because it just, it's less fun. I start, I start to see the things in the movie that they necessarily had to cut out—

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher —to make it a movie and, and it just, it starts to make me less happy with the movie. And that's not fair to the movie because it's a movie. It's a different thing. And, and so I kind of stopped reading books before—

Daniel Before the movie came out. Yeah.

Fletcher I also kind of stopped reading the books after, unless it was something that I really, really vibed with. Right?

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher If I really wanted to go back and live in that world some more, then I might go back and read it. But another really annoying thing for me that I would do is after I read it, I would, I would picture the actors who were in the movie, which seems fine, except that my brain wouldn't let me do that. And so I would start trying to erase that picture of the actors.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And just go by the description of who the character was in the book. And so I would have this weird tension of jumping back and forth between the actors and trying to force myself not to think of the actors.

Daniel I feel like you're talking about, I feel like I'm thinking of a book right now, and I feel like you're probably talking about one of the same books, Jurassic Park.

Fletcher Oh man, absolutely. [Daniel laughs] Yeah.

Jenny Either that, or if you take a really long gap between reading the book and—

Fletcher Right.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny —because like I read Jurassic Park when I was in high school in the '90s.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny But like I hadn't seen Jurassic Park for like another ten years after that. So I've forgotten what was in the book.

Fletcher Yeah. And that I can do.

Daniel Jurassic Park is really interesting because like, I read the book last year and I noticed, like, more and more like I think the new Jurassic World thing was coming out. And then it was like they were talking about like a return to the novel with that book and like, I just remember the older I got, I would watch Jurassic Park and the stuff—because I loved that movie as a kid.

Fletcher Sure.

Daniel And so, like, I would watch it and I'd be like, I wouldn't care, like, about the grown up talk. But when I watch it as an adult now, I'm like, listening. I'm like, wait, how do like... what's the lawyer doing here? Like, what's all this going on? And the book's all that.

Fletcher Yeah. Well, that makes sense.

Daniel Yeah. The book is a lot of like, the book is very like... it's Michael Crichton so it's very like talking about the technical aspects, of it's all like—

Jenny The science.

Daniel Yeah. And it's, I, it's been interesting to read that. And, also like after reading the book and kind of knowing like what happens—spoiler: John Hammond in the book is kind of not a nice guy.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel And he, stuff happens in the book. He basically gets eaten because he's convinced like the dinosaurs won't, that he's their dad.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel And it's funny because I was watching the movie recently, and I, and there's lines not directly from the book, but like, close enough. You're like, oh, they fully planned on killing John Hammond on production. And then, like, is it Richard or David Attenborough that played him? Which one's the Earth guy?

Fletcher It's... yeah, I can't remember which Attenborough is which.

Jenny David Attenborough is the one that does the documentaries.

Daniel Richard.

Fletcher So it's Richard. Yes.

Daniel Yeah. So Richard got—and I saw, I looked it up and Richard, everyone loved him on set.

Fletcher Yeah, yeah.

Daniel So they were like—

Jenny "We can't kill you!"

Fletcher And that makes sense.

Daniel He played Santa Claus!

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny They needed to get a jerk to play him.

Daniel They should have gotten Sean Connery. That would have been like—[vaguely bad Sean Connery impression]

Fletcher [Fletcher laughs] We all should have been so lucky.

Daniel Oh my gosh, Sean Connery would have totally changed that movie. So, like, did you, like, as a kid, were there like books that, like... did you read novelizations ever?

Fletcher Yes. I, the only one I remember specifically was the novelization of the Tim Burton Batman movie. And I remember. I remember reading it and thinking, this is so much better. And I loved the Tim Burton Batman movie when I was a kid, but I read it and oh my gosh, I loved how—I loved the book and how detailed it was. I don't remember anything about it now, but I sure remember being really impressed by the novelization of the Batman movie.

Daniel Novelizations are like, very interesting because a lot of times they're movies that were adapted and they like, yeah, changed the movie enough. Like, did you ever read novelizations, Jenny?

Jenny The only novelization I can think of that I've read wasn't like a direct novelization from like an actual work that was done, so... But it was a Wonder Woman. It was a series. It's teen books. And this was like maybe ten years ago. They did these novelizations based on, like, DC legends, and they did like a Catwoman one, and...

Daniel Oh, that's cool.

Jenny And I want to actually say the Wonder Woman one was written by Sarah J. Maas.

Daniel Oh, yeah.

Jenny And is actually really good, but it's like a whole brand new story. They did kind of mess a little bit with her origin story.

Daniel I've always been curious about graphic novels and comics.

Jenny But it was actually really good. It was, and then I went and read the, the Catwoman one too and I think Leigh Bardugo did that one. [Editor's note: Leigh Bardugo wrote the Wonder Woman book and Sarah J. Maas wrote the Catwoman book.]

And she's another, like, really well known, mostly Y.A. fiction. And again, that one was really good and I think they did a couple others. I can't remember. But yeah, those ones I've read.

Fletcher But these weren't like direct novelizations.

Jenny No, they weren't direct. So that's why I'm like—

Daniel They weren't from movies.

Fletcher So do they still do direct novelizations?

Daniel Okay.

Jenny I've seen some.

Daniel Okay, so I would say I was like, I think this was during COVID. I remember, like, I COVID happened and like I went to Dillons and I was like, everything's changing, right, in your life just looking for meaning and stuff. And I remember, like, feeling like I went by the magazine section. I was like, okay, there's still magazines. And I saw Mad magazine and that, like, warmed my heart. And then I saw a novelization of like, whatever, like Joseph Gordon Green, that's the Halloween reboot guy.

Fletcher David Gordon Green.

Daniel David Gordon Green. Yeah, whatever like, I think it was either like it was the second one and I was like, they had a novelization? Because I remember as a kid—

Fletcher Wow.

Daniel —You go to Dillons and they have all the Ann Rule true crime books, and they'd also have movie novels like the airport rack, right?

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel Like and I was like, I haven't seen a novelization in forever, but what's now kind of like an... it's not really like it's, it feels like a cash grab. I hate, I'm not trying, I'm trying not to say cash grab, but like...

Jenny It is what it is.

Daniel There's, now there's novelizations of horror popping up right now.

Fletcher Oh. Interesting.

Daniel So like people, like they'll get a popular horror author to write the novelization for the, like, Ghoulies or something.

Fletcher Really? Wow.

Jenny I feel like I've seen some too where they'll take—

Daniel Fright Night is one that I saw.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny They'll take something like a podcast or whatever, and then they'll turn it into I feel like they've done that with the Old Gods of Appalachia.

Daniel Is that a book? Because actually I really like that podcast, but they're like ten minute episodes.

Jenny I feel like I recently ran across like a book about it, and I'm pretty sure that started just as a podcast.

Daniel I will say as far as like, this is really meta—and sorry, we get random.

Fletcher It's all right.

Daniel One of my favorite things I'm doing now, there's been a couple of, like, podcasts and they'll release, they'll condense. So like I do fictional podcasts so like, what's that one? Welcome to Night Vale and all shoot offs and like, Lime Town and stuff. And like, I've gone to the point where, like, I'll just wait for the novelization because novelization isn't going to have ads.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel And they're, and they're like fine tuning it, right? Like the podcast is like, is raw. It's because it's like they're, you know, like... and so when they get to the novel, it's like it's, it's a better version.

Jenny They've edited out the stuff that doesn't always get edited out.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny On some of these podcasts.

Daniel So that's weird because it's like the podcast is the original and then the novel's the adaptation.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel And so...

Fletcher That's wild. I didn't know they did that.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny That seems to be fairly recent that I've seen that. And I know that they've started, they started doing it like a handful of years ago where it wasn't like a direct novelization. It was more like they created a book like The Moth had some books about like—

Daniel In lore. Yeah.

Jenny Yeah, where it was more just like that encyclopedic-like collection of information.

Daniel Mostly nonfiction, and then fiction started.

Jenny But I've started to see fiction on more of the serial-based podcasts, though, where it's like the story. I tend to do more of the nonfiction podcasts, but I have noticed and was like, that's different.

Daniel One question I had to ask, and this is going back to your movie reviewing stuff. So like, we live in Wichita and the climate has changed.

Fletcher For sure.

Daniel And with movies and like... I remember like a long time ago, it used to be like, sometimes you have to go to Kansas City to see a movie.

Fletcher I've done it multiple times.

Daniel Like, me too. Yeah, like, or go to Oklahoma City. Like I remember people going to, as far as Dallas to see a movie and stuff and like, and now everything's available online. But also it's like the windows for screening. So like, how has like being a movie reviewer changed since COVID? Let's set it for 2020. Like you've been doing this for a few years now. So like what are some of the changes you've seen?

Fletcher It seems to be a lot easier, except for the major releases or the major studios. It seems to be a lot easier to get digital screeners because everybody got used to providing those during COVID.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher Even the big studios. Well, although they weren't putting out a lot of movies at that point, but, a number of the smaller studios have continued to do that. Or distributors, I should say smaller distributors have continued to do that. And so that's been easier.

Obviously, streaming services have exploded and so you can get stuff through them. So when I review movies, I try to sort of spread it around because people are seeing movies in a lot of different places now. And so, you know, I'll try to do a couple from the theater in, you know, in a month, then a couple from Netflix and a couple from Hulu or whatever.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And so there's just a lot of, a lot more places you can get your movies. And so you kind of have to... I try to sprinkle it around so that I can catch everybody who's seen their movies somewhere with something.

Daniel That's cool. And you—and we were talking—and TV is almost the same now. Do you feel like you're reviewing more TV?

Fletcher I don't, not so much. I try to stay away from it. Sometimes if there's like a limited series, like I remember last year, toward the end of the year, I did Death by Lightning, which was on Netflix, which was about the assassination of James Garfield. And it was, it was a blast. That series was fantastic, but it was like a four episode limited series.

Daniel Wow. I had no interest in the death of Garfield.

Fletcher Oh, it's so much fun.

Daniel You're making me want to watch it. The death of lightning?

Fletcher Yeah. Death by Lightning.

Daniel Death by Lightning. Is that a book? So that's a book.

Fletcher It's based on a book, too. Yeah.

Daniel Ooh.

Jenny I have heard of that one. But, like, I read a lot of just you know, entertainment news and so, like, I'll hear, like, titles and stuff. And then it goes kind of in the back of my head and I'm like, okay, let's revisit that later.

Fletcher Well, and there's so much... I mean, even with me paying attention to so much, there's still so much that just goes past me and I end up catching it four months later or something because people are talking about it. But there's just so much right now. It's hard to—

Jenny I was like that with The Queen's Gambit.

Fletcher Oh yeah, sure.

Jenny Like I, I watched like... I think there's like, oh, I like eight episodes.

Fletcher Yeah, six or eight, I want to say.

Jenny And I watched all but like the last two episodes, and then I didn't pick it up again until like a year later. And I just continued and I remembered it. I still haven't read the book, though, so I have no idea.

Daniel It's weird now that like TV shows, typically the seasons aren't a year later. It's like it can be when it's time. It's whenever, like whenever we get around to it, you'll get season two or whatever. Yeah. And George R.R. Martin, obviously. [Daniel laughs]

Jenny Oh yeah. Because there's the newest one.

Daniel I would honestly put money that like Game of Thrones is where this, like, spreading out the seasons and not caring anymore to rush them is like...

Fletcher Yeah. Yeah, I wonder. I mean, there have been, you know, earlier there were things like when The Sopranos came out, they ended up splitting one of the seasons.

Daniel Yeah, that was the first time doing the split, yeah.

Fletcher And I think that was largely because they didn't want to pay the actors more. So they called it the same season. And the same thing I think happened with Mad Men, maybe.

Daniel Yeah, I kind of remember that with Mad Men. I just remember also writers strikes kind of...

Jenny I was going to say the writers strikes like really affected certain... this is more shows. I don't know how well it probably impacted films as well where yeah, like certain shows just weren't the same afterwards.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny Like the original Heroes, if you ever watched Heroes, I was so disappointed. It was going somewhere. And then, and then like afterwards, it, like, lost its momentum and the writing was not great. And then it just kind of tanked from there.

Daniel Yeah. I, I the what was like The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I remember that show like drastically changing. But anyway, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll be back with Fletcher and we'll have some more questions for you.

Fletcher Great, okay.

Daniel Thank you.

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Daniel And we're back. And this is Read Return Repeat. I'm Daniel.

Jenny I'm Jenny.

Daniel And we're here with Fletcher Powell, film critic for KMUW.

Fletcher Hey, guys.

Daniel Hey. So, we've been talking about adaptations with Fletcher. I guess, like, the big question is, like, what makes or breaks like an adaptation? Like when you adapt a movie, like, I think, like, source material is obviously like a big one, but, like, what do you feel like whatever like movies, when they, like, take it from a source, like what's something that you feel like, even if it's like something you haven't read, right? It's like they totally went off the rails with it. [Fletcher laughs]

Fletcher Well, I think I'm going to have to speak for myself specifically because what makes or breaks an adaptation for other people may be how closely it resembles the book, and that's not that important to me.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher Because and I get it, I get it, why people would feel that way. Because you read a book, you become emotionally invested. You really care about the characters. If we do something different to the characters or they behave differently from what we expect, then you're going to get mad because you do, you genuinely have that emotional investment in that world, in those characters.

Daniel There's an entire industry on the internet of people that are just like—

Fletcher Mad.

Daniel Mad about comic book movies and like it's... yeah, it's just kind of...

Jenny Well, when you have people that get really hung up on the visual.

Fletcher Oh, sure.

Jenny Like—

Fletcher Yeah, it doesn't look exactly like what I imagined in my head.

Jenny Like, oh, well, they weren't supposed to look that way. And I mean, there's other things at play I'm not going to get into, but like—

Daniel Yeah, I mean, like, I think, I think gender or race swapping is like, I don't... I mean, like...

Jenny I love that though because it if they fit the characters—

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny —but they look different, I don't care.

Daniel I mean like, I mean the, the author who we won't talk about, or I try not to, but I did think it was funny when people got mad. She was like, oh, I actually intended that character to be... like, I was like, yeah, J.K. Rowling is what I'm talking about. Like just being like, I always thought that was like... yeah, I don't, I guess what I get annoyed by, lately, I don't even know I was going to talk about.

I think I just kind of like with comic book adaptations is when the character, like, is like age swapped. Like, sometimes... it's always like, like they'll make a character, like if it's a kid, like, I don't know, I watched that recently. Like I forgot what it was, but it was like, they, like, made the adult character like a teenager. And I was like, why?

Fletcher Yeah. It's funny. For me, I guess, I guess what makes an adaptation is if it justifies its existence, because there are a lot of movie, I mean, it, you know, you look at, you look up a list of adaptations, good luck. Because, like, 50 percent or—I'm just making that up, maybe more—of movies are adapted from something, right?

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher So there's so many of them, and some of them are just, okay, let's make a movie of this thing. But there are others that really find a way to tell that story in a way that makes sense for a movie. And I think that's when a movie is really made as an adaptation in that it takes that story that you could read, you could not even make the movie, you could read this and it's great.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher But they do something else that makes it make sense that there is a movie now, right?

Jenny There has, there should be a purpose, because if you think of the amount of times a particular work gets adapted and adapted and adapted and you're like, why do we need another one?

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny Like I'm thinking of really most recent. I haven't seen it, so I can't really speak too much about it. But the new Wuthering Heights.

Fletcher Uh-huh.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny How many adaptations have been made of Wuthering Heights?

Fletcher So let's talk about that for a second. And we're going to talk about it in a weird way because I also haven't seen it. And I am not a huge fan of Emerald Fennell's, right? But she said in an interview something along the lines of, I wanted to make the movie that felt like what it felt like to me when I read this when I was a teenager. I think that's an admirable approach. Like, you want to get a specific feeling that you had reading this book. I don't, I have no idea whether she executed that well or accomplished it. Like I said, I haven't seen the movie, but approaching something that way, that justifies why you would make that movie. Because you're putting something else along with this source material. And I think that's really fantastic.

Daniel I think that's how like a director, if, that's like a really, that's a really honorable and solid way to like go about that.

Jenny Yeah. And that actually thinks, that makes me think of the, a few years ago, the adaptation of Little Women by—

Fletcher Greta Gerwig, right?

Jenny Yeah. Greta Gerwig, and she did kind of put in like some more modern sensibilities, some more feminist sensibilities that you really didn't see in the original text.

Fletcher But it was brilliant. She did it.

Jenny But she was very open about that, that she wanted to retell the story through a feminist lens. And so, despite normally I would have been like, yeah, that's a little too modern. But like, she was very open about that, and that was her vision. And so yeah.

Fletcher And what was so—sorry, I'm just getting excited. What was so lovely is that she both kept the original version essentially, and added this other, this other part. So she ended it essentially in two ways, right? She kept the original ending, but she also gave, gave Saoirse Ronan a different ending that, that updated it for a more modern sensibility.

Jenny Yeah.

Fletcher Which was so brilliant.

Jenny Yeah. Because that character's because it was Amy, I believe, the youngest sister that she... oh, wait, no, Saoirse Ronan actually played, did she play Jo?

Daniel I, so no one's seen—

Jenny I can't even remember.

Daniel No one's seen the movie, right?

Fletcher Are we talking Little Women or..?

Daniel Oh, were we still talking about—we're talking about Little Women.

Jenny We were talking about Little Women. I've seen Little Women. I haven't seen Wuthering Heights.

Daniel Well, yeah, I was just going to say I only read the cliff notes of Wuthering Heights. That's all. [Daniel laughs]

Fletcher So from what I hear, it departs quite a lot. And also only, only, takes a small part of the book, which, in my opinion is a fine way to adapt a movie. Again, I don't know if she executed it well, but that's a fine way to adapt a book, is to take a small part of it and tell a larger story within it.

Daniel So speaking of Wuthering Heights, I did take an English lit class and like I said, cliff notes. [Fletcher chuckles] And so, like in this class, we had to read all this stuff. And, like, I just kind of phoned it in. I did watch a lot of movie adaptations of things and stuff. And I remember like bringing, we were talking about Gulliver's Travels and I didn't read the book at all, but I watched like several adaptations. I brought up the courtroom scene and my teacher's like, that was in the movie. And I was like, so embarrassed.

Fletcher See? That'll get you. [Daniel laughs] Don't do that, kids.

Jenny I actually, I love adaptations that deviate so much that it's technically a different story. Because I feel like that gives the director a lot and the writer a lot more creative freedom.

Daniel Oh, totally.

Jenny Because if you think about like Ten Things I Hate About You or Clueless or Bridget Jones's Diary, technically that was a book that was adapted from Pride and Prejudice. So that's like different layers, but I feel like they get a little bit more leeway because it's like, hey, well, this is just inspired by so we can like differentiate. It doesn't have to be true to the source material completely.

Daniel So we recently had you speak at the Senior Wednesday about short films, and you kind of talked about early short films, and a lot of them were adaptations like Méliès's adaptation of is it A Trip to the Moon by Jules Verne, which...

Fletcher Yeah. Well, very loose, right?

Daniel Yeah. I read that and I had to read that book in like 1800s science fiction class, but, yeah, that is a very loose adaptation.

Fletcher They have to be, almost. Well, it's funny that you mention that because I just watched a recently restored—recently in the last ten years—restored version of Frankenstein from 1910.

Daniel Oh, that's interesting.

Fletcher Very cool and very different. It's 12 minutes long, right? Again, you're not going to you're not going to get all of Frankenstein in there.

Daniel Speaking of horror, I think what's interesting is the Dracula. Like, how, like Nosferatu in Drac—Dracula was... the whole adaptation of Dracula is very interesting because I think there was like a play that was made like within—like official play. So the book comes out in like 1870-something, and it's within like ten years there's like a play written by someone working with Stoker, and then Nosferatu comes out like ten years later.

Fletcher Yeah. I mean, Nosferatu is in the, what, the '20s?

Daniel Yeah, '20s. So I think, like, I do not know what year Dracula came out. I know Greg will probably add it to...

Fletcher The 19, I think 31 or 33.

Daniel Oh, the book.

Fletcher Oh, the book. I'm sorry. Yeah.

Daniel I can't remember. [Editor's note: Dracula was published in 1897.]

Jenny Oh, yeah.

Fletcher I've already jumped ahead to the movie.

Daniel But so Nosferatu is it just basically they changed names for it. They ripped off Dracula.

Fletcher Right.

Daniel It's interesting because it's like, oh, they—it's not an adaptation. It's just basically like a ripoff. It's like—

Fletcher They just couldn't get the rights to the to the name.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny Yeah. So let's give it a Latin name. I don't know.

Daniel I don't know what Nosferatu is. [Editor's note: There is not a universally agreed upon root. Some proposed etymologies connect the word "Nosferatu" to Latin or Greek, while others link it to Romanian terms.]

Jenny I just assumed it.

Daniel It's interesting because like now it's like people consider it like a Dracula movie. Even though his name was like Count Orlok. And then every, like everything is changed. But it's like, but it's like if you ask someone like, what are the best Dracula films? You know, like, Nosferatu, the Herzog version, this one probably come up in the list, too, even though they're not technically adaptations.

Fletcher You know one that should come up on the list that a lot of people hate is Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Daniel I love that movie.

Jenny Oh, that's my favorite.

Fletcher Good. I'm so glad to hear this. [Daniel and Jenny laugh] But here's a, here's an example of something that makes sense when you see the adaptation is that he does so many things that only a movie can do.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And that's what's so great when you see a good adaptation is that you see why, okay, that's a movie now. Because these things can't be done just written on the page.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher Right? And it's gorgeous to watch.

Daniel Yeah. I think what's interesting yeah, is that... so like Dracula is like an epistolary novel. Which means like, found footage did not exist. [Fletcher laughs]

Fletcher Found footage.

Daniel The most, like, true version of Dracula would be like the most like weirdest, like intertextual found footage movie involving, like, emails and...

Jenny You want to be where like somebody found a journal or something.

Daniel Ken Burns's Dracula.

Fletcher Ken Burns's Dracula.

Jenny Yeah. It would, they would have to do like a dual timeline thing where, like, somebody finds this cache of letters.

Fletcher That would be interesting.

Jenny It actually almost kind of makes me think of a little bit if you've ever read the book The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which dealt with like vampires or something, and she discovers these old letters or whatever, because her father was like... like academic, like he was a professor or something of history. And so it kind of ties in that with these letters. And then she discovers they were vampires. So it was really cool. It kind of made me think of it was very like Dracula crossover.

Fletcher That's really neat.

Jenny And that's kind of how I feel like you would have to do it if you wanted it to, like, work like that.

Daniel I think that's, yeah, that's, that would be really cool. I think, I think bringing the epistolary nature of Dracula back into the, like, movies would be cool, like, but I guess, like, my next question for you would be, like you said you kind of like, stopped reading the book before the movie.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel What book ruined the movie?

Fletcher Oh, ruined. Oh, gosh.

Daniel Did something, was there a moment that made you stop, or was it just like...

Fletcher No, I remember... it's funny because this is they actually go in the other direction. But I remember when I stopped reading books that I was going to watch the movie of, or that I'd seen the movie of, and it was A Simple Plan, which was a Sam Raimi movie from like 1998 or so. And it came, it came out shortly after Fargo, which I think—

Daniel Similar vibes.

Fletcher Yeah, I think it was kind of to the detriment of that movie, because A Simple Plan is a really good movie.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And they both take place in, you know, the... in Minnesota and it's very barren. And there's money that people are fighting over and, and so on. But I read, I read A Simple Plan, the book, after I'd seen the movie, and I did not have an enjoyable experience because I didn't like some of the ways the book went compared to the movie.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And I didn't really think I was being fair to the book at that point because I was just comparing it to this other thing, and it kind of made me feel like, okay, I'm just not going to do this anymore. I don't feel like I'm being fair to the book or the movie if I'm constantly comparing the two things. And some people can handle that really easily. I, I personally, I personally can't.

And so that's kind of when I made that decision. So I was probably, it was probably around the year 2000 or so. And I pretty much have avoided unless, as you mentioned earlier, unless it's been a decade or two decades since I've seen the movie, and I don't or since I've, since I've read the book and I don't really remember the details that well.

Jenny I've had to do that with—there is one book-slash-movie I can think of where I felt kind of guilty because it did deviate enough, and it's a movie I've seen so many times, and I love, and the author I love, but they were different enough to where I was like this, it's not fair because on their own, they're good. And it was Practical Magic.

Fletcher Oh.

Daniel I didn't even know that was a book.

Jenny It is. There's a whole series. Alice Hoffman is the writer, and she actually, like, did a prequel to it. And, like, goes into, like the original story of the ancestor that she mentioned at the beginning of the movie.

Daniel Oh, that's cool.

Jenny But for whatever reason, I think just the movie I had seen it so many times before I read the book, and the book does kind of take a different, like path a little bit. And so it diverted enough to where I was like, I don't really like the book as much. And I feel like the reason I don't like the book as much is because I just love the movie so much. But on its own, it's good. It's just... not the story that I just got really familiar with and the actors and everything. I really enjoyed all the follow up books she did, though. It's just, I can't reread Practical Magic because it's just...

Daniel I guess I, I'm thinking about Practical Magic and I'm thinking about like times when the, it's like both the book and the movie are good, but the vibes—let's just say like before we jump in, what's best works—both movie and book are good, but the vibes are just completely off.

Fletcher I have one example of that that is a really divisive one, I think.

Daniel Okay.

Fletcher Especially among people who've read the book, which is the recent adaptation of Nickel Boys. Have you have you seen or read Nickel Boys?

Jenny I've read the book.

Daniel I've seen them the—it's like about the bank robbers?

Fletcher No.

Daniel Oh wait, I have not.

Jenny That's the like school that was in Florida.

Fletcher Yeah. It's about the, the two boys who are at sort of a reform school in Florida. They're Black and, you know, and—

Jenny There was a major abuse—

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny —that happened. It was based off of a real school.

Fletcher Right. So I don't, I don't necessarily want to say the vibes are completely different because they are telling the same story, but the... there's... how spoiler-y should I be?

Daniel It's fine. We talk.

Fletcher So one of the characters essentially is pretending to be the other character for the entire time. The way the movie tells it is the entire thing is shot first person, and we don't know that he's pretending to be this other character until there's a moment when the other character is shot to death, and our perspective jumps from the first person back to third person behind his shoulders.

Daniel Oh, wow.

Fletcher And it it's an incredible way to tell this story of identity in a purely cinematic way, a way that could not be done in another format. And for people who read the book and loved the book, and great because it's an incredible book, that the way it was shot and the way that story was told was really incongruous with what they had experienced.

Daniel So it's almost like it was like an unreliable narrator. The movie had—

Fletcher Extremely.

Daniel —an unreliable narrator, and the book did not.

Fletcher Well, no, I believe the book, the book is, it's still... I don't think it's clear the entire, it's not clear the entire time.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher But you can't, you can't tell that story in the same way, literally looking through someone's eyes in a book because you're reading words on a page. And I think that was, the whole thing was jarring enough for some of the book readers that they didn't very much not connect with the movie. But it's, it's an incredible adaptation of something because it's taking something that only a movie can do.

Jenny And if I remember correctly—I could be wrong because it's been a couple of years since I've read The Nickel Boys. I want to say it was written in third person.

Fletcher Yeah, again, I'm the same as you. I read it shortly after it came out and so...

Jenny And you're going to get a different experience if you have like a film that's kind of using that kind of perspective because it's almost like a first person when you're doing it from that. Something that was similar in that respect, where the vibe was different was with the film or it wasn't a film, it was TV series. Kindred, the TV series of Kindred that was on Hulu of Octavia Butler's.

Fletcher Oh, really?

Jenny And I've read, I have read that novel, like twice. I've even read the comic adaptation of it. But the show—like they set it, I feel like they set it in more modern day, and it takes place in the '70s, and I don't know why that made a difference to me.

Fletcher Mm-hmm.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny Like it, I think part of it is cause some of it was the outer societal thing of how she is treated in the modern day of the book, because it goes between, you know, present and past. But when they set it in a modern day and they threw in contemporary stuff, it just didn't work for me.

Daniel I, I just was going to say, like the, the book covers for True Blood, like the, the vampire—what is it, Southern Vampire Chronicles?

Jenny Oh yeah, by Charlaine Harris.

Daniel They look completely different, like that, those books do not look like True Blood at all. And so, like, we gotta get you out of here, and so we're just gonna, I'm gonna, we're going to go down, we got a few more questions.

Fletcher Sure. Unless we've got time—

Jenny We want to just....

Daniel Oh.

Jenny Do we want to share our favorite—

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny —film adaptations or our least favorite?

Daniel Okay. Yeah. I just was losing track of time. Yeah, that's what I was going to do. I was going to jump into next. So, let's just jump into, like, favorites and un-favorites and stuff. I'll go ahead and, is there a... let's go ahead and start with the obvious one. What is like the books like, what's your like favorite, like what movie is a book better to you I guess.

Fletcher Is the book better?

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher How about we go the other way?

Daniel Okay, we'll go the other way. Because everyone can say that, right?

Fletcher Everybody always says the book is better.

Daniel Yeah. So what movie do you think is better than the book?

Fletcher Well, I think the, the example that is the very easiest is The Last of the Mohicans, which is a dreadful book, but wow, it makes a good movie.

Daniel Yeah, I read the cliff notes of that, too. [Daniel laughs]

Fletcher Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'm thinking, of course, of the Michael Mann one from the 1990s with Daniel Day-Lewis.

Daniel Yeah, I have, I've been, like, doing a lot of art with Wes Studi.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel I keep making these, like, I've been at home doing, like, these stencils of, like, Wes Studi and like, I've been looking for it. I'm actually—this is funny because I'm actually using Wes Studi from Heat for, like one of these. [Fletcher laughs] Which is, Heat's like interesting because like, it's a to go back to the novelization thing and it's like there's—I don't know if they did a novelization of Heat—

Fletcher Probably.

Daniel Michael Mann did write a sequel. And that's what's happening now, too, is like...

Fletcher Yeah, that's, that, I don't know, I'm not sure how I feel about that because he did that. Did Quentin Tarantino do something? Oh, he wrote, he wrote a longer novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I think.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher I don't know how I feel...

Daniel I liked that book.

Fletcher Really?

Daniel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is, I don't know, because it's not, there, there's supplemental.

Fletcher Okay.

Daniel Yeah. So, like, they both share the same title. And this is very interesting when the book and the movie complement each other.

Jenny Yeah.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel And that book's actually really good and it's more and it explores Keith... I can't think of, Cliff Booth's character, Brad Pitt's character, more. What I'm bummed out now, though, is because I like that book a lot, because those two things stand alone. Now they're doing a Cliff Booth miniseries. I'm like...

Fletcher Oh yeah, see, that's...

Daniel They're just going to take it from this book. Yeah. It's like...

Fletcher Yeah. They always go too far.

Daniel So Last of the Mohicans.

Fletcher Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and that's the easiest one because nobody likes the book.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And the, the movie's fantastic. And they're, I don't know, there are other versions of the movie that I haven't seen, but, you know, people always say it makes for a good movie. There are other things that end up being problematic when you even try to talk about them. And so I apologize to everyone for this. But like Fight Club.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher The movie far better than the book.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher It understands what it's doing far better than the book did. Another one is American Psycho, which is also a terrible book.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher But the director, Mary Herron, took it in a, in a very different direction. And, I mean, maybe being a woman adapting such a male book was a really good thing. And her perspective on that changed things enough that it's actually a pretty good movie. And so there are movies like that where the perspective of whoever's doing it maybe understands the, the root of it better than the author actually did.

Daniel Yeah. I think that does happen. And I feel like Bret Easton Ellis, I think, I've kind of heard that about all his movies are kind of more comprehensible and like, I guess my example would be The Hunger Games.

Fletcher Okay.

Daniel The first one, the book was very grounded in like a teenage reality and stuff and like... I had some issues of contrasting like this, like, angsty teen perspective against, like, this, like dystopian, like... role that's like this, like, and I get like, it's very like... and it's like, harkens back to, like, Anne Frank's diary where it's like teenagers are going to be teenagers, even despite what's going on and stuff. But I thought the movie handled that a lot better than the books.

Fletcher I haven't read, I haven't read The Hunger Games books.

Daniel Yeah. And I think possibly is because the book was like first person and the movie was third person. And I think that was just something I like—for this world, I thought the third person perspective was like... and I think when you do have like a complicated world, sometimes it's like best to have multiple like perceptions of it.

Jenny Mine is completely an unserious answer.

Fletcher Good.

Jenny But, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Daniel They made that a movie?

Jenny They made it a movie.

Fletcher I didn't see the movie.

Jenny And like, the book is literally the original text, and they just throw in zombie stuff, so it's unreadable. But like, the film is ridiculous. [Fletcher chuckles] It's so utterly ridiculous. But, like, at least it seems to make a little bit of sense.

Fletcher Uh-huh.

Jenny It's definitely not one that you can take seriously while you're watching it. The acting is pretty awful, but like, objectively, those types of ones, because I actually went and read also, I read all of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, but I haven't actually seen the movie that they did of it. But I feel like it's probably the same way where it's just like, so ridiculous. They're not meant to be taken seriously, but as a film—

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny —like you can just have fun with it.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny They're, they're just, you know, they can just be ridiculous.

Daniel How do you feel about Ready Player One?

Fletcher Well, I've not read the book.

Daniel Okay.

Fletcher I, I did not love the movie.

Daniel Okay. I think that's one of the things I, I haven't tried because I actually like the book when it came out. I hated the sequel. And then, like, retroactively, I've gone back and then like, okay, this is like just a nostalgia bomb.

Fletcher That's how the movie feels.

Daniel Yeah. And it's like—

Jenny The book totally was just a ton of references, like trying to hook in millennials particularly, or Gen Xers.

Daniel Have you ever read a sequel to a book that had, like, the book came out like Heat 2 as an example, like, but I read Ready Player Two and it was very obvious. It's like this is being written to be adapted kind of thing.

Fletcher Oh yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Like, and it's like, that's like, I hated. That was like the worst experience because it was like, you're not even writing for your reader anymore. You're writing to like for the intellectual property. And I was like... I have, I can go on, I can talk an hour about Ernest Cline. Ian also is not a big—one of our show or team members is not a big fan, but we'll save it for someone else. [Fletcher chuckles]

I guess as far as like when the book is, I want to say one of my problems with the movies a lot of times, rather than talking—because everyone knows, like rather than being like, what book is better, I guess, like to make it interesting, what time do you think—we talked about when movies deviate from the course. What movie do you think—like Blade Runner would be a good example. So are there movies that you feel like should have deviated?

Watchmen is like one of the best, like the first examples, because Watchmen is too true, like a lot of Zack Snyder's stuff is too true to text. Like even 300 is very like page by page. The show Invincible is just, there's, it's very straight page to movie and it's like, is there something that you feel like probably needed to, like, branch out or got constrained because it was trying to—

Jenny It was trying too hard to, like, stick to the source material.

Fletcher Yeah. It's funny that you bring up Watchmen because you're talking about the movie.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And then there's the HBO series.

Daniel The series is great.

Fletcher Just fantastic.

Daniel Yeah, yeah. And then it's like, the series is like an unofficial sequel to the... it's the, that's interesting because you're getting messy waters because they, they changed the ending for the movie. If you haven't read Watchmen, well, what's supposed to happen is a giant squid monster teleports into New York City. This is basically the only thing they change. And I guess in 2009, this is like pre-Avengers. And it was like no one really kinda had. [Fletcher laughs]

So this is like people say that movie gets a lot of hate because it was like too true to the source. The source is wonky. It's written by Alan Moore. And then the other thing is that no one, there was not a concept for a superhero team like in the, the collective conscious like Avengers or Justice League. And so people watching Watchmen are like, why are, what is this? And it's like retroactively like if you watch Watchmen now, it's basically—it was ten years before its time.

Fletcher Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Or five years because I think Avengers came out like three years after that or... yeah, I don't know.

Fletcher I'm trying to think if there's something... because that has happened to me where, where I've thought, hey, you know, what you should have done is fix the book, right? Because there's this... oh, I wish I could think of a good example because there's something that happens in the book. And I do think—

Daniel Tolkien? [Daniel and Jenny laugh]

Fletcher Well, maybe, yeah.

Daniel Honestly, those short animated movies are just as good.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel Like the condensed Tolkien movies.

Fletcher But that is a responsibility, I think, of somebody who adapts a book is if there are problems with the book, you fix that, right?

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny Or things that just aren't going to translate very well to screen, especially like the long dialog that might not make sense. Or, you know, stuff that just could be cut out and it's not going to change the story.

Daniel As far as—do you play video games at all?

Fletcher No.

Daniel Okay. So video game adaptations are very interesting to me because there's, I've been using this—this show Twisted Metal, based off the PlayStation game, where you're a car guy—

Fletcher Right.

Daniel Great show.

Fletcher Really?

Daniel Great story because they didn't have any lore to like—

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel They didn't have to like... Five Nights at Freddy's is so, like the fandom around Five Nights at Freddy's and all the like, the lore of Five Nights at Freddy's, the movies, like the second movie was not that good because you can tell it's like they are adhering to these, like, like rules for the movie from this world building, they have to play with them. And it's very, it's for teenagers and it's very, like, disjointed.

Fletcher It's almost like they're afraid of the internet getting mad at them?

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny Yeah.

Daniel Yeah. It felt like that because it just seemed like they're trying to like... there's weird time stuff, like the movie takes place... supposedly the place was open in the '80s and closed, and that's like, that's 40 years. That's almost a half century. And they make it look like 20 years. But I think the... and then like, I don't know, the whole movie is very this... kids love it, obviously. But like I tried watching it as an adult and I played the first game and I'm aware because we get so much of the books here, like in the juvenile and I just like, I can't make sense. They should have like deviated because this story doesn't make sense. I'm sure if I love this content and it's like...

Jenny You know what is really bad about doing it is if you've seen any of the more recent live action adaptations they've done of Disney.

Fletcher Mmm.

Jenny And I know those technically aren't... well, technically, you could say they're book because they're based off of like, fairy tales or whatever, but like The Beauty and the Beast or the Cinderella, like, I saw the Cinderella one, like it was exactly like the old animated film.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny Like they didn't do anything different with it.

Fletcher The one I watched was Pinocchio, and I was watching and I was like, what am I even doing?

Jenny Yeah.

Fletcher I could watch this gorgeous animation, or I could watch this muddy computer generated stuff that's mixed with live action that's telling the exact same story in the exact same way.

Jenny I always think—

Fletcher It just looks worse.

Daniel I feel like—

Jenny They literally did nothing.

Daniel I, I would, I feel like A.I gets a bad rap for the word—I feel like slop can apply to more than A.I. And those movies to me is like unnecessarily replication.

Fletcher Yes, absolutely.

Daniel You spent billions of dollars to basically recreate this thing.

Fletcher Yes.

Daniel I understand that's probably for like legal reasons, like because of copyright and intellectual property and stuff.

Jenny Honestly?

Fletcher Maybe, who knows?

Daniel Who knows?

Jenny One of my favorite Cinderella adaptations was Ever After.

Fletcher Oh, sure.

Jenny With...

Fletcher Drew Barrymore.

Jenny Is it Drew Barrymore?

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny Yeah.

Daniel That's—

Jenny It's actually really good. Like, I don't care if people say—

Daniel That's a really good movie.

Jenny I love it.

Fletcher Now, it's been a long time for me on that one, but—

Jenny I haven't seen it in—

Daniel We could talk about '90s teen adaptations of classic works. Ten Things I Hate About You. That's, what is that? Oh, that's, Shakespeare, right?

Fletcher Taming of the Shrew.

Jenny That was Taming of the Shrew.

DanielThere's so many.

Fletcher Well, there's so much Shakespeare.

Jenny And that one did a really good job of adapting it, too, because, I mean, even if you think about it, do you remember Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet?

Fletcher Of course.

Daniel That movie goes hard.

Fletcher I, I love it.

Jenny They stuck with the actual verses, but they made it so unique. That actually I think is a really great example of taking, taking like source material but doing something completely different with it.

Fletcher Yep.

Jenny And I feel like that one did a really great job of just incorporating it all.

Fletcher And understanding the spirit of what the original work was giving.

Jenny And you still had that same... yeah, you would, it still felt like Romeo and Juliet, but like completely modern. That was great.

Daniel Yeah, that one, that movie was like, that VHS was like very popular in drama class.

Jenny I had the soundtrack.

Daniel Well, we're about to get you out of here. We got one more question. Let's go ahead to the fan casting question. Is there, what is something you want to see adapted that hasn't been adapted yet?

Fletcher That's really hard.

Daniel Just give it a year.

Fletcher Yeah. No, that's, that's hard. What I really enjoy when it comes to adaptations are like adventure movies, right?

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher So, like Count of Monte Cristo never seems to be a bad movie.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher There was one that came out a couple of years ago that was French, like 4 or 6 hours long. Great. The one with, with Guy Pearce, you know, back in the early 2000s, really good. So what I really like are adventure movies, so I'd kind of like to see—do you guys know Scaramouche?

Daniel That sounds familiar.

Jenny That sounds very familiar.

Fletcher Okay, so it was written, I think, in, like, the 1920s. But anyway, swashbuckling type movie. I'd really like to see something like that. I like swashbucklers, and when it comes to adaptations, you know, what, what is it harder for me to imagine in my head? An adventure movie. Put it on the screen. Let me have fun, right?

Daniel Yeah. That actually makes a lot of, that actually makes a lot of sense because like, I was thinking of, like, what are those movies that's like the, National Treasures. There's the other one, Sahara.

Fletcher Oh, right.

Daniel Which is like, Clive Cussler's adaptation, which is like a really fun movie. And like, I ended up like reading a Clive Cussler novel, and I was like, well, this is better as a film. [Daniel laughs]

Fletcher Oh, yeah. Yeah. People say that about Cussler sometimes.

Daniel Yeah. I was so excited. I thought, this is based on—I was, like, very bored with it immediately.

Fletcher Well, apparently some of those get, like, really bonkers, some of his books and the plot, so, I don't know, maybe, maybe doing some more of those might be a good idea.

Daniel Yeah. And yeah, that'd be... yeah, that'd be cool. So Scaramouche is probably your, going to be your like—

Fletcher Yeah, yeah. I mean I, probably I could think of some more, but I mean, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to adapt something, then put something up there that I'm going to have a lot of fun with, you know, that I can, I can enjoy on a big screen. Give me a reason for it to be a movie because I can make up lots of good pictures in my head when I read a book.

Daniel I'm going to—yeah, I get that. Yeah. I think mine is because last season, we interviewed... was it Graham—I'm sorry, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

Jenny Oh, yeah.

Daniel By Stephen Graham Jones. And that I was, I can't, I'm excited for this movie. Like I hope they actually, I don't know if there's any talk about it. I know the like Choctaw native vampire hunters and Sinners happened and then people started talking.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel That possibly. But that's the one right now that I'm like hopefully I will go see that when it comes out.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny Oh my gosh, there's so many. But I guess if I narrow down, what I would love to see adapted for like a TV series, Lore Olympus.

Fletcher Tell me more.

Jenny Though it was the webcomic—

Fletcher Oh, cool.

Jenny —that retells the story of Hades and Persephone.

Fletcher Oh, cool.

Jenny Yeah, they have collected it now into graphic novel form, but that would definitely have to be like a series and not a movie.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny If it was a film, Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree.

Daniel Oh, Legends and Lattes, that would be a good. I would actually... that would be fun.

Jenny That would be so fun.

Fletcher Tell me about this.

Daniel Okay. You know, do you know what cozy mysteries are?

Fletcher Yeah, basically.

Daniel This is cozy fantasy.

Fletcher Okay. That sounds nice.

Daniel And it's about an orc and a demon that run a coffee shop. [Fletcher chuckles]

Jenny Yeah. In this, like town, they, it's all about, like, found family. But it also has, like, D&D vibes.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny And yeah.

Fletcher So why, why would you want that to be a movie?

Jenny I feel like that would be fun. It would—and not to mention, I can't really think of too many cozy fantasies on film. Like it would be something that—

Fletcher Does Princess Bride count as a cozy fantasy?

Jenny I guess that's as close as we have, that I can think of off the top of my head. And even though it's become more and more popular, I feel like you could bring in a lot of humor element like, and I know I just mentioned D&D vibes, but the most recent D&D movie, not the awful one from 2000.

Fletcher Right, right.

Jenny Because I recently rewatched that. It's so horrible. It's so horrible.

Daniel I didn't, Princess Bride is a cozy fantasy.

Fletcher Okay.

Jenny Yeah.

Daniel Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Like, I know that's like a new term.

Jenny But I feel like if you brought in some of the humor that you had in the most recent D&D—

Fletcher Right.

Jenny —film with... shoot—

Fletcher Chris Pine.

Jenny Was it Chris Pine?

Daniel Chris Pine.

Jenny He can do that. He can do that kind of humor. And like some of the other actors, I feel like they would have to have like the people that were like in, like, the Marvel movies like Tom Hiddleston.

Daniel I feel like Michelle Rodriguez. Didn't she play, like, a half orc or something?

Jenny Yeah, she did.

Daniel She'd actually be good in that role.

Jenny She would. She would, she would play, Viv was the orc in it.

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny I would want like Aubrey Plaza to be the succubus. [Jenny laughs]

Fletcher I know nothing about the book, but that sounds right.

Daniel Okay, I'm going to go for Legends of Lattes I will go Rhea Ripley from WWE debuting as the orc. [Jenny and Fletcher laugh] She's tall. It works, it works. And then, I'll stick Aubrey. I don't feel like—

Jenny I feel like Aubrey Plaza would, would make the little goth succubus, you know?

Daniel Yeah.

Jenny One the love interest in there. It'd be great. And I don't know about the Hobgoblin. Like Danny DeVito. [Fletcher laughs]

Daniel That'd be great. Anything with Danny DeVito's gotta... Is there like... okay, I will say, maybe I have to preface this question. Is there any, like, movies you'd like to see turned into a book?

Fletcher Ooh.

Daniel I have an answer. And I always see people reading mysteries. And, like, I know I'm getting older and I'm like, I'm starting to do things my grandparents did, my parents did. And, like, one of the things is like, I do like... I never watched like Columbo.

Fletcher Oh yeah.

Daniel But Poker Face.

Fletcher Oh, sure. Yeah.

Daniel But with, I can't—

Fletcher and Daniel together Natasha Lyonne.

Daniel Which only ran, I think it's already canceled, I think.

Fletcher I hope it's not cancelled.

Daniel Honestly, anything—I don't know.

Fletcher Okay.

Daniel But also Knives Out.

Fletcher Uh-huh.

Jenny Oh, yeah.

Daniel Though, like, they need to realize millennials are getting older. We want cozy mysteries. We want mysteries to, like, read. Pump them out James Patterson style. The Knives Out and Poker Face, which I can't—Robert Eggers, is that.... no. What's the name of the guy that made the... the director that wrote Knives Out?

Fletcher Oh, Rian Johnson.

Daniel Yeah, yeah, Rian Johnson or whatever, because he's the producer on Poker Face as well, I think. So he just needs to get into publishing and start turning his IPs into books because I'll read them.

Jenny Oh yeah, if they made a novelization of Knives Out, I would totally, because it's like James Bond but like—

Fletcher There's somebody I want to tell you about named Agatha Christie.

Jenny Oh, I've read Agatha Christie. [Daniel laughs]

Daniel I know that's like grandma stuff.

Jenny No. Agatha Christie's fun.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny It's fun.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel Yeah, I get that. I get that.

Jenny But I feel like there's a more modern set and there are.

Fletcher No, you're right. It, I mean like and that's kind of what the Knives Out movies are, are sort of a more modern type of Agatha Christie.

Daniel Yeah. Benoit Blanc, is that his name?

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel He's just cool.

Fletcher He's so cool.

Daniel He's so cool. And I like the Poker Face, Natasha Lyonne because she's, like, kind of like a hot mess. And it's like I feel that, yeah.

Jenny Oh, I love her.

Fletcher You need to go back and watch Columbo. That's what you need to do.

Daniel Okay.

Fletcher It's really good.

Daniel Is Columbo, was that an adaptation?

Jenny Actually, you want to hear something really funny about Columbo?

Daniel I'm gonna do that.

Jenny And maybe I'm totally wrong about this, but according to my mother, I'm like a fifth cousin like—

Daniel To Columbo?

Jenny Yeah. To Peter Falk.

Fletcher Yeah, that's awesome.

Jenny That was my grandmother's maiden name.

Fletcher Oh, wow.

Daniel So you're like—

Jenny It's believable.

Fletcher Go with it. Just go with it.

Jenny Apparently I was distantly related to Peter Falk.

Fletcher That's fantastic.

Daniel That's awesome. One more thing.

Fletcher Okay. [Daniel and Fletcher laugh] Good, very good.

Jenny That was totally, totally unrelated.

Daniel That was my Columbo impression.

Fletcher That was magical.

Daniel Yeah. So I guess we'll wrap it up. So are you working on anything, doing anything cool, got anything coming up?

Fletcher I am always on the radio. KMUW is 89.1 on your FM dial. And I host All Things Considered there, and I have my movie reviews each week. And I also host a show called You're Saying It Wrong, which is about language, sort of the pitfalls of the English language.

Daniel Oh, like "bio"—

Fletcher It's a lot of fun. People, people sort of sometimes call it Car Talk for language. I have—

Jenny Oh, man.

Fletcher There's a brother/sister writing team who are language experts and I connect with them each week and we, you know, spend half an hour talking about whatever we want to with the world of language.

Daniel Oh, that's awesome. We might have you back on the show to talk about that.

Fletcher Let's do.

Jenny Yeah, I got to check that out. I am such a—

Daniel I didn't know that existed. That's—[Daniel laughs] We should probably have found that out of the beginning of the show.

Jenny I'm a big language nerd.

Fletcher You'll love it.

Jenny Like I listen to linguistics podcasts.

Fletcher Yeah. No, it's a lot of fun. And I don't just say that because I'm on it, but, You're Saying it Wrong. You can podcast it, you can listen Saturday mornings.

Daniel You know what's really funny is... I remember KMUW did this thing about... there's like a Key and Peele sketch about saying "aks" instead of ask, and they, like everyone thought I was like, African-American vernacular, but I actually, like, dated way back before—

Fletcher Oh yeah.

Daniel —because, like, my mom, my dad always says "aks" instead of ask. My mom, like, I've watched my parents fight over this for my whole life. And then I, like, sent that. I was like, mom, actually... [Daniel and Fletcher laugh] But that's, I've always thought languages are interesting.

Fletcher Yeah.

Daniel So that's cool. We're gonna definitely check that out.

Jenny Is very fascinating. I love the fact that, like, Appalachian dialect is like... and I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, that it's like closer to, like Shakespearean English than, like modern British English.

Daniel I've heard that too. Yeah.

Fletcher Well, I mean, it's... I mean, that would kind of make sense because you know, they came over and it kind of hardened. I mean, obviously not Shakespeare.

Jenny Yeah. In a very kind of—yeah, not like... in terms of like linguistically, not so much how it sounds. In terms of like some of the grammar that we make fun of for people speaking a certain way in the Appalachian region.

Fletcher Also, I really appreciate you saying Appalachia. [app-uh-lah-cha] That's good.

Jenny Oh, I have, my grandmother was from Appalachia.

Fletcher People often say Appalachian. [app-uh-lay-shun]

Daniel Oh, I probably do.

Jenny Oh, yeah. I had to correct my husband. And I was like, it's not Appalachian, it's Appalachian.

Daniel But definitely like, we can like, have—yeah, we'd love to like, talk about that more.

Jenny Yeah, that's a whole other, we could go on about that.

Daniel Because—[Daniel chuckles]—We're the adult literacies department, so we have a lot to say about language. So we can check you out at KMUW.

Fletcher Uh-huh.

Daniel And did you see any movies, got any movies you're excited about coming up?

Fletcher Will you let me turn on my phone and look at my—

Daniel Yeah, go ahead.

Jenny Yeah.

Daniel Did you see Project Hail Mary?

Fletcher No, I didn't see Project Hail Mary.

Jenny Oh, we were just talking about that this morning.

Fletcher I will tell you, having two small children, it makes it very hard for me to get to the movie theater despite, despite my job.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher So I have to watch a lot of stuff through screeners, or I end up catching it a little later and I just don't review it, which is fine.

Daniel Yeah. Are you completely, are you physical media-free at this point?

Fletcher Oh, no. I, if there's something I really care about, I will buy it on physical media because I want to be guaranteed that I will have it.

Daniel I want to take a moment, while Fletcher looks at his phone, to a quick shoutout to Kanopy, Kanopy streaming service with your library card.

Jenny Yes.

Fletcher Fantastic.

Daniel It's, you could check it there. Yeah, we have tons of Blu-rays and DVDs, but also, check out Kanopy. There's some great movies on there.

Fletcher I love Kanopy.

Jenny And if you have the, if you like, once you sign in with your library card and you, they do have you, like, register an account so that you can, like, rewatch movies or put stuff on a saved list. It'll send you an email with like stuff that's new or whatever. Like what to watch this week.

Daniel I need to check my email—

Jenny Because I get those emails.

Daniel —because I don't see those. I'm sure it's in the spam folder.

Jenny Yeah. No, I get mine. I get them in my personal email account, not my work email. But yeah, something to do if you want to see because like Netflix, it does cycle out movies too.

Daniel I was, speaking of Letterboxd, I was on Letter—I was in a movie that's on Letterboxd and I was really scared to look at it. And then I went and it was there's people saying very nice things about me. So if I'm ever down—

Fletcher Oh.

Daniel —I go look at the Must Love Pie Letterboxd reviews. So like, awww.

Fletcher That's really sweet.

So, let me recommend two things. One is just a movie, although kind of adapted from earlier things, kind of. And the other is an adaptation. One is the movie. I think it just came out on, on streaming or VOD at least. So Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie. Do you know this?

Daniel Okay. No, I keep seeing it. I saw it was showing recently, but I didn't get to see it.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny I've heard.

Fletcher Incredible. So I never I didn't know anything about this. So Nirvana the Band was like a web series, in around 2008, from these two Canadian guys, and they made up this band called Nirvana the Band. And their goal was to get to play, to play a show at the Rivoli, which is a big venue in Toronto, right? So then they had a series, I think, called Nirvana the Band the Show. And that was, I don't know, I want to say late 2010s maybe.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher So now there's this movie called Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie, and it is these guys present day, but they end up inventing a time machine accidentally, sort of, to go back in time to set things up so that they can play a show at the Rivoli in the present day. And man, this movie is mind blowing.

There is a scene early on where they skydive off the CN Tower in Toronto, onto the roof of the SkyDome. I have no idea how they made this look like if they actually did it, but then later they go back into 2008 and they interact with their—themselves from 2008, and it is them. So I don't know if they had the magical foresight in 2008 to shoot scenes of them interacting with their future selves or what? But I have no idea how they made this movie. And it is, it is incredible. Anyway, it's also a lot of fun.

Daniel I'm going to, that sounds fun.

Jenny Oh my gosh, I want to see that.

Daniel Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie.

Jenny I love like, I think I mentioned this in the last episode, I love stuff with like unhinged sounding plots.

Fletcher Yeah.

Jenny Or just stuff that's utterly unique.

Fletcher Yeah. And me, I mean, me describing that to you really doesn't even do it justice.

Daniel No, it—yeah, I'm definitely checking it out. That is, that sounds really cool.

Jenny Yeah.

Fletcher The other thing I want to recommend is a series. It's Italian, but it was directed by Joe Wright, who made—he's made a lot of movies. I think he really broke out with Atonement, maybe around 2002 or so. But it's, it's about Benito Mussolini. It's called Mussolini: Son of the Century. And it's about Mussolini's rise to power. And it pretty much ends once he's risen to power in Italy. But man, this thing is bonkers.

Wright is kind of crazy anyway, and like, the way he makes things is just wild. But this, the, the performance by the lead, who's—he's an Italian actor, he's been in quite a few things, but it's just, it's completely unhinged. I mean, you want to talk about unhinged? This thing is wild. And it has just sustained momentum for, like, eight episodes. And it's also pretty terrifying because you can see the blueprint that people have used to create a fascist framework ever since then.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher And you're just... I mean, I just watched it with my jaw dropped. It's about eight hours long, but I really, really recommend it. It's, it's just it's, I don't want to say fun exactly because you get a pit in your stomach watching it, but it is, it is fun to watch the filmmaking and just, just the, the level of absurdity and insanity both in what you're seeing and in what actually happened.

Daniel Yeah.

Fletcher Definitely I recommend that too.

Daniel That's, I'll definitely have to check that out. Yeah. Anyway, so, thanks for, listening to, thanks for listening, watching. Thanks for being here, Fletcher.

Fletcher Nice to be here.

Jenny Yeah, thank you. It was a lot of fun.

Daniel All right. I think that's a wrap. So, catch you, catch you guys later.

---

Daniel, voiceover That was so awesome that Fletcher was able to come talk to us today on the episode.

Jenny, voiceover Yeah, it was a great conversation. He had some really interesting thoughts, too., which I really enjoyed and I learned a few things.

Daniel, voiceover And, actually, I think, I kind of want to listen to his other show about how words, You're Saying it Wrong, which I hope we can get him back on for that, because I think especially with like, adult spelling bee and other things like that, that show would also fit within.

Jenny, voiceover Yeah.

Daniel, voiceover So definitely Fletcher, we're going to have you back to talk about if we're saying words right.

Jenny, voiceover Yeah, that's totally my thing too. I love like word history and etymology and a lot of library workers were big word nerds.

Daniel, voiceover Yeah.

Jenny, voiceover And, I just think we could go down such a rabbit hole.

Daniel, voiceover I'm trying to think of words I've been saying wrong for a while, but I cannot come up with... I used to say "subtle" really wrong. I used to say sub-tle.

Jenny, voiceover Well, I'm really fascinated by accents, like regional accents. And maybe it's because I have one.

Daniel, voiceover Yeah.

Jenny, voiceover And I always—

Daniel, voiceover You do?

Jenny, voiceover I do a little bit. Apparently not as much as I used to, but when I first moved here, like a decade ago, people would not understand me when I said certain words. And then later on, somebody was like, yeah, I could tell you weren't from here because you say "serial" funny.

Daniel, voiceover Say, can you say, "don't you know" real quick?

Jenny, voiceover Oh, you want me? Do you want me to say, [strong upper Midwest accent: "don't you know?"]

Daniel, voiceover Okay, okay. Now I can say you're, the Michigander came out in you. [Jenny laughs] So thank you guys for listening. This is now the show is ending. Make sure you check us out on all your podcast listening apps: Spotify, YouTube, Apple, wherever you listen to podcasts. And again, you can email us. My email is . If you—and that's D-P-E-W-E-W-A-R-D-Y at Wichita.gov. Feel free to email me if you have questions or ideas for the show.

Jenny, voiceover Yeah. And we have an email chat form on our website as well. So if you go to wichitalibrary.org and you scroll all the way to the bottom under "Contact Us," there is live chat. But there's also like an email form.

Jenny, voiceover So you can fill out and that will get to us as well.

Daniel, voiceover Yes. So, thank you guys for listening. Next episode we're going to talk about comic books and graphic novels, which I'm excited about. So I will, we'll catch you later.

Jenny, voiceover Yeah. Take care. Thank you.

Daniel, voiceover Bye.