Angela's Ashes: Frank McCourt's book is better than its 1999 film adaptation
Whenever movie producers such as Mace Neufeld ( The Hunt for Red October ) or the triumvirate of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Barrie M. Osborne ( The Lord of the Rings ) announce that they are going to adapt a literary work for the silver screen, most of us say something like, “That’s great, but I bet it won’t be as good as the book.” Of course, if you go into screenwriting or even just read books about the process of writing for the film industry, you quickly learn that the business of adaptation isn’t simply changing the original prose format of a book (fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t matter) into the more concise one used in movie scripts. Instead, you have to write your screenplay with a keen eye for the visual aspects of the story, as well as making tons of compromises that will allow you to keep thematic ideas from the book close to what the original author intended when he or she wrote the book without giving your producer a screenplay that will result in a very