In Cold Blood Book Vs Movie Essay

The book In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is a description of the real murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb in 1959. In spite of being based on a true story, describing true events that happened to real people, the book shows all the qualities of a novel, complete with dialogues and other characteristics of the genre, in what the author mentioned to as a non-fiction novel. What caught most critics’ attention, was the use of filmic establishment in the development of the story. The book was later made into film under the same title, though this proved to be disappointing and unable to gain the same impact as the book had. In 1973, Edward Murray analyzed both the book and the film, attempting to understand the influences of film in fiction writing,
He uses his analysis of the two media, the book and the film, to make his final argument that filmic novels are not good for screening. While the influence of film in these books, whether fiction or non-fiction novels, justifies in their story telling and development, the vice versa is not true for film (Murray 132-137). Filmic novels are no easier to adopt for film than the traditional novels of the past times. While non-filmic novels give the filmmakers room for interpretation and creativity in their redesign, filmic novels give a framework for the redesign. Creating a film adaptation of such books requires the filmmaker to either create an exact translation of the original or to conceive a new piece of artworks, none which is a hard job as Murray shows in Brooks’ failure to create a great film adaptation of a great book. He ends the article by explaining that filmic novels are not easy for film redesigns due to their complexity (Murray 132-137). Sub-literary novels, he writes, whether filmic or not, make better film redesigns than distinguishable