Tags

,

The Princess Bride has entered the collective consciousness as one of the great movies of all time. It’s a stretch to remember that it wasn’t all that popular in theaters. It only became something of a phenomenon after it hit the Blockbusters on video tape. I’m quite sure that’s how I first watched it. I’m also pretty sure that the word had gotten out that it was a must watch, which would have prompted me to rent it. I, too, took to it right away.

The movie starts with a grandfather who brings a book to read to his grandson, while the latter is sick in bed. It is, therefore, a bit sad that I didn’t even realize until recently that The Princess Bride was actually a novel, many years before it was a movie. In fact, in a story echoing what is in the book itself, director Rob Reiner was given the book by his own father. Of course, the novel wasn’t published until 1973, when Reiner was already a man grown (and necessarily several years into his fame as Meathead, Archie Bunker‘s liberal, hippie son-in-law), so no real-life scene of Carl Reiner reading to little Rob in bed ever took place. Nonetheless, once Rob saw huge success with This is Spinal Tap, he realized that he was eager to make The Princess Bride into a movie.

Finally reading the book 30-some years after I first watched the movie (and 50-some years after the book came out) is an experience I’ve put off for too long. Starting from where I have, it has become impossible not to see the scenes and hear the dialog with the faces and in the voices of the Hollywood actors. Further, any impressions I get while digesting the book inevitably are filtered through my long experience with the movie. For example, one of my first lines of thought was about the changes made in converting the book into a movie and how well Reiner made it work.

There is always a challenge when adapting works for the movie theater. A two-hour (or even much longer) movie cannot possibly include every detail of a good book. Furthermore, some things that work in print will not work if directly ported to the screen. While much of The Princess Bride was retained verbatim for the big screen, much has also been changed or removed entirely. The wisdom of those changes and adaptations becomes very clear when first opening the book after many, many repeat viewings of the movie. Reading along, it is immediately obvious when I encounter a passage that was removed or rewritten. In almost every case I think to myself, yes, I can see why they made that change.

Among the many things that an aspiring filmmaker might learn from watching The Princess Bride, this has to be an important one: How do I abridge my source material so as to do it justice as a film? Once again, life imitates art. The original book is written around a conceit that it is not an original work at all. Instead, it is described how the original Princess Bride is an abridgement of an obscure, translated foreign work which is (the author comes to learn through the years) based closely on historical facts. Author William Goldman goes so far as to add commentary about the writing of the book, penning a modern story which rivals the actual Princess Bride fairy tale itself. Inserted as comments in between chapters and even paragraphs, as well as spread across introduction and afterword sections over multiple pressings, he relates a detailed, personal story which includes many famous names and Hollywood projects. The thing is, some, most, or possibly even all-of-it is made up. Well, not all of it. Some facts are verifiably part of Goldman’s resume.

It is also necessary to acknowledge that Goldman himself had primary responsibility for the screenplay. Having the novelist contribute heavily to an adaptation is no guarantee of success, but I have to think it doesn’t hurt. I further wonder if Goldman didn’t have it in his head as a movie project from the get-go, writing a book so as to sell the idea for the script. Although the film didn’t come out until 1987, the film rights were sold shortly after the novel was printed. The intervening 14 years were simply the machinations of Hollywood, delaying a project that seemingly had sufficient support all along.

Which brings me to one final connection between the story and the story of the story. Goldman speaks at length of the original book (which, I’ll remind you, does not exist) and, well, its length. The idea is that the fictional author, S. Morgenstern, created the novel as an intricate satire of government and society in the late-Renaissance nation of Florin. Other chapters expose Morgenstern’s dissatisfaction with doctors and lumberjacks, to name some specifics. Goldman’s adaptation, then, removes this satirical content in favor of the core story. He replaces it (remember, of course, that it never existed in the first place) with his own commentary – on the publishing business, on Hollywood, and on the legal profession. Like the unsophisticated reader of Morgenstern’s original, the average reader of The Princess Bride encounters Goldman’s injecting superfluous stories about his life – or is he? Especially when you consider that those stories aren’t true. I suspect there is some clever critique of the screenwriting business and the process of adapting works for film buried within, but I’m also quite sure I’ve missed most of it.

– Reiner used the Cliffs of Moher, on the west coast of Ireland, as his Cliffs of Insanity. Photo by Annie Japaud on Pexels.com