hollywood has been ****ing up books by making them into movies for as long as anyone can recall. a great example is the movie that came out some few years ago called "simon birch". It's about a dwarfish kid who does interesting things. The movie is a pseudo-adaptation of a book by John Irving called "A Prayer for Owen Meany".
In the movie, the kid dies in an alley at about age 12 after a christmas pageant in which he was the part of baby Jesus due to his small size...and thats the end of the movie. That part happens to be at about chapter 5 in the book...and he doesnt die. In the book, the main character (the dwarfish kid) goes on to grow up, join the army, is about to be sent to vietnam and gets killed by throwing himself on a grenade to save a group of vietnamese refugee women and children. They turned a first rate book with a heroic ending and a amazing plotline into a third rate joke of a movie that has been used as a punchline in the scripts of other movies (it's mentioned as being a sappy movie about "a goofy kid with problems" by david spade in the movie "Loser"). As a matter of fact, the movie was originally supposed to carry the title of the book, but John Irving was so pissed off about how badly they butchered the story that he revoked the contract rights for the name.
I could easily name at least a hundred other movies which have followed the same pattern, but i wont bore you all. However, there have been some reasonably good adaptations, as evidenced by most of the movies adapted from John Grisham's novels (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, A Time To Kill, etc.)...but those are few and far between.
Yeah, hollywood sucks.
