SCREEN’S NEW INGENUE: BOOKS
Which shows have been your pandemic panaceas as you’ve stumbled through this locked-down, upsidedown year? “The Good Lord Bird”? “The Queen’s Gambit”? “The Undoing”? As disparate as they are, they have one thing in common: They were all adapted from books.
The so-called IP pipeline, through which stories flow from authors’ screens to yours, is just as vital to the culture economy as oil pipelines are to our fossil-fueled lives. Books have provided raw material (a.k.a. intellectual property) for Hollywood since its founding, but the streaming-driven proliferation of content has led to an explosion of book-to-screen deals. It’s one of the few sectors of the business that has actually accelerated during the pandemic.
As Ryan Faughnder reported in The Times in October, more time at home and less in production has freed up Hollywood’s decision-makers to read books: “That newfound availability, coupled with streaming services’ and media companies’ insatiable appetite for fresh material, has led to a substantial uptick in sales.” Dig deeper into this relationship between authors and Hollywood, though, and you find more than a cash grab. Increasingly, those deals come trailing the writers themselves — novelists looking for steady work. They’re in a large number of TV writers rooms, lapping up the conviviality along with the health insurance. They’re making bold, difficult changes to their own work, as Eleanor Catton has done to turn her sprawling, complicated novel “The Luminaries” into a new Starz show.
These forces are also driving the careers of a powerful and increasingly diverse subset of industry players specializing in book-to-screen. And they’re responsible for 15 projects already in the 2021 awards race.
What follows is The Times’ starter kit for understanding the book-to-screen universe, a state of play in which the medium hardly matters as long as you can spread the message.