Who Colorized my Black and White Movie?
Posted: November 19, 2009 Filed under: Writing about Writing | Tags: actors, digital. twilight, new moon movie, Old movies, reading, wizard of oz, Writing 54 Comments
Most writers are avid readers. They have a love for the written word that pulls them to paper and pen or more precisely in this day and age, to the keyboard. The computer has become an extension of ourselves and we are as comfortable with it as we are with our remote controls and driving a car.
Other people may have a similar love for movies or theater and take up acting to be a part of the world they love. Would the writer and reader be more visually perceptive than the actors and theater people? Which group would likely have a deeper level of imagination?
I don’t believe there is any right or wrong answer. My husband is certainly a movie person and I swear there are dozens of characters living in his head. My best friend and sister are both the same way while also being creative and talented authors. My husband doesn’t read at all. I read my novels to him. Reading the books aloud also helped me to edit as I read.
Now, let’s talk about you. Are you a movie person? A book person? Is there a hidden actor or author within you? Maybe all of the above? If you’re a mixture of both, do you read the book and then go see the movie? If you see the movie, do you refuse to touch the book? Are you at the point where you watch movies or read books on your computer or on a handheld device such as Kindle, or game systems such as PSP. Would you read a book or watch a movie on your phone?
The line between pen and paper and the keyboard as well as the silver screen and the digital world are all blurring together faster than I can keep up!
Claire Collins is the author of the romantic suspense novels Images of Betrayal and Fate and Destiny, both available from Second Wind Publishing, LLC.
Can a person be both? I love movies…duh! I’m totally visual ! But on the other hand…love to read!
I do visualize while reading a book…is that weird?
Good post Claire!!
Hugs
I think most people are a mixture of both and the ones who are at one end or the other are the extremes. I’m the only person I know who really doesn’t enjoy movies. Whereas I know many people who don’t read.
I don’t enjoy movies either. I do like documentaries about everything from distant lands to distant presidential candidates.
OH I should follow you around with a camera! Hang on, I’m on my way!
so many questions. First, The Wizard of Oz.. I have seen that movie over 40 times I’m sure. I never read the book until about 10 years ago and was shocked to find the differences.. no ruby slippers, Glinda isn’t pretty.. I felt so let down.
I prefer to read the book first, I reread all of the Tolkien trilogy before the movies.. It can be disappointing as I come away with a distinct visual image and the movie frequently disappoints when they glamourize the characters or liberally edit the story.
And, lastly. I like my books to be books. I don’t want a Kindle. I want to feel the pages, write in my own margins, hold the real thing.
I love the Wizard of Oz movie but I’ve intentionally never read the book because I’m sure I would be disappointed. Once I have someone else’s vision of a character or scene in my mind, it’s really hard to replace it with my own. I’m still very much a printed book person as well although I think I could quickly adapt to a kindle. I look around at the stacks and stacks of books taking up space in my house and think of what I could do with that space if all of my books were on one small little device.
So on OZ – I read all the books – yes, there are many – before I saw the movie. The books are amazing, entrancing, much more fanciful. And as you suspect, very different from Ms. Garland’s crew.
Wizard of Oz was always in color when they made it to Oz.
oops I meant when Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas.
Right! The scenes in Kansas were all black and white and OZ was always in color. I’m so tickled that you picked up on that. As a kid, I remember how awed I was by the switch from black and white to color and the impact to the storyline because of that change. I remember watching it last year with my daughter for the first time and she loved it as well. That movie came out in 1939 which makes it 70 years old this year. As a side note, Gone With the Wind came out the same year.
As a side note…I wasn’t alive in 1939.
Neither was I. At least I don’t think so. The memory ain’t so good anymore.
Where’s Don when we need him? He must’ve been a young man of 50 when that movie came out.
Although I’m sure Gone with the Wind was probably a great disappointment to him since he was there for the original event.
Very interesting … my wife reads what she writes to me, too. But ONLY when she is ready – if I read over her shoulder before she is ready I hear about it! 🙂
It makes me CRAZY when people read over my shoulder. But then it makes my test readers crazy when I send them half of a finished book and it takes me a year to finish writing the rest!
I’ve found that when I read my writing aloud to someone else I hear it from a different perspective and almost always find things I want to change.
I do too! I will read and halfway through the sentence I’m already marking through and changing things. That helps with the neverending editing process.
I’m a hybrid of movie and book lover. I’ll watch the film adaptions of certain novels, but I know that there are some things that don’t translate well to film. If a book was filmed directly into a movie, it would probably be five hours long. So, a good chunk of the book is left out for the sake of brevity. I had to learn not to mind that. 🙂
And that would bug the crap out of me. I’d lose all interest in the movie because it would never match up to my previously conceived ideas of the characters and the book events.
I’m a book person in a big way and I’m also married to a book person so our house is filled with books. I don’t have television (tossed it about 10 years ago), but I do watch a few films or old time TV shows usually with Hulu or YouTube. Sometimes a DVD or VHS from the church library, and a friend has gotten me into watching opera DVD’s. Still, I set aside major time every day to read and I always have two or three books going at once. If I see a film or two a month, that is enough for me.
I’m with you, Zeus. When I met my husband, I didn’t own a tv. He couldn’t grasp the concept and brought me one so he could watch tv at my house while we were dating. It’s amazing that I loved him anyway. 🙂
For better or worse, nearly all my reading is done on the internet these days. I used to read book after book, but it’s been awhile since I really sat down and read. I also don’t see nearly as many movies as I used to.
On the other hand, I write much more than I ever did, so that’s something. I don’t feel like my life is less satisfying without the reading and watching. I think it’s just shifted for the time being.
Professor,
My reading and writing habits have shifted as well. I do want to thank you for sharing your habits with me 🙂
I love books and movies almost equally. I have dozens of characters within my brain, constantly fighting for attention and the power to control my motor functions. I prefer to read my books on paper. I spend far too much time on the computer as it is now anyway. I don’t mind which order the book/movie or movie/book come in. I just try to put whatever I saw first completely out of my mind.
I just try to put whatever I saw first completely out of my mind.
You’re putting things completely out of your mind because it’s already so crowded in there!
I am a book person, or at least was (my reading is down lately). And I will refuse to see movies that are made from my favorite books because, well..they are shockingly wrong! The characters look wrong, sound wrong, all the subtle and critical plot details are missing – I hate it! But I’m also a movie snob and rarely see remakes of classics or old favorites.
And just to confuse you more, I was an actress.
We have so much in common. Right up to the part about being an actress 😉
I can’t act to save my life. Never even tried or wanted to. I took creative drama in high school. I always went to fast and sweated bullets. I did much better at Debate where I could at least argue!
As a young man I was an actor. I appeared in several community theatre plays and loved to read scripts whether or not I had any idea that I would ever be in the play. I read them for their style and to appreciate the literary genius of the author. Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, of course the Master Bard William Ticonderoga Shakespeare, et. al. and etc. (of course his middle name wasn’t “Ticonderoga” but it should have been.)
Later I began to read that which I was supposed to have read in High School and never did. Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Poe, and others.
Movies! Being an actor wannabe, I devoured movies. In my day I wanted to be the next Marlon Brando. I not only had the characters in my head, I could also turn them off and on in my daily activities. I could become Michael Corleone. I could Become Stanley Kowlaski.
Today?
Today, I am Cornelius Eugene Spots, Ph.D – “Doc” 😉
Of course I am also “Gryph.” 😀
Come see Doc’s latest contribution on Yorba Linda.
Still acting, I take it?
if you call “Doc” acting then yes. I don’t see it quite that way though.
Good questions CC!
I have always read a huge amount,(a lot of tedious work related documents) and for pleasure. I had to listen to people talk for many years, so prefer dialogue based literature, such as Robert B Parker in print copy. We have also done quite a bit of live ballet (watching FFS) and classical music concerts. Movies we do by DVD, series rather than one-offs.
Somehow this all grinds round my neurone to prompt my own on line novel writing and provide background to smart-arse commenting on other peoples blogs.
We dont have kindle in britland, but will try it when we have as I think that for word communication, that is the way forward.
I’m very surprised to hear that the Kindle isn’t available in Britland. Also, given you history, I imagine anything you write is going to hold my brain hostage for a long time.
Seems I mis-spake on this matter. A form of kindle has been in UK for the last month;
http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/blog/2009/10/amazon-kindle-hits-uk-next-week.html
My only defence is that we were on hols at that time! (And not connected to the web)
I hope this satisfies the kindle legal team, if they ever find their way here.
If the Kindle legal team find their way here, then I’m probably the one in trouble and not you. Maybe that will generate more interest in my books 🙂
Yep, nothing like a good litigation to stir up publicity, ask Tiger…
I’m unsure of the official answer, but I’ll guess Ted Turner. If not him, then I bet he knows who.
I thought you did it?
Did Ted tell you that? What a rat bastard!
He’s such a chicken.
How did you think I knew him?
I’m both. Before blogging I would read about three books a week, now I usually only manage two plus a movie at least once a week. All this plus I hold down a full time job. Is it any wonder I don’t have a social life?
What’s a social life? I remember reading for enjoyment. I miss those days. Having a social life was at least a decade prior to the time I spent reading for enjoyment. I’m just going to curl into a rocking chair and wait for the end now.
Hi, stopped by and was intrigued enough with your sharing and the wonderful responses to throw in my one and half cents’ worth. I am first a reader, have always loved and preferred books. Having said that, I also enjoy movies, all types, even subtitled foreign films and especially independent films. Reading allows me to use al of my imaginative resources to visualize an author’s words, settings, descriptions. Movies never even come close to approximating an author’s vision in my opinion, even when the author is brought on as a creative consultant during the process. I think the two mediums are distantly complementary, but more often than not, non-Boolean and disappointing in their subsets of commonality. Like you mention, I also only own a TV for watching DVDs, no cable. I am not an actor, although as a musician I often played one on stage. As for Kindle, or computer viewing or PSP or etc… nope, I need the physicality of a real book, despite the apparent advantages of a Kindle device. As yet, I do not watch movies on my computer, although that may be changing since my system for the computer far exceeds my TV/audio system. Thanks for letting me share. I will return to explore your other posts and questions from time to time.
Hi Purple! Love your color. Sorry it’s taken me so long to come back and respond. I have a bad habit of that and periodically need a cattle prod applied to my backside.
I love the phrase “distantly complimentary” and think it is a perfect description of my own ideas of the relationship between books and movies.
Also, it is the entire concept that our computer systems are surpassing our surround sound tv setups. I think our electronic devices are all eventually merging into a media organizer the size of a deck of cards.
Blahahahaa I was just talking about the book/movie thing the other day. I can’t read a book after seeing the movie first. The whole intrigue and ending guessing is lost.
I love both movies and reading. Geez, I am even in a friggin bookclub (which is more about eating and drinking 🙂 ) I have to read before I go to sleep.
I do have a serious issue with books though. I have to own my books. No lending from libraries and definitely no purchase of second hand books (except if antique). I have issues with secondhand books. You don’t know where they have been, what the person did with it before you eg sitting on the toilet with it, sneezing on it, germs, stains, arghhhhh!!! Needless to say my house is overflowing with one owner books. I also like to use old antique ladders as bookshelves….I use the rungs as shelves 🙂
Remember those Readers Digest condensed versions of books…now that always made me laugh. It’s like watching a movie trailer instead of the film.
You’re in a Frigging book club? When are you going to discuss one of mine? ohhh let me write one about eating and drinking first 😉
I love the idea of antique ladders as bookshelves. My house is full of books too but I really have to thin them down and get rid of a lot. It’s like giving my children up for adoption.
I am equal parts both. Sometimes I enjoy reading the book after seeing the movie…go figure.
Why am I not surprised that you’re unique like that? 😉
Jesus! You scared the electronic shit out of me just showing up out of the blue in “My Comments.” It’s like a haunted house or Jesus’ zombie heading out for some revenge/redemption.
Welcome back! I’m going to sit back down and collect my previously organized thoughts.
How often have you seen Jesus’ zombie? Who’s scarier? Me or him?
You had organized thoughts? 😉
Think you’re scared now? I’m heading over to your place.
I haven’t actually seen Jesus’ zombie, having been born more than 2,000 years too late and in completely the wrong country. I won’t answer which is scarier, except that I know you’re real.
Organized is a very relative term.
First, I love Judy Garland. She absolutely mesmerized me.
As for acting, does popping open my raincoat at inopportune times count? I say it does…law enforcement tends to disagree.
Also, I much prefer writing over reading. But I HATE reading what I have written once it is done. I think that takes discipline which I clearly don’t have. I envy you for having written multiple books. Can you ghostwrite for me?
I’m telling Sarah.
I would love to ghostwrite for you. You’re very interesting. Email me what you want me to write 😉
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