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John Irving's memoir begins with his account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the novelist's grandfather Dr Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and includes Mr Irving's incisive history of abortion politics in the United States. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen - for four different directors.
Mr Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, into a movie, about two of the films that were made from his novels (but not from his screenplays), The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire; about his slow progress at shepherding his screenplay of A Son of the Circus into production.
Not least, and in addition to its qualities as a memoir - anecdotal, comic, affectionate and candid - My Movie Business is an insightful essay on the essential differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay.John Irving is one of America's most widely read contemporary novelists, a man Peter Matthiessen has described as, "probably the greatest storyteller of American literature today".
At a 1981 talk in New York, Irving mentioned working as technical director on the movie of his most famous novel, The World According to Garp. Asked about his views on the transition of his work from page to screen, he replied that faithful translation was impossible and that the process didn't interest him: "Why spend three to four years writing, and then another three to four trying to convert it to a less-perfect medium?"
He also divulges here that he himself is "not a moviegoer." It's perhaps odd then that he's embarked on, and documented, an "almost fourteen year odyssey to see The Cider House Rules made into a movie". Not only that, he's written the screenplay to both this and another of his novels, A Son of the Circus.
My Movie Business is essentially about making the screen version of The Cider House Rules. As such, it's concerned primarily with the intricacies of condensing a 500-plus page novel into two hours of screen time, discussing necessary adaptations of the plotline, the treatment or cutting of characters and the shooting of specific scenes. This will be of interest to other writers, film buffs and fans or students of Irving.
But this book's not only about writing screenplays. Irving's digressions are what make it interesting to a wider audience. He writes in detail on the main subject of The Cider House Rules, obstetrics and abortion (chapter titles include "Rubber Gloves" and "The Disintegrating Uterus"), describing one of the narrative's two main protagonists, Doctor Larch, as "a polemicist raving against an entrenched moral doctrine of his day". Irving himself continues the pro-choice polemic, and more aggressively than Larch: "Let doctors practice medicine. Let religious zealots practice their religion, but let them keep their religion to themselves".
However, not all the subjects on which Irving touches are as intense or controversial. He deliberately follows a narrative path that's "circuitous or serpentine, that wanders far afield". His anecdotes comprise many of the most intriguing passages of the book: from his grandfather's ribald poetry, to his hectic, improbable-sounding account of the filmmaker Martin Bell being bitten on the face by a rabid chimp while researching a documentary on Indian circus dwarfs. The whole amounts to an insightful slice of opinion and autobiography. --Martin DreweJohn Irving's memoir begins with his account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the novelist's grandfather Dr Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and includes Mr Irving's incisive history of abortion politics in the United States. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen - for four different directors.
Mr Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, into a movie, about two of the films that were made from his novels (but not from his screenplays), The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire; about his slow progress at shepherding his screenplay of A Son of the Circus into production.
Not least, and in addition to its qualities as a memoir - anecdotal, comic, affectionate and candid - My Movie Business is an insightful essay on the essential differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay.
