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Brian Enos's Forums... Maku mozo!

Good Book, Bad Movie


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  • 2 months later...

Fried Green Tomatoes the movie is much better than Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe, the book by Fannie Flagg on which it's based. Just as a for instance, the scene where Idgie, played by Mary Stuart Masterson, pulls a honey comb out of an active bee hive in a tree, her body covered in swarming bees, and then hands it to her friend Ruth, played by Mary-Louise Parker, is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. You're just standing there going, ".....Jesus." In the book the scene reads something like, "Idgie walked over to the tree, pulled out the honey comb and then handed it to Ruth." And that is IT. Not exactly evocative, what? Compared to the scene in the movie it's....pathetic. And the entire book is like that. Where the movie in involving and heartwrenching, the book is by comparison pale and uninvolving.

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I once ghost-wrote country music singer Hank Williams Jr's "autobiography. When it got made into a television movie, it was like falling down the rabbit hole. All the "movie people" were every bit as sharp as, say, a kennel full of cocker spaniels on thorazine. Stuff kept getting changed for no apparent reason, like a wife would disappear one day, reappear the next and get merged into another wife on the third. Hank Jr. kept calling me and saying, "Don't they realize that life is something that really happens? This is my life they're screwing with!" I always had the same mantra...the check cleared...the check cleared...

MB

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