Peter Jackson’s triumphant “Lord of the Rings” trilogy may have proved that completely-imagined other worlds were no longer out of bounds for live action adaptation, but that doesn’t mean that every previously-deemed ‘unfilmable’ novel is suddenly fair game. How exactly do you motion capture Leopold Bloom’s meandering interior monologue? At how many pixels per inch should Holden Caulfield’s caustic world view be resolved?
These questions are nonsensical, but are also slightly more than idle speculation right now, as the closing of a tax loophole may make it necessary for JD Salinger’s estate to sell the rights to his most famous, and most widely read book, “The Catcher in the Rye.” A current movement in Congress to reinstate a previously-repealed tax liability for the year 2010 could mean that, after exemptions, a payment of up to 45% of the value of the entire Salinger estate would be due to the government (and I hope that’s the last sentence on tax law this writer will ever have to write). The ‘Catcher’ rights would presumably raise enough to cover this, since they have been something of a holy grail for producers, directors and actors of the young and disaffected variety (and their agents) for decades now, with everyone from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg to Terrence Malick and the Weinsteins making unsuccessful bids for them in the past.
The main obstacle to bringing “Catcher” to the screen, of course, died in January of this year. The notoriously reclusive Salinger only once granted the movie rights for any of his works – Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut, a short story of his, was made into the 1949 film “My Foolish Heart” with Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward. The resulting film, (which this writer has tried and failed to track down), seemingly took enormous liberties with the source material and ended up a paint-by-numbers tearjerker, which horrified Salinger to the degree that he vowed never to repeat the mistake, and held on tightly to the rights for all the rest of his works until the very end — outlining some of his reasons in this letter. However, with eerie foresight as to the circumstances, he also predicted that the ban he imposed might not outlive him by much:
“…it is possible that one day the rights will be sold. Since there’s an ever-looming possibility that I won’t die rich, I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy. It pleasures me no end, though, I might quickly add, to know that I won’t have to see the results of the transaction.”
So with it now being possible (though still unlikely; the publishers insist the rights aren’t for sale and the exact identity of the current trustees of the estate are unkown) that the film could be made, the question becomes, should it? Leaving aside the obvious casting debate (though Taylor Lautner would be awesome as Holden), and the filmic difficulties that stream-of-consciousness writing presents, the answer, for this writer’s money is still no. Perhaps if it were going to be a smaller, less spotlit film, the chances would be greater for getting a very skilled filmmaker to preserve not only the complex tone and characterization of the book, but also its moral ambiguity. But who is going to spend big on the rights only to go make an indie/arthouse movie? With the best will in the world, Hollywood will more likely give it the big-name Oscar-hopeful treatment, and the book will be forced to work as a two-hour audience-friendly glossy prestige project. This will out of necessity require the neatening up of many of the arcs which are allowed to trail off into the reader’s imagination in the book. What does Holden learn? How does he grow, if at all? What does his future hold? What kind of adult will he be? The power of the book is that we all have our own, private ideas — widely read as it is, it has managed to defy a single canonical interpretation for so long. Do we really want a bunch of Hollywood phoneys answering those questions for us? Here’s hoping the estate can find some other solution to their tax woes.
