I’m planning to do a post in the near future about the Da Vinci Code, one of my favorite books of all time, but briefly, I wanted to highlight something that I had noticed.
When books are made into movies, often the overweight characters seem to have missed the invitation to the silver screen. Or better yet, their thinner selves were invited.
In the book, the Da Vinci Code, Sir Leigh Teabing is an obese, aging millionaire with a constantly red face. In the movie, he’s is a trim, good-looking sixtysomething guy.
In the book, Running with Scissors, the main character’s adopted sister is Natalie, an overweight pothead with a love of McDonald’s. In the movie Running with Scissors, Natalie is a skinny, good looking (albeit skanky) girl played by Evan Rachel Wood.
Both of these are fantastic books and fantastic movies and fantastic books-to-movies (both made the transition nicely). I’m assuming that these aren’t anamolies, though: I bet many movie versions of books cut out plumper characters. Did this happen in any other books-to-movies that you can think of?
1 response so far ↓
1 Jamia // Jul 14, 2007 at 1:26 am
Have you seen “Sicko” yet? There is a great part about a woman who was considered “too fat” for health insurance juxtaposed with a man considered “too thin” for health insurance. I loved the presence of this in the movie, because while it made a statement about the corruption of our HMO and big corporate driven health care system, it also showed how our physical characteristics are used against us and how ridiculous it is that humans define standards of “fitness”… It is totally eugenics in my view.
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