Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener

After reading The Night Listener by Armistead Maupin on Sunday, and seeing the movie on Monday, I’ve got to admit, I’ve had this small hole in my heart that kept on getting bigger. First off, the ending of the novel troubled me. I didn’t know what to think and there were all these loose ends going every which way that I figured would eventually get back together when I had an epiphany concerning the novel later on in life. The movie was even worse. I was slightly pissed off at Maupin because I knew that he and Terry Anderson had worked on the screen play together. The movie barely went along with the book, and they stripped it bare of all of it’s heart with a few stupid, needless scenes that I know were thrown in there to appease audience who can’t watch a movie without a few Right-atcha moments. Nonetheless, I chose to stop thinking about the novel that night.

Much to my surprise, though, I found this article this morning. The Seattle Times ponders the movie, and Maupin’s original intentions of writing the novel.  This helped extremely. Now that I can look at the novel in retrospect, all of the heart that Maupin wanted to portray shows clearly. It’s also nice to know exactly how much of the movie was based on Maupin’s personal experience. I knew all along that the novel was a way for him to close “that box”, but how much actually pertained to his life was anyone’s guess. Now, though, I feel much better about the book, and the movie.

Armistead actually says that he didn’t have free-reign when it came to his take on the screen adaptation. “They filmed a scene where Donna actually confronted Gabriel in his home with a box cutter. I screamed and yelled, but I was essentially a tourist on the set. Finally, the director agreed that we’d be better without it because that’s not really what this story is about. Donna doesn’t want this man to die. She just wants him to love her.” Unfortunately he couldn’t stop them more frequently because the movie ended up losing 70% of the novel’s soul through confusing suspense moments, and obvious attempts to shock the audience.

But the big kicker is the article’s mention of Maupin’s upcoming novel, Michael Tolliver Lives. If that’s not exciting, I don’t know what is.

But hey, what’s there to say? Most novels just aren’t cut out to be films. Now I’ve just got to talk to Michael Cunningham and ask him why he allowed them to leave important characters out of the film adaptation of A Home at the End of the World. Hmph.