Originally published at: Guardian review of Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization: "entirely outrageous and addictively readable" | Boing Boing
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Shouldn’t this be by Alan Dean Foster? Novelization writers need work these days.
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It’s a well-packaged dead-tree book, for sure. I’m mostly on e-readers these days, but I’d be tempted to pick this up if only as a novelty item.
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I guess I would have been surprised if he wasn’t a decent writer.
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I saw an interview about this. It is a homage to all the old movie novels from back in they day. Like Star Wars!
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But does it have “8 full-color pages from the film” in the middle? 
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Aw man, he totally should have done that. The best ones had the full color pics in the center.
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This may simply be nostalgia speaking, but I think it’s kind of a shame that home video and streaming have killed off the original screenplay novelization. I can remember reading a number of these as a kid, especially for whatever sci-fi/fantasy film I wanted to relive in the days before VHS made re-watching the movie on demand a simple thing. I can remember that the novelization for Return Of The Jedi came a week or two before the movie did, which even at 13 I thought was remarkably weird, given the historic security around plot points for that film. I finished the book days before the film opened and was rather surprised when I got to see the movie that 1) the book had in fact spoiled all the secrets from the movie, and 2) there were some minor, but significant plot threads cut from the film that made it into the book. Star Wars, of course, has continued the tradition of the movie novelization. But the books based on those movies kind of out performed the market for those kinds of books, even when they existed.
Back in the day, these things were always based on an early shooting script of the film to make sure that they hit bookstands around the same time as the film was released. That was my favorite part of these novelization was to see all the ways a film can change once shooting starts and all the little bits of character and dialogue that get dropped along the way.
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Do you think it has, though? It seems to me that when a film or show is released, you still get novelizations? Wasn’t there novelizations for the more recent Star Wars films?
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Sold! I just ordered it and look forward to reading it.
Star Wars and other very large/original franchises are the exception, I think. In most cases, the novelization is not necessary, because so many properties are based on an existing literary work (The Martian, Lord Of The Rings, Ready Player One). I, for one, would love to see a novelization of Godzilla vs. Kong, but written solely from the perspective of the two titans. It would be especially lovely, I think to have novelizations based on the screen plays for some artier films. Many of A24’s releases would make for wonderful novels on their own, for instance.
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Certainly there is some manga that covers that… I thought there was manga or light novels for literally everything and only a tiny fraction makes it stateside?
Also, how common was that kind of novelization outside the big franchises in the past anyways? Any idea?
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Many of A24’s releases are novels in visual form.
Apparently Junji Ito just made a manga out of A24’s The Lighthouse
I’m surprised my kid does not have a copy of that already… But not surprised by that. Seems right up his alley.
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