Earlier today, I was researching one of my all-time favourite Christmas movies: Miracle on 34th Street, released in 1947. I found out that, as well as the well-known remake in 1994, there were also three television adaptations over the decades.
And there was a novella.
The man who came up with the original story for this movie, Valentine Davies, didn't write the screenplay. He offered it to his friend, director George Seaton, who sold the idea to 20th Century Fox, and who wrote the screenplay. But Davies still had "Story By" credit in the movie.
The studio decided to get a book published, to coincide with the movie's release. They put Davies in touch with a friendly publisher (Harcourt Brace & Company), who worked with Davies to get it written and printed.
It's only a short novella, about 23,000 words.
I bought it as an e-book today, and read it almost in a single sitting. It only took about an hour and a half.
And, it's awful.
Valentine Davies won an Oscar for Best Original Story for the movie. He got nominated for another Oscar for another screenplay. He was the President of the Screen Writers Guild for a hot minute.
But he could not write good prose to save himself. The writing in this novella is simple, blunt, and unexciting. It's only a small step above "See Dick run. Run Dick, run." The vocabulary is adult level, but the sentence structure comes straight out of those childhood readers. There's so much simple exposition. He tells us in plain blunt terms what the characters think and feel. There's no subtlety. He'd obviously never heard of "Show, don't tell." And so on.
The only good parts of the novella are the lines of dialogue – which Davies didn't actually write. Davies openly acknowledges in his foreword that the novella is effectively a collaboration, because he used Seaton's writing from the screenplay as well as his own material. The contrast between Davies' sections and Seaton's material is painfully obvious.
I'm very disappointed.
At least the movie is still a classic.
by Algernon_Asimov