Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Filming an unfinished novel: The Last Tycoon
- 2 The texts behind The Killers
- 3 The Day of the Locust: 1939 and 1975
- 4 Ship of Fools: from novel to film
- 5 Intruder in the Dust and the southern community
- 6 Dramatizing The Member of the Wedding
- 7 Film and narration: two versions of Lolita
- 8 World War II through the lens of Vietnam: adapting Slaughterhouse-Five to film
- 9 John Huston's Wise Blood
- 10 Genre and authorship in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
- 11 Screening Raymond Carver: Robert Altman's Short Cuts
- 12 The Color Purple: translating the African-American novel for Hollywood
- 13 The specter of history: filming memory in Beloved
- 14 Filming the spiritual landscape of James Jones's The Thin Red Line
- Filmography
- Index
- References
12 - The Color Purple: translating the African-American novel for Hollywood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Filming an unfinished novel: The Last Tycoon
- 2 The texts behind The Killers
- 3 The Day of the Locust: 1939 and 1975
- 4 Ship of Fools: from novel to film
- 5 Intruder in the Dust and the southern community
- 6 Dramatizing The Member of the Wedding
- 7 Film and narration: two versions of Lolita
- 8 World War II through the lens of Vietnam: adapting Slaughterhouse-Five to film
- 9 John Huston's Wise Blood
- 10 Genre and authorship in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
- 11 Screening Raymond Carver: Robert Altman's Short Cuts
- 12 The Color Purple: translating the African-American novel for Hollywood
- 13 The specter of history: filming memory in Beloved
- 14 Filming the spiritual landscape of James Jones's The Thin Red Line
- Filmography
- Index
- References
Summary
When it was announced that Alice Walker's (b. 1944) Pulitzer Prize-winning third novel The Color Purple (1982) was to be filmed in 1985, there was reason for considerable optimism about the result. Hollywood's top moneymaking director Steven Spielberg had decided to direct the film with Walker's approval. Quincy Jones had joined the company as a producer, and young talents Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Margaret Avery had signed for the major roles of Celie, Sofia, and Shug.
As the year's Academy Award nominations were announced, it seemed that The Color Purple might sweep the board. Nominated for eleven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and three acting awards (Goldberg, Winfrey, and Avery), the film faltered at the presentation, winning none of the honors. The big winner that year was Out of Africa (directed by Sidney Pollack and starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep), which won many of the awards for which The Color Purple had been nominated. The Color Purple won some secondary awards (a Golden Globe for Goldberg), but it finished out of the running for the most prestigious ones.
While The Color Purple earned respectable grosses during its first six months of release (approximately $94 million), it was also greeted with considerable criticism during this period. Many would later argue that the harsh reception of the film, particularly from the African-American community, hurt both its earnings and its award potential, and left a lingering bad taste among the various participants in the film.
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- Information
- Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen , pp. 198 - 209Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007