This past Winter I sat down to watch The Help as a PPV movie with my local cable company. It was fantastic! The characters where likeable (and “hateable”), the story was heart-wrenching and the message was clear. I enjoyed it. I laughed in all the right places and cried in all the right places. Overall, it was a great experience…

Until I read the book (my boyfriend had bought it for me for Christmas) and I realized that the one of the only things the book and the movie have in common are the characters, the town’s name and the time period. While the movie was great, it moved around timelines, skipped over major characters and even invited characters into events that they weren’t present for in the book. In the movie Miss Skeeter’s mother was already sick with cancer when she arrived home from school; in the book she doesn’t come to know it’s cancer until almost the very end. Even how Miss Skeeter found out about the fate of her old maid (a heart-wrenching moment in the movie) was completely different from the book.

It’s not the first time this has happened. Remember The Bourne Identity? Those movies had less in common with the books than The Help did with their book.

I think a major factor in how much relation the movie has to the actual book is reliant on the involvement of the original author of the book. Look at how involved J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer were in the creation of their movies. It’s almost a seamless transition from the books to the movies with just trivial facts, long-winded explanations and non-essential events being left out for time’s sake.

All I can say is, let’s hope Suzanne Collins was present for the screenplay development of The Hunger Games.

Have you ever read a book in anticipation of a movie and then found the movie to be nothing like the book?