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| Book version vs. Movie version: Different depictions of famous characters |
When a reader immerses himself in a book, he essentially plays all the parts in a story—which makes it difficult for any cinematic adaptation to live up to its source material. The reader is the director, cinematographer, editor, costumer, and production designer. What movie or performance can compete with that? Over at his blog,
The Composites, however, an artist and filmmaker named Brian J. Davis is taking some of those same words and transforming them into actual pictures, specifically composite sketches that look like the images of suspects and missing persons circulated by the police, and posting them on a biweekly basis. What does Stephen King’s telekinetic teen, Carrie White, really look like? According to Davis, this:
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| An artist's depiction of Carrie White. |
So not exactly like Sissy Spacek, but not a million miles away either. Fans of Cormac McCarthy’s gory Western novel,
Blood Meridian, have been awaiting a film adaptation for years. Until that happens, however, here is Brian J. Davis’ rendition of the book’s mysterious antagonist, the powerful, ruthless, and hairless Judge Holden.
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| "He says he will never die." |
According to the Composites blog, Davis created these literal-minded, unsentimental, black-and-white images “using a commercially available law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters.” For those wondering how these police sketches match up (or fail to match up) with actual movie portrayals of these characters,
Sara Barnes has a nice collection of side-by-side comparisons at My Modern Met. There, one will find Marla Singer, Jack Torrance, Norman Bates, Count Dracula, and Frankenstein’s monster, among others. Barnes begins her list, however, with Katniss Everdeen of
The Hunger Games.
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| Katniss Everdeen: On the page and on the stage. |
Not bad, right? One amusing sketch, however, shows that if the makers of
The Great Gatsby were really true to the vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the character of Daisy Buchanan might have looked a lot like a grownup version of Nick’s
Angela Anaconda, minus the freckles.
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| Am I tho only one who remembers Angela Anaconda? |
