I've been re-reading Lyndon W. Joslin's Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker's Novel Adapted, 1922-1995 (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1999) and it's got me thinking.
Why hasn't anyone done a proper adaptation of Stoker's novel?
I mean, if you read Joslin's synopsis of the book (pp. 7-10), it's all fairly straightforward. What's the challenge? What's the hold-up?
The closest it's come to a faithful rendition, in my opinion, is Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). It retains all the major characters, most plot points...but then incorporates a whole reincarnation-love story subplot.
Christopher Lee played Dracula several times, in several movies, yet in only one does his look conform with Stoker's description.
He's definitely one of the best actors to play the part. He's got the look. He's classically trained. I think.
He's even passionate enough to expresses exasperation over Dracula movies straying from the source:
Let's finally get a faithfully rendered Dracula movie up and running!
I mean, what do I have to do? Write the damn screenplay myself...
Why hasn't anyone done a proper adaptation of Stoker's novel?
I mean, if you read Joslin's synopsis of the book (pp. 7-10), it's all fairly straightforward. What's the challenge? What's the hold-up?
The closest it's come to a faithful rendition, in my opinion, is Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). It retains all the major characters, most plot points...but then incorporates a whole reincarnation-love story subplot.
Christopher Lee played Dracula several times, in several movies, yet in only one does his look conform with Stoker's description.
He's definitely one of the best actors to play the part. He's got the look. He's classically trained. I think.
He's even passionate enough to expresses exasperation over Dracula movies straying from the source:
The subsequent Dracula stories, after the first one, got so far away from the original conception, not only in the character but in the stories themselves, which had absolutely nothing to do with Stoker. The same thing happened with the Fu Manchu films. The producer bought the rights to all Sax Rohmer's stories about Fu Manchu, ignored them and then wrote his own. Something quite beyond me, I can't understand it. But I had read the books as a boy. I knew what the character was, because I knew how the author described him, so I played him the way that the author described him. It wasn't necessarily what was in the script. And the same thing applied to the character that I played in the Dracula movies. I tried to play the character the way that the author described him, but it wasn't in the script.This is a golden opportunity, Hollywood! Or BBC, if you're reading.
Let's finally get a faithfully rendered Dracula movie up and running!
I mean, what do I have to do? Write the damn screenplay myself...
