Note: because of the numerous footnotes and images, I recommend reading this post on a web browser, not via email.
Quentin Tarantino has published his first book. It is, fittingly, a novelization of his most recent movie, Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood: fitting, because Tarantino’s writing process has always started with sprawling, novel-like script treatments, which the novel Once Upon a Time is clearly adapted from, and fitting that the man who made Pulp Fiction has made his publishing debut with the pulpiest form there is, the movie tie-in novel.
The book is even packaged as a regular tie-in novel, complete with boxy vintage design in a mass-market paperback format that the covers were bent and the spine cracked before I’d even finished reading it. There are publisher advertisements at the back for other tie-in books (Serpico) and trashy westerns that Tarantino seems to have made up (Ride a Wild Bronco). The whole thing is a kind of pop art object, a sincere and exhaustive recreation of a disposable product. It was an inspired move by HarperCollins, who inverted the usual hardcover-to-paperback approach, with the deluxe edition coming later this year. They probably figured audiences would buy into the joke for eight bucks, but not $34.99. I certainly wouldn’t.
The book itself is just alright. I like Tarantino’s movies and I think Once Upon a Time is his best in a decade, but the book makes a lot of bad structural calls. Some of the chapters that were “cut” from the movie, like a Manson Family home invasion or the many trips to theaters that let Tarantino flex his classic film obsession, are delightful. But for each of these, there are two or three ridiculous flashbacks or plodding, incongruous fictionalizations of the TV western Lancer that features in the story, more distraction than detail.
There’s also too much fumbling with the writing on a words-and-sentences level. Present-tense narration is an unfortunate choice for a novel thick with flashbacks, historical asides, and plot summaries, the “now” of the novel hopping through layers of history and reality, making duration and sequencing hard to follow. The perspective jumping between an omniscient, Tarantino-ish narrator and tight, third-person storytelling is supposed to read like free indirect discourse but often just makes it hard to tell whether the author or the character is thinking or giving an opinion.
This doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the book. I did, reading it in a few big gulps while drunk and sunburnt on vacation, as these things should be done. This is, after all, a movie tie-in book, about as unserious a genre as it gets. Once Upon a Time was the first one I’d read in at least a decade, and may be the last. But Tarantino’s book and its weird meta-homage to movie novelizations got me thinking about this unloved corner of the book world, and looking into their history.
You have seen them before. You may have read a few, or maybe even a lot: I know I have. Tie-in novels based on movies, TV shows, and games get no reviews from critics, little in the way of marketing, and their authors are rarely known--or if they are, it’s under a pseudonym at every step besides the name on the paycheck. The Big Five publishers don’t much like to admit their role in it, either, hiding their tie-in books behind niche imprints so that they get the money but not its odor. While most book people like to think of books as ensouled, non-fungible cultural artifacts, the tie-in novel is as close as books get to being assembly-line widgets made for money. If making books was really about prestige and aesthetics, tie-ins wouldn’t exist and they wouldn’t have to be resented.
Their reputation hasn’t changed much in two centuries. Novelizations of scripts actually predate movies, going back to the theater. They served a practical need: until home video in the 1980s, the only way to get a bunch of actors together to perform your favorite story was to own your own theatrical troupe, like King James and the King’s Men.
This was bad enough with movies, but much worse with theater, where every production is specific to a certain time, place, and cast that only stayed together for months at most, and usually less than that. When a play you liked wrapped up its run, it could be the last time you ever get to see it. Drama had always been like this, but in the 19th century, publishers began to sense an opportunity, paying writers to adapt theatrical scripts into full novels, often enhanced with photographs and illustrations from the original run. Then, as now, these were thought of as lowbrow hackwork for writers, but they were good earners, easy to produce, distribute, and sell.1
Not much changed in the early years of film, when short one-reelers like Le voyage dans la Lune were the most popular format. Most of these skits, fantasies, and pantomimes couldn’t even sustain a short story. Around 1910, the film serial took off as the most popular form of movie, packaged in 15- to 45-minute episodes. This was still too short to demand standalone book adaptations, but written adaptations of these episodes found an audience in consumer movie magazines, which took off around this time. These written adaptations, usually the length of a long short story, served a dual purpose of letting fans relive the story and entice new ones by giving them a taste of the series and a chance to catch up on the plot they’d missed. These story adaptations were actually the bulk of those early magazines, with the more familiar mix of star interviews, backlot gossip, and movie reviews only taking off in the mid-1910s. Some of these serials, like The Perils of Pauline or Les Vampires, were popular enough that publishers gathered the stories from the magazines and repackaged them as episodic novels. They were the TV box sets of their day, as well as the first real tie-in books. 2
It was around 1913 to 1917, though, that the American movie industry finally found its footing—Hollywood, where Thomas Edison’s lawyers couldn’t reach them—and its primary product: the one- to three-hour feature film, watched in a single sitting and telling a standalone story. Where earlier one-reelers could adapt a scene or two from Ben Hur in 1907,3 by 1925 audiences expected the whole story stretched over two and a half hours, which they got. And if novels could now be turned into movies, it followed that movies were long and complex enough to become novels. Collected-serial books faded, and the photoplay book was born.
Photoplay editions, as publishers called them, were a catch-all group for any book released alongside a movie from the 1910s to the 1960s, though they really covered two different kinds of book. The first and most familiar kind were tie-ins for movies based on a preexisting book: Ben Hur, Frankenstein, Dracula, and so on. Hollywood has always subsisted on a steady diet of novels, and has almost always accompanied every one of them into a reissue of the book with a film-related dust jacket (“NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE”) and some photo inserts from the movie, with a few weird exceptions.4
For original movies, though, which had audience demand for tie-in books but no source text to reprint, studios and publishers commissioned novelizations leaning on the old theater adaptation model. Movies don’t work like plays, though--especially silent movies, which they all were at first--and writers had to get creative.
Turning silent comedies like Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman or Buster Keaton’s The General into novels must have involved a significant amount of invention on the author’s part. The silent movie scripts being adapted were usually catalogs of camera shots with terse notes for actors, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. Without genre conventions or editorial policies, writers had broad freedom to play around with style, perspective, and tone in ways that modern tie-in writers rarely get to do. To take one example, the novelization of A Night in Casablanca seems to have kept only the bare plot and Groucho Marx’s one-liners, filling out the rest with jokes, riffs, and metafictional asides, not trying to copy the Marx Brothers movie but translate it for the page.5 It’s a small, unique corner of American literature, but it didn’t last.
The problem is that hardcover books with lavish dust jackets were more expensive to produce and harder to sell when reading preferences shifted to cheaper paperbacks in the 1940s and 50s. Publishers ditched the picture inserts, focused on writing, and steered the editorial and production standards to be more in line with the other mass-market pulp industries: romance, sci-fi, mysteries, and so on. This was the end of the photoplay form.
The artistic freedom of the photoplay withered soon after, with New Hollywood in the 1960s and its increasing reliance on financialization, creative accounting, merchandising, and other revenue streams as the star system faded and TV bit into its profits (Van Parys 314). Just like you’d expect when accountants and lawyers take over, novelization became even faster and cheaper before, with new intellectual property rules encouraging the strictest adherence to the original screenplay. No budget for fancy dust jacket illustrations or photo plates, no time to think up a thousand Groucho-type one-liners: you get two months to novelize Battleship.
This is the tie-in regime we’ve lived under for fifty years now: studios, working with publishers and agents, commission an author to turn a 100-page script into a 300-page novel, with varying levels of input and oversight from the studio. Sometimes, especially for franchises, that means running every little decision past the studio to ensure continuity and fit company values, like Jason Heller did with a Pirates of the Caribbean book; but occasionally you wind up like Alan Dean Foster, who had to novelize Alien without getting to see what the actual alien looks like. The turnaround on these is short even by pulp paperback standards, from a few months to a few weeks between commission and submission. The money is modest, around $5,000 to $10,000 in most sources. Some authors use them as stepping-stones towards publishing independent work, others make careers out of it, building reputations as fast, reliable ringers for tie-in writing.
And there are always more tie-ins to write. While home video cut into the original rationale for tie-in novels, they remain popular and profitable in the age of extended universes, fandoms, and their insatiable appetite for more content and expansions of the source material. The current conventional wisdom is that one to two percent of any audience will buy the tie-in book. Spread over millions of fans, with no need to spend extra on establishing a brand or audience, and figuring in the low production costs and modest author advances, that’s a lot of money to be made.
Enough, at least, to keep the whole thing going even though very little love exists for tie-in novels. There is an International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, though it’s more of a trade organization than a public-outreach group. Nobody is a fan of tie-in novels as such: they’re not a regular genre with an established niche like paranormal romance or military sci-fi, literary book critics won’t touch them, genre critics prefer to talk about the source material, and readers aren’t likely to appreciate the author or the literary qualities of the book.
Still, I’d argue that tie-in novels serve an important role in our literary culture. Now that everybody grows up with what Steven King calls the “daily dose of video bullshit” and knows the Avengers before they know the alphabet, tie-ins are a useful bridge to literature. In middle school, they were the only thing short of a crowbar that could get me to put down the Xbox controller, and showed me that my favorite things could be found in books, too. I’m in good company here: Quentin Tarantino has admitted that tie-in novels were the first books he ever took seriously. And he’s a published author!
Sources & Further Reading:
As the footnotes show, I am indebted to Thomas Van Parys’s “The Commercial Novelization: Research, History, Differentiation” for much of the writing on photoplay editions.
Any readers curious about the modern novelization process are encouraged to read Jason Heller’s account in Atlantic Magazine, Christopher Borrelli’s feature in the Chicago Tribune, or Alexandra Alter’s write-up for The New York Times. I have linked to these articles above wherever I have sourced information from them.
I learned about the context of the great pulp paperback shifts of the 1950s from Oliver Corlett’s broader history of the paperback at the IOBA Standard.
Van Parys 309
Van Parys 310
With chariot races filmed in Brooklyn, as you can see around the 13-minute mark.
Both Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), despite having the author’s own name in the title to signal fidelity to the original, wound up getting tie-in novels based on the movies based on the books: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Lenore Fleischer and one one of the all-time great dumb book names, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Francis Ford Coppola Film by Fred Saberhagen.
Van Parys 314