Adapting Tom Clancy

Today Tom Clancy is such a multimedia success--indeed, so known by his success in media (video gaming, television, film) outside the one in which he began (print)--that it is easy to forget just how unlikely his becoming so seemed in the '80s, even when he was topping the bestseller list. Where all that is concerned it is worth recalling the Los Angeles Times' article about the challenge Clancy and Hollywood collaborators of his such as Mace Neufeld and John Milius faced getting the Jack Ryan franchise going.

While I have never had a high estimate of the average level of intelligence in Hollywood, and especially its studio executives, reading this article it seems to me that, as the article conveys it, they at least understood the difficulties of translating Clancy’s material into a hit film pretty. Besides the very understandable, and ultimately correct, sense that the Cold War was waning with all that implied for the interest of such stories, which did indeed start to plummet with the fall of the Berlin Wall as the bestseller lists show , there was the sheer scale of the stories--the author of the article noting that the studios recognized that Red Storm Rising could be the basis of a mini-series (and a lavish one at that), but not a movie, while the same tendency was evident, if in lesser degree, in most of the Jack Ryan books, if one tried to be at all faithful to their scope and intricacy. There was the extent to which much of what made the books interesting to their readers could not be incorporated into any screen action story--the intricate construction of the narrative out of numerous threads, subplots, viewpoint characters that would get cut down for any two-hour film, all the technical detail that would fall by the wayside as, rendered visually rather than by way of the written word, it just becomes people looking at screens and pushing buttons and things exploding. And just as translation to the screen would likely discard their strengths it would highlight their weaknesses--along with the diffuseness of those narratives, their emotional slightness. To use the Goethe-Schiller conception, these narratives are "epic" rather than "dramatic," and conventionally it is the dramatic that filmmakers endeavor to offer. (Even action movies tell us that "This time, it's personal"--even if only because someone killed the hero's favorite second cousin, and that's a big mistake, and, and save for Patriot Games, which was in its way the least Clancy-ish of the early novels, there was just not much of that driving Ryan's actions, at least.)

There was also what it would all cost.

In the period when Hollywood was first thinking about making films out of Clancy's work it was still common for the studios to fund major summer releases--a Commando, an Aliens, a Robocop, a Lethal Weapon--at $10-$20 million, a sum that, even adjusted for inflation, still seems paltry today, some $30-$60 million, as against the $150 million and up, often way up, expected today. (Indeed, by today's standard they fall into that middle range which is too expensive for little indies, but too small for the tastes of most backers.) This was a long way from being enough to make a film version of The Hunt for Red October look credible on the big screen.

So what happened? Well, if it took longer than many hoped Clancy was a sufficiently big phenomenon, apparently with enough sympathy from Hollywood's "players," for The Hunt for Red October to get its chance, Paramount making the movie with a blockbuster budget and getting it into theaters in February 1990. That was not a typical release date for a blockbuster, but it meant that the Cold War, if already fast passing (the Berlin Wall came down four months earlier), remained a strong enough presence for a little backdating to suffice at smoothing over its rapid obsolescence (the story presented as a bit of secret history taken place in November 1984 rather than a contemporary tale). It was also the case that there was just not much box office competition for a movie like this at the time (since Hollywood hadn't yet made summer movies play all year long).

The movie was not just a hit, but the fifth-highest grossing movie of the year (notably outdoing such highly anticipated summer action movies as Die Hard 2 and Total Recall), and sequels followed in due course, two in a mere four years (Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger), all as other techno-thrillers filled up the screen--movies like Under Siege, and Crimson Tide, and Broken Arrow, and Executive Decision, and Air Force One, extending and encouraging the fashion, which I think happened because of several ongoing developments that may have played a part in getting Red October made in the first place. By and large this was a matter of the scaling up of the action movie, which meant that if $10-$20 million got you a summer move in the mid-'80s even a couple of years later studios expected to, and did, lay out much more--$50 million budgets becoming the norm by 1989 with films like Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon 3. There was, too, a detectable sense that the '80s-era approach to such movies was not working so well as before, that making them "go bigger" was not making them better--as one sees in the over-the-top quality of, for example, Rambo III, or Tango & Cash, or Die Hard 2, all of which have their fans but all of which some saw as just "too much," and which did not make so much more money than their predecessors as to justify the extra money sunk into them. (Rambo III, in fact, left that franchise moribund for years, while Tango & Cash and Die Hard 2 were also seen as not all that had been hoped for.) However, the techno-thriller with its military hardware and geopolitical plots seemed to leave some room for usefully “going bigger.” And so it went for a while, until Hollywood ran short on conveniently adaptable material (The Cardinal of the Kremlin was not easy to work with, Red Storm Rising a non-starter, the side story of Without Remorse a tricky proposition, etc.), Clancy's star sank, and the action movie was increasingly colonized by "still bigger" sci-fi themes anyway. Armageddon was the champion in the summer of 1998, the return of Star Wars to the screen the champion in 1999, while if it did not dominate the year the comparative success of the first X-Men initiated a renewed fashion for big-budget, first-string superhero films that made the successes of Superman in 1978 and Batman in 1989 look like flashes in the pan, the boom really getting going now--while we are still there, as Jack Ryan thrillers, far from representing the scaling up of the blockbuster, have come to seem comparatively limited productions, with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Without Remorse no head-liners, and for the time being Ryan most successful in a streaming TV series. Of course, we now hear reports of Debt of Honor being made as a feature film--but any attempt to render it faithfully will pit the writers against perhaps insuperable obstacles as they face a different generation's challenges in producing a satisfactory adaptation of his material.