Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

4

A novel that makes a neat bridge away from the Bad Place (and perhaps it's time we got away from these haunted houses before we come down with a terminal case of the creeps) is Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967). I used to be fond of telling people, at the time Roman Polanski's film version came out, that it was one of those rare cases where if you had read the book you didn't have to see the movie, and if you had seen the movie, you didn't have to read the book.

That is not really the truth (it never is), but Polanski's film version is remarkably true to Levin's novel, and both men seem to share an ironic turn of humor. I don't believe anyone else could have made Levin's remarkable little novel quite so well . . . and by the way, while it is remarkable for Hollywood to remain so faithful to a novel (one sometimes thinks that major movie companies pay staggering sums for books just so they can tell their authors all the parts of them that don't work-surely some of the most expensive ego-tripping in the history of American arts and letters), it is not remarkable in Levin's case. Every novel he has was ever written* has been a marvel of plotting. He is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel; in terms of plot, he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drugstores. This fact alone has made Levin almost invulnerable to the depredations of the story-changers, those subvertors who are more concerned with visual effect than with a coherent storyline. Levin's books are constructed as neatly as an elegant house of cards; pull one plot twist, and everything comes tumbling down. As a result, moviemakers have been pretty much forced to show us what Levin built.

About the film Levin himself says, "I've always felt that the film of Rosemary's Baby is the single most faithful adaptation of a novel ever to come out of Hollywood. Not only does it incorporate whole chunks of the book's dialogue, it even follows the colors of clothing (where I mentioned them) and the layout of the apartment. And perhaps more importantly, Polanski's directorial style of not aiming the camera squarely at the horror but rather letting the audience spot it for themselves off at the side of the screen coincides happily, I think, with my own writing style.

"There was a reason for his fidelity to the book, incidentally . . . . His screenplay was the first adaptation he had written of someone else's material; his earlier films had all been originals. I think he didn't know it was permitted-nay, almost mandatory-to make changes. I remember him calling me from Hollywood to ask in which issue of the New Yorker Guy had seen the shirt advertised. To my chagrin I had to admit I'd faked it; I had assumed any issue of the New Yorker would have a handsome shirt advertised in it.