High concept adaptation: Christie's auction meets rom-com, Pitt and Portman

By Sarah Sluis

Perhaps I shouldn't be saying this on a film blog, but it is a fact universally acknowledged that, most of the time, the book is better than the movie. There are certainly exceptions, even among prize-winning literature--I just finished No Country for Old Men and found the movie to be much better than the book. I also count the dramatization of action-packed pulp novels as a one-up over the writing of John Grisham or Dan Brown. Michael Crichton's work reads as well as it adapts, and the CGI spectacle of Jurassic Park gave me nightmares for literally years. What can be great in print often fails on the screen, and let's mark Watchmen as the latest example.

I'm also a little mixed when it comes to using books as a jumping-off point. He's Just Not That Into You, a romantic comedy based on the comedic self-help book, took two hours to work its way through the romantic couplings of nearly a dozen people. It barely kept the tone of the book (probably a good thing, as the book was kind of like when a friend says something cruel to you, then follows it up with "just kidding"), but at least it helped at the box office, giving the movie the benefit of being a vaguely recognizable property.

I bring this up because of the announcement that this book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (page through it here and here), will be made into a romance. A romantic comedy, specifically. The book by Leanne Shapton, art director for the NY Times, looks like a Christie's auction catalog, and documents a couple's four-year relationship by putting their possessions on display. It's rather archaeological, has that ever-popular element of ironic detachment ("behold exhibit A, a love letter"), and

requires a little bit of detective work and imagination to enjoy, which will certainly make the book popular among snoops, a category I suspect the author belongs to. (Her previous book, Was She Pretty?, is a fictional exploration of a boyfriend's ex-girlfriends, facilitated by the girlfriend's examination of his diaries.)

What I appreciate about (the potential) for this project is how much will be left unsaid. So often, it's "five years later" in movies and stories without a sense of anything meaningful having happened during the

interim. Being able to convey a sense of history, and the sense that characters have many stories left untold--a tone this book excels at simply through its structure--makes for a much richer project. As an added bonus, telling a story through objects allows for easy manipulation of chronology, and, again, that indie sense of irony that comes from explaining a relationship only through objects. Because the book is modeled after a Christie's auction catalog, the project seems very tied to New York and I see a bit of Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally... in the idea, which has yet to attach a writer.

Most promisingly, Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman would play the couple in the project, which was auctioned off to Plan B productions (Pitt's production company). If

you think about it, Portman has a bit of that Angelina Jolie look, so I

suppose that makes their coupling plausible. Less plausible, however, is the idea that the movie will be made in the near future. With seventeen titles in development, Brad Pitt's slate is filled to the brim. Perhaps it's time for him to hold an auction of his own.