Hollywood adaptations of literary material are hotter than ever in 2002. In addition to a fleshed-out story, adaptations offer another incentive: a built-in audience. It's safe to say that not even anyone in Harry Potter's circle of friends could have conjured up the $300 million that film posted last year without the huge success of J.K. Rowling's novel. And would a journeyman director like Peter Jackson have ever guided a film to those grosses had it not been based on classic Tolkien?

In the following feature some of our most engaging authors discuss film adaptations. Though everyone's experience is different, one thing is clear: no matter how much Hollywood leans on the literary world for product, literature is literature and film is film and whenever the twain shall meet there shall be some degree of disagreement. The authors MM spoke with are among the most talked about writers of our day. Collectively, their books have been praised, panned, bought and boycotted throughout the world.

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Bret Easton Ellis burst onto the literary scene as a college student when his debut novel, Less Than Zero, was published in 1985. Though a film was made of the book, the title and character names were about the only simi­larities one could find. His career hit a bump in 1991, when Simon & Schuster refused to publish his third novel, American Psycho, amidst protests from women in and outside of the company. The book was picked up by Vintage, but its initial reception left an indelible mark that followed the title all the way to its film release in 2000. Though possibly due to misleading marketing (even with an NC-17 rating, the Film targeted the slasher ­friendly teenage crowd), American Psycho was a success and American Psycho 11: All American Girl is now scheduled for release. The plot-a would-be victim of Patrick Bateman's develops homicidal tendencies of her own-has about as much to do with Ellis' composition as Jaws: The Revenge did with Peter Benchley's novel. Cashing in further on the Ellis Franchise, Lions Gate will also release The Rules of Attraction, based on Ellis' second novel, this Fall.

Jennifer Wood (MM): You've had three books adapted, and three very different expe­riences. What is the key to a successful book-to-film adaptation?

Bret Easton Ellis (BEE): Getting a book with the right bunch of people, that's half the battle. I realized that with The Rules of Attraction and Roger Avary and Greg Shapiro. I've been writing novels for 17 years and it's taken this long to finally find the right people.

MM: With American Psycho, did the controversy surrounding that book affect interest in the movie rights?

BBE: Completely-I think no one wanted to touch it. But also, you don't read that book and think: ah, movie! There's really not something that can be easily translated to a screen: There's no story, and there's this horrible character in the middle of it who's beyond evil-or he's a wimp.

Jamie Gertz and Andrew McCarthy in Less than Zero (1987)

MM: But by putting a face to the character and a physicality to the violence, do you risk losing your intention of making a social comment?

BBE: The movie is definitely nowhere near as violent as the book. It's a far less cruel experience, and I would say thank god! I don't think I would want to see an entirely faithful adaptation of American Psycho.

The problem with adapting that book was twofold: one, you had to make a choice about whether these things happened or whether they didn't; whether he did kill these people and they're just popping up again or people are mistaking the people he killed for other people. And you have to delineate, on-screen, the psychosis of a society, which is a very difficult thing to do. That is what the first director, David Cronenberg, wanted to do.

MM: Though the book was criticized for its treatment of women, the film caused waves because of the sex-one scene in particular.

BBE: The violence didn't get the initial NC-17, the sex scene did. And the sex scene got the NC-17 because you could have three male thrusts and get an R, but you can't have six-that is an NC-17!

MM: Yet when I saw the film I was surrounded by teenagers, most of whom probably thought they were there to see the latest slasher flick.

BBE: (laughing) I had problems, I suppose, with the marketing of American Psycho, in terms of how it was marketed as a slasher picture or a horror movie. Even though it was successful for Lions Gate, there's been a lot of discussion among people I know that it was probably seen by the "wrong" audience. It should have been marketed to people who wanted to see a social satire and not a horror movie. But it's actually in between the two.

It's the same problem with The Rules of Attraction. I loved it, but thought, how in the hell are they going to market it? This is a very dark, adult movie about college students. And college students or younger are James Van Der Beek's core audience. There's no way they're going to accept this movie. It's going to horrify them and college enrollment is going drop drastically if you get this out into 2,000 theaters (laughs)!

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Jeffrey Eugenides is no stranger to Hollywood. Though best known as the author of The Virgin Suicides, his frst brush with the movies came in 1986, when he was awarded a Nicholl Fellowship: "The terms of the Fellowship were that we were to write a full-length screenplay. I never really wanted to be a screenwriter, however, so when I finished the script and was told that it was a good First effort but not great, I put it into a drawer where it has stayed ever since... In the end I wrote a novel that was turned into a film, so the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally got something to show for their money."

MM: As someone with a bit of experience in the film industry, you know that a film adaptation can never completely mirror the novel, but Sofia Coppola's treatment of The Virgin Suicides was pretty faithful.

Jeffrey Eugenides (JE): I wanted the film to be the best it could be and understood that this might entail deviating from the book. At the same time, I didn't want the divergences to be so great as to deform or misrepresent the book. I didn't want a happy ending, for instance. Happily, Sofia stayed true to the spirit of the book.

That said, the film and book are very different for reasons beyond Sofia's control. The book is told by a collective narrator of adolescent boys-an omnipresent, invis­ible and in some respects impossible, narrator. This narrator exists as a voice­over in the film which, though effectively done by Giovanni Ribisi, still comes across as a single person. The book is very much about the boys; the film is more about the girls. That's a big shift and, dramatically, possibly unavoidable. But I always feel that Sofia caught the mood, the time and the basic feelings that the book came out of.

Kirsten Dunst in The Virgin Suicides (1999)

MM: What do you think people glean from your work that makes it seem adaptable?

JE: I think film directors don't respond so much to formulae, actually. I think they want to find a story that possesses them. They're readers like anybody else, and when they pick up and book and can't put it down, they start thinking about making it into a film.

MM: As a writer, do you find it difficult to differentiate between the literal and visual?

JE: The novelist Edmund White says you should always leave your hero's physical appearance a little vague, so that the reader can fill it in. I never over-describe my characters' faces, so it's not hard for me to see a variety of actors portray them.

As far as the writing process goes, I'm always highly visual in my writing. This comes from growing up with movies, I'm sure, but also from the influence of writers like Nabokov or Bellow, who have incred­ibly sharp eyes. Some people have told me The Virgin Suicides is also the smelliest book they have ever read, so there's that, too.

MM: What was your experience like when you won the Nicholl Fellowship?

JE: In 1986, when I won the Nicholl Fellowship from AMPAS, we were all flown to LA to have lunch with Jack Lemmon. They took us into the back room where they kept the old Oscars. They had lots of old Oscar statuettes on hand, and we stood around holding Jack Nicholson's Oscar and Meryl Streep's Oscar and Billy Wilder's. The interesting thing was that many statuettes were showing their age, turning green. You could imagine the things sitting on the shelf of some seaside mansion, being eaten away by the salt air.

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It would be easy to say that few novelists have had as much luck with their film adaptations as Russell Banks. Atom Egoyan directed The Sweet Hereafter and Paul Schrader made Affliction, both to nearly unani­mous-and well-deserved-critical acclaim. But luck has nothing to do with it. Taking the advice of longtime friend and author William Kennedy, Banks is careful about the stories he options and, more importantly, who they're optioned to.

MM: I hear that Rule of the Bone is being made into a film, and that you're adapting Continental Drift for the screen, as well?

Russell Banks (RB): Yes. I'm also producing Continental Drift and Raoul Peck is directing.

MM: Is it difficult to cannibalize' your own work for a different art form?

RB: It is difficult, but it's eased somewhat in my own case. It might be different for another writer, but if I've been away from the book for a long time, then picking it up is almost as if someone else wrote it. I don't feel like I'm defending the book in any way; I'm just using the material for another purpose.

MM: And you're adapting On the Road for Francis Coppola. Is it intimidating to be adapting someone else's work? Especially someone like Kerouac?

RB: In some ways it may be more difficult, especially with a writer and a book like that. I think my script is the fourth version, and there were good people writing it before.

MM: Have you seen the other scripts?

RB: No, I haven't. Maybe some day I will, but I just started fresh. I didn't really want to be influenced by anybody else, since they apparently failed (laughs). At first it was a kind of intimidating project, since I had so much admiration for Kerouac and such remembered affec­tion for the book. I hadn't read it in years and going back and re-reading it I realized why everyone had so much trouble, because it is so subjective. But underneath all that there are some really extraordinary events and characters; that's finally what you can get to. It is very cinematic once you start breaking it down.

MM: You were on the set and often consulted with both Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter. What was the experience like for you?

RB: For me it was like a crash course in film­making with two of the best filmmakers in the world. Both of them were so generous with their time and sharing the process with me; I learned a lot about a new field.

MM: Considering the fact that your stories are very non-commercial it's not surprising that the making of these films was unconventional.  What was the process, from script to screen, on both Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter?

Russell Banks on the set of Affliction with James Coburn and Willem Dafoe.

RE: It took seven years to get they money together for Affliction, even with Nick Nolte attached from the beginning. The script was written early on. Schrader bought the option and wrote the script right away and Nick got attached right away. He was Schrader's first choice for Wade Whitehouse and, even then, raising what turned out to be $7 million took seven years with people who were very dedi­cated to the project from the very start. And I was putting my shoulder to the wheel as well, in whatever ways I could. Whereas The Sweet Hereafter took relatively little time. It only took a year because there was a commitment in Canada to Atom Egoyan. He was the Golden Boy of the moment, and still is, and he could pretty much do what he wanted.

MM: Would it always be your preference to be so involved in the film?

RB: I think one has to be selective. I'm first and foremost a novelist, and that takes up a sufficient amount of time that I don't have to get involved in other things. A number of years ago a dear friend of mine, a slightly older writer William Kennedy, said `You know Russell, if you care about what ends up on the screen then you've got to make sure you're attached as a producer. Then you have to make sure that you get approval over script and director and major casting. They're not going to give you that, except on the rarest of occasions, and then they're not going to give you any money. So take your pick: Do you want a lot of money for the option or do you care about what goes up on the screen?' Happily, I'm in a position in my career and life where I don't really need a lot of money for the option and I do care what goes up on the screen.

I wouldn't write the screenplay to a book that I recently finished because there's a continuing involvement that runs with it for quite a while, even after it's been published, for the writer. And I think I wouldn't be detached enough to go ahead and see the material for a potential film. In the case of Continental Drift and Rule of the Bone, it's been a long enough time that I don't have to defend it. I don't have an investment in it as a writer; I have an investment in it as a book about stuff I care about. But I would think that any screenwriter would bring that do it.

In a way it makes the viewer of the film very passive, where the reader of a novel is very active. You bring your own imagina­tion, memories and dreams to a novel and kind of flesh it out. Whereas with a film you just have to sort of sit back and substi­tute your own dreams and so forth for what's on the screen. It's a completely reversed sort of polarity.

MM: What are the challenges in screen­writing that you don't find with novels?

RB: Everything has to be seen, for one thing. And the tiniest gesture has enormous meaning. A film is sort of in your face; you can't modulate it or tone it down or slow it down. It happens all at once, and control­ling that is really very difficult. I've spent my life writing fiction, where you can control the pace and the way in which it is perceived. Is it ironic or subtle or slow or fast and so on. You can't do that with a film.

MM: Is it difficult to see the sacrifices that are made for a movie? To see a major char­acter become minor, for example?

RB: It's sort of the economics of film­making. You've only got so much time and something has to go. Paul Schrader said something that I thought was really smart. He said any good novel has between 12 to 15 stories in it, but any good film can only handle three. So when you adapt a novel you've got to find the three best stories for the film, not the three most important to the novel. From the novelist's point of view, you hope that they're finding the three stories that matter most to the novel. That's the approach I took later when adapting my own novels, and even On the Road.

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In 1995, a string of amazing events-in quick succession-turned writer Chuck Palahniuk into the voice of a new gener­ation. Three days after dropping his Fight Club manuscript into the mail, the book was purchased by W.W. Norton. At the same time, Raymond Bongiovanni was in New York scouting properties for Fox. Bongiovanni read the manuscript and loved it. A month later, the film rights were sold. The film was met with some immediate criticism, in part because of the violence. Older critics found it difficult to look past the pugilism and into the philosophical heart of the story and its stance against commer­cialism. While the box office numbers were not as high as had been projected, Hollywood found a new storyteller in Palahniuk. His subsequent novels, Invisible Monsters, Survivor and Choke, are all in various stages of development, and he's currently selling the rights to the yet-to-be released Lullaby.

MM: The chain of events surrounding Fight Club all happened so quickly. What was the experience like?

Chuck Palahniuk (CP): My editor, Gerry Howard, had told me that only two percent of novels ever get optioned, and of that two percent, only two percent ever go into production. He said until principal photography starts, don't expect it to happen. So when they invited me down for story conferences with the screen­writer, Jim Uhls, I did more listening than anything else. I went down the whole time with no expectation that it would ever become a movie.

MM: Your writing demands a lot from readers. Invisible Monsters, for example, is constantly shifting in time to reveal things about the characters. Can such a story trans­late to the screen without part of its meaning getting lost?

CP: I think it can get lost, but I think there are people who are doing a movie adapta­tion-and nobody wants to make a shitty movie. It's their job to make sure that it doesn't get lost, and I trust that they are good at what they do.

Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Ina Gebert, Jim Uhls and Chuck Palahnuk on the Fight Club (1999) set.

MM: Do you write visually?

CP: I visualize things, but I put so much into creating the scene that when you read a screenplay and it has so little visual stuff in it, it's all dialogue, that's difficult for me.

MM: Described violence is much more readily accepted than depicted violence. People had trouble looking past the violence to find out what the movie was all about.

CP: Isn't it funny, too, how contemporary violence is fine but Lord of the Rings is incredibly violent and Gladiator is lavishly violent. You put violence in a costume and people just eat it up.

MM: With so many of your properties being optioned, would you like to be more involved in the filming of your work?

CP: This is going to sound so irrespon­sible: I have a friend who says that I'm the kind of animal who eats his young. By the time something gets far enough along to become a film, I am much more interested in whatever book I'm working on.

MM: Do you have any interest in trying your hand at screenwriting?

CP: I'm going to be screenwriting a movie for David Fincher from the book Chemical Pink, by Katie Arnoldi.

MM: How are you approaching the project?

CP: I'm going to be meeting with Katie and David to see what I can learn from both of them about their intentions, expectations and vision, and see how that jives with my own and sort of come together with a compromise that encompasses everyone's vision. And I'm working on a book beyond that, so life goes on.

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Seeing the translation of a character from novel to screen can be a surreal experience for any writer. But when that character is you-and the story is purely autobiographical the witnessing of the creative process can be a bit more difficult. Before Leonardo DiCaprio became a household name, he established himself as a true talent by playing Tobias Wolff in This Boy's Life, based on Wolff's memoirs.

MM: If one were to envision the dream cast for a film, This Boy's Life may just be it. Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin and Leonardo DiCaprio each gave amazing performances.

Tobias Wolff (TW): I was very impressed with the depth and seriousness of [De Niro's] training and trying to figure this character out-to get to the bottom of him so he could really play him.

One thing he did that really tickled me was that I had mentioned, in the book, a trick my stepfather had with a Zippo lighter-he open it with one hand. I learned to imitate him and used to get laughs by mimicking him behind his back, and Robert De Niro asked how it worked.

So I showed him and he tried it and every time he did, the lighter went across the room-it's a tricky little thing to do. I didn't have a video camera, so he had me borrow my neighbor's, and he videotaped me doing it. I didn't think any more about it and then, when I was watching the movie, there's a scene where he stops to light the cigarette and he does it-he does it with one hand! He had obviously studied that videotape.

MM: Were you able to see the script as well?

TW: I did, and I had a very good experience. Most of my friends who've had movies made of their books grind their teeth over it, though they go back for more every time they can. I had a very good experience with the people who made the movie. I liked the director, Michael Caton-Jones, a lot and the producer, Art Linson. I didnt think there was anything cheap about the way they thought about how this should be made.

I disagreed with them on a number of things here and there, as any writer would, but it was never a question of them trying to find some cheap way of doing some­thing, or playing to the dumbest person in the audience... Obviously, something so close to you as your memoir is different from another novel.

MM: It must be surreal to see not just a character, but yourself-and your experi­ences-on screen.

TW: Absolutely. Oddly enough, some of the scenes that really took me back were not scenes that were actually in the script as such, or the book. They were things that the moviemakers-the director, in particular-had done with intuition. There's a scene when the mother and the son are first visiting and the people inside are singing "Sailing Along on Moonlight Bay." There's a shot from outside the house and it just sent chills down my spine because even though I was not outside that house, there was just some weird quality to be caught there that exactly woke that memory in me again.

MM: Would you consider involving your­self further in the making of a film?

TW: I might. It depends on the circum­stances, on the piece, what the level of involvement would be. One thing about writers like me is that we work alone. What I did like about the little involve­ment I had with This Boys Life was that it was collaborative. I wouldn't want to do that all the time, because I like taking the credit and the blame. I like having the responsibility for my own work completely, and I like having a unified vision that no one else gets to put their fingers in. But once in a while that kind of experience of working together with people, like in the theater or in a symphony-a collaborative effort-I find very exciting. I had a lot of fun hanging out with people and, yeah, I'd like to do that again. I wouldn't want to make a habit out of it; I wouldn't get my own work done then. I require a lot of privacy and solitude and peace to get the kind of work done that I do, and that's not what you get from this sort of experience. But you do get something else that I think is wonderful, which is that experience of working collab­oratively with other people. That's so rare in my life-and wonderful. MM