Susan Cooper at the 2011 National Book Festival in Washington, DC
I wasn't in town to attend the book festival, but came across this link on the Library of Congress Web site: Susan Cooper: 2011 National Book Festival. It's a webcast of Susan Cooper's appearance at the festival, where she talks about writing and about the fan outrage over That Movie. Here's the full transcript, but I've copied the best bit from it below the cut.
Susan Cooper:
[laughs] Like every other children's author, I get some wonderful letters from the readers. I don't mean the ones that say, "Dear Ms. Copper, we are doing you in class" --
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
[laughs] I mean the real ones. It's a heartwarming collection by now, this sharing of the imagination between a writer who made a book and the kids who've been living inside a story just as she was when she wrote it. We're friends, all of us, through the words we've written down or read.
I never properly appreciated this until a few years ago when the book "The Dark is Rising", the second in the sequence, was made into a movie. I turned down film offers for decades but this one had come from somebody I knew and trusted, unwisely as it turned out. It was a heartbreakingly bad film --
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
-- in which they changed almost everything about the book, starting by turning my English 11-year-old hero into a girl-chasing American adolescent. They even changed the title in the end, mercifully, and called it "The Seeker". And after it came out I was in a state of suicidal gloom, only slightly comforted by the pretty bad reviews.
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
And then I began to hear about the surge of indignant protests about the film at assorted places on the Internet. They were from adults and teens as well as children, and these people seemed to know the five books better than I did myself. They used phrases like "horrible, mangled mess" --
[laughter]
-- and "What were they thinking?" One woman wrote that her 26-year-old daughter, a comic book artist, was designing herself a t-shirt that read, "My Will Stanton is 11-Years-old." Another one wrote, "Don't see this movie. Don't let your kids see this movie. Do yourself a favor and read the book instead." And Wikipedia picked up a quotation that read, "During filming in Bucharest, Romania, there was a joke on "The Dark is Rising" set that only three things had been changed from the original 1973 novel: the nationality of the lead character, Will Stanton; his age; and everything else that happens in the story."
[laughter]
This came from a blog entitled, "The Dark is Sinking".
[laughter]
[laughs] There were hundreds of these resentful protests online. They went on and on. They used words that I can't repeat on this platform.
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
One of the repeatable ones said, "I wasted seven fifty on this movie but had to be sure it was as awful as I feared. --
[laughter]
-- "It was worse."
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
And I stopped being suicidal and I realized that a wonderful thing had happened. These angry people weren't just the child readers, they were also the child readers five, 10, 30 years later.
There was once a headmaster of a celebrated school in Britain which at particularly progressive methods. And when he retired somebody asked him what he felt he'd accomplished and he shook his head. "We can never judge the success of any aspect of education," he said, "until the children grow up and can tell us what really happened." And the same goes for books. There are some advantages to being a very senior writer. You're old enough for some of the children to have grown up and tell you what happened. When I read those defenses of fantasy from the Internet, I felt like -- I felt that after all there was some point to what people like me are trying to do. My niece in Britain even reported gleefully that there was a chat group out of the University Oxford called "Keep Your Filthy Hands Off 'The Dark is Rising'".
[laughter]
It's that magic link between the imagination of the writer and the imagination of the reader. The film had broken it but the readers were keeping the link alive.
Susan Cooper:
[laughs] Like every other children's author, I get some wonderful letters from the readers. I don't mean the ones that say, "Dear Ms. Copper, we are doing you in class" --
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
[laughs] I mean the real ones. It's a heartwarming collection by now, this sharing of the imagination between a writer who made a book and the kids who've been living inside a story just as she was when she wrote it. We're friends, all of us, through the words we've written down or read.
I never properly appreciated this until a few years ago when the book "The Dark is Rising", the second in the sequence, was made into a movie. I turned down film offers for decades but this one had come from somebody I knew and trusted, unwisely as it turned out. It was a heartbreakingly bad film --
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
-- in which they changed almost everything about the book, starting by turning my English 11-year-old hero into a girl-chasing American adolescent. They even changed the title in the end, mercifully, and called it "The Seeker". And after it came out I was in a state of suicidal gloom, only slightly comforted by the pretty bad reviews.
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
And then I began to hear about the surge of indignant protests about the film at assorted places on the Internet. They were from adults and teens as well as children, and these people seemed to know the five books better than I did myself. They used phrases like "horrible, mangled mess" --
[laughter]
-- and "What were they thinking?" One woman wrote that her 26-year-old daughter, a comic book artist, was designing herself a t-shirt that read, "My Will Stanton is 11-Years-old." Another one wrote, "Don't see this movie. Don't let your kids see this movie. Do yourself a favor and read the book instead." And Wikipedia picked up a quotation that read, "During filming in Bucharest, Romania, there was a joke on "The Dark is Rising" set that only three things had been changed from the original 1973 novel: the nationality of the lead character, Will Stanton; his age; and everything else that happens in the story."
[laughter]
This came from a blog entitled, "The Dark is Sinking".
[laughter]
[laughs] There were hundreds of these resentful protests online. They went on and on. They used words that I can't repeat on this platform.
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
One of the repeatable ones said, "I wasted seven fifty on this movie but had to be sure it was as awful as I feared. --
[laughter]
-- "It was worse."
[laughter]
Susan Cooper:
And I stopped being suicidal and I realized that a wonderful thing had happened. These angry people weren't just the child readers, they were also the child readers five, 10, 30 years later.
There was once a headmaster of a celebrated school in Britain which at particularly progressive methods. And when he retired somebody asked him what he felt he'd accomplished and he shook his head. "We can never judge the success of any aspect of education," he said, "until the children grow up and can tell us what really happened." And the same goes for books. There are some advantages to being a very senior writer. You're old enough for some of the children to have grown up and tell you what happened. When I read those defenses of fantasy from the Internet, I felt like -- I felt that after all there was some point to what people like me are trying to do. My niece in Britain even reported gleefully that there was a chat group out of the University Oxford called "Keep Your Filthy Hands Off 'The Dark is Rising'".
[laughter]
It's that magic link between the imagination of the writer and the imagination of the reader. The film had broken it but the readers were keeping the link alive.