Holes, as adapted by Richard Kelly

April 29, 2016 12:09 PM

You want to adapt a lighthearted whimsical YA novel for the big screen; who do you hire for the screenplay? The original author? Nah. Just get the guy who wrote Donnie Darko. Holes, by Richard Kelly [pdf]. Featuring nuclear holocaust, prostitutes, and mercy killings.

I was very naïve. And I was convinced that I could convince them that this was the cooler version of the movie. And they were just like, “No, we want to make a PG-rated pretty faithful adaptation of this best-selling book. We have Andrew Davis directing. You’re insane. Please sign this contract. We’re not going to pay you anymore money. We respect you. We like you. But we’re moving on in a different direction.”

-Richard Kelly, Scriptnotes, episode 118

posted by specialagentwebb (36 comments total)

Southland Tales: Rise of the Onion Man
posted by beerperson at 12:22 PM on April 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is bananas. As in, forget about the William Gibson Aliens script with the wooden space station and the Nick Cave-penned Gladiator 2 set in the afterworld, this is new gold standard in mainstream scripts gone insane.

Thanks for this.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:27 PM on April 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

I'm a fully-grown adult, and was the same when Holes was published, yet it remains one of my favorite books of all time. I haven't seen the film as they made it, but I'm really glad they didn't go with Richard Kelly's version. That guy's weird.
posted by carsonb at 12:28 PM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

As John LeCarré reportedly said, turning a book into a movie is akin to turning a cow into a bullion cube.
posted by acb at 12:55 PM on April 29, 2016 [17 favorites]

You know, I want to see the mountain of drugs that was necessary to make that seem like anything but a bad idea.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:57 PM on April 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

He really gets the feeling of the book towards the beginning, but I'm not sure writing out the rest of modern society in a cataclysmic nuclear war was the best way to approach things. A big part of what made Holes, the novel, tick was that everyday life was still out there on the other side of the desert. That, and the Kafkaesque misadventure that gets Stanley sent to Camp Green Lake in the first place.

Also, it's really odd that he wrote out the plot significance of the yellow-spotted lizards completely, but still kept in a bit of the original novel's dialogue mentioning them.
posted by fifthrider at 12:58 PM on April 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

This makes me happy. I loved the book and I was so happy they stuck with it for the movie. The book and the movie are both great. Great decision. How often do we get to say that?!

I went and just changed so much of the novel into kind of like a dystopian, post-apocalyptic Stephen King thing.
Craig: Mm-hmm.
Richard: And just kept the core essentials of the novel.

If he thought this was possible then there's no way he understood that novel in the least.

Knowing that the Donnie Darko guy (a movie I hate) was prevented from ruining the complex delight that is Holes is the best news I've heard in ages.
posted by bleep at 12:58 PM on April 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

carsonb, it's a very faithful adaptation. Worth checking out, imo.
posted by themanwho at 12:59 PM on April 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

yeah, it's a landmark of how a great adaptation can be done. right down to soundtrack songs written from fragments of lyric from the text. and really tight adherence to the dialog, which could have easily been wrecked. sachar really crafted a terrific read-aloud that naturally translated straight to the screen.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:06 PM on April 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

*opens the pdf*

*reads the first line of voiceover*

*laughs uproariously*
posted by gusandrews at 1:11 PM on April 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

OK, I'm calling Poe's Law. What the hell is going on here?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:49 PM on April 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

There used to be a terrific spoof of Peanuts -- Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski -- but it appears that it has been scrubbed from the Internet. I've found only a few excerpts: Bread, Bread and Answers That Never Arrive, Lucy.

***gets around to reading the FAs***

Oh! Well I like it as a spoof, anyway. It's great to think of someone going to all the trouble to pretend to be Richard Kelly, right down to the watermark, and write up a whole 117 page screenplay based on Holes and put it on the Internet and hope for the best.

And also I like it as a true story -- that interview is great -- and I'll just go ahead and click "Post Comment" because I want to have a handy place to come find these Peanuts by Bukowski scraps again sometime.
posted by notyou at 2:16 PM on April 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

The book Holes is so perfectly constructed and all the parts fit together so delightfully, anyone who would want to do this sort of adaptation either didn't read it, didn't get it, or didn't like it.
posted by straight at 2:47 PM on April 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

So wait this is a parody?
posted by bleep at 3:06 PM on April 29, 2016

Can't say it makes much sense. All the way to this bizarre deus ex machina at the end.

I should have known the author didn't care about the book when the holes they dig were square.
posted by macrael at 3:34 PM on April 29, 2016

HOLES

dug by little

MOLES

©Gary Jules 2023
posted by howfar at 3:53 PM on April 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

You know, I loved Holes the novel. I liked Holes the movie less, because it fails the Sesame Street/Pixar test, in that it's not something (IMO) that kids can watch with adults and both can enjoy the movie for different reasons. It's very heavily weighted towards kids.

One of my favorite parts of Holes the novel was Stanley's sudden insight into institutionalization. IIRC, the film cut that portion of the story and replaced it with a montage of digging with the Holes song. I would have liked to have seen how they handled that sequence cinematically.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:11 PM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Louis Sachar is an astonishing writer. Not just by the terms of YA fiction—his stuff, even his lesser stuff, stands up to rereads surprisingly vividly. The man has a gift for words and ideas, and a masterful ability to reach kids without dumbing down.

Richard Kelly, meanwhile... well, I'm pretty sure the NYC MeFites all recommended Southland Tales to me as part
of a weird-ass hazing ritual, and now I live in Philadelphia instead. So good riddance to that.
posted by rorgy at 4:40 PM on April 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

@rorgy, you are wrong in all the ways it's possible to be wrong, up to and including your hopelessly misconceived move to Philadelphia, the unwashed navel of the eastern USA.

Southland Tales is great in a Phildickian/Lynchian 'conceptual fantasia unencumbered by plot or sense' way, and the blend of music and visuals is surprisingly beautiful at times. It's funny (sort of), it's trippy (sort of), the ending is weirdly intoxicating balderdash, the first time you see the Justin Timberlake lip-sync is one of those out-of-nowhere joyful mindfucks. It contains a line about fascism that made my wife and I laugh so hard we embarrassed ourselves in the thoroughly unamused theater. It has Buffy the Vampire Slayer in it. It has Vizzini in it. It has Jon Lovitz in it.

You're right about Sachar though. Acquitted, by the skin of your cheez-wiz-rotted teeth.
posted by waxbanks at 5:33 PM on April 29, 2016

Southland Tales is a piece of shit, Philadelphia is better than New York, and Holes is a timeless classic. And Buffy sucked.
posted by rorgy at 7:31 PM on April 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

And if I ever hear you compare Kelly to Lynch again, what I do to you is gonna make Liam Neeson look like a saint.
posted by rorgy at 7:31 PM on April 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Loved Holes, haven't seen the movie adaption.

Richard Kelly, meanwhile... well, I'm pretty sure the NYC MeFites all recommended Southland Tales to me as part of a weird-ass hazing ritual, and now I live in Philadelphia instead. So good riddance to that.

rory, what are you even talking about. Southland Tales actually is great, you should watch it, and has absolutely no bearing on whether or not Richard Kelly has any place writing an adaption of Holes. And I don't recall any hazing; rather, I recall like 20 people trying to get you to move into the city.
posted by likeatoaster at 7:58 PM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Southland Tales is a piece of shit, but The Box is the shit that piece of shit takes.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 8:39 PM on April 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Holes is a great book and the film adaptation is also great. Andrew Davis directed, and he's got a subtle trademark style that's very naturalistic; the performances come across really vividly, particularly Shia Lebouf.

I got the DVD which included some cut scenes, and my only gripe with the film is that those scenes weren't included in the final cut. And some goofy scenes that obviously pander to really young kids--namely Jon Voight acting like a clown--were left in. But whatever, this adult wasn't the target audience anyway.
posted by zardoz at 1:09 AM on April 30, 2016

rory, what are you even talking about.

Wait, what? Man, these one-letter-different usernames...
posted by rory at 6:43 AM on April 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

I also didn't like Donnie Darko. It struck me as insincere and pandering; equal parts Hot Topic mall-goth angst-by-numbers (a psycho-killer rabbit! How original...) and point-missingly superficial David Lynch pastiche made by someone who didn't get Lynch's works beyond “it's dark and weird”.
posted by acb at 7:12 AM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

> There used to be a terrific spoof of Peanuts -- Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski -- but it appears that it has been scrubbed from the Internet.

Damn, I remember loving it when it was posted here. Thanks for the memories!
posted by languagehat at 8:00 AM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Richard Kelly is awesome, especially when he's not. THANK YOU FOR THIS
posted by Sticherbeast at 10:07 AM on April 30, 2016

Southland Tales makes perfect sense if you consider that it takes place in another dimension that is almost the same as ours but a little bit different. It was made in the wake of ; G. W. Bush and the NeoCons campaign of full on fear, Homeland Security, 'Peak Oil', the Iraq War and it's vets that started coming home with PTSD. Those ideas, especially the last, were absurdly and sadly personified with the added bonus of a sci-fi trope reused from Donnie Darko.
If you want to understand the plot then you should read the graphic novel and then watch The Cannes Cut. Twice. Also keep in mind the film spends around 90% of it's time on unnecessary subplots.
posted by P.o.B. at 1:28 PM on April 30, 2016

I still haven't the film yet, but isn't Stanley Yelnats supposed to be overweight? Shia Leboeuf at that age doesn't seem to fit that characterization.
posted by Apocryphon at 8:50 PM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Holes is lighthearted and whimsical? Am I remembering the right book? This was the one with kids at the juvenile prison doing hard labor... [quick check at wikipedia] Yup, though I forgot the part where they come close to starving in the desert and the staff erase their records of the kids to make it easier to leave them to die...
posted by Margalo Epps at 8:58 PM on April 30, 2016

I read the whole script and it was so laughably cheap and bad that I have to go back to Donnie Darko now and see if it ages as poorly as I suspect. The dialog is wooden, the plot points bog-standard Hollywood, the characters carry a whiff of Mary Sues who grew up watching Apocalypse Now, and the biggest travesty, of course, is that Kelly killed all that childish weirdness right out of a wonderful Sachar book. Cmon, Kelly. I watch bad movies for the idiosyncratic gems they contain. This just smacks of your self-pity because Hollywood won't let you make its movies.
posted by gusandrews at 12:46 PM on May 1, 2016

(And I'm going back to my copy of Holes and loving it all over again.)
posted by gusandrews at 12:47 PM on May 1, 2016

Donnie Darko was the worst and I hated all of my teenage friends for not understanding how bad it was.
It was also the first movie where the website was lightyears better than the movie. I loved that dang website.
posted by Theta States at 12:51 PM on May 3, 2016

Donny Darko has some amazing performances in it, but the script needed another three or four hundred passes.
posted by infinitewindow at 5:05 PM on May 3, 2016

Donnie: You're such a fuck-ass!
Rose Darko: Please.
Elizabeth: What? Did you just call me a "fuck-ass"?
Rose Darko: Elizabeth, that's enough.
Elizabeth: You can go suck a fuck.
Donnie: Oh, please, tell me, Elizabeth, how exactly does one suck a fuck?
Elizabeth: You want me to tell you?
Donnie: Please, tell me.

posted by Theta States at 5:56 AM on May 4, 2016