Joseph Javier Perla

I am reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 again. It’s hilarious. As I read through Yossarian’s attention-deficit narrative, I can hear his dry, serious voice, “They’re trying to kill me.” I can see the insane soldiers scurrying through abrupt transitions. I can imagine hilarious shorts made from each chapter of the book.

Traditional media companies like CBS are confounded by online video. They don’t know how to make money with it, or at least they didn’t a year ago. They seem to be on the right track now, posting their television shows online. But that is just a start.

As television loses its prominence, IPTV, internet television, all on demand, will be the prominent medium. With every new format comes a new art. Movies require people to go out to the theatre (or wait on a DVD from Netflix) and sit down in front of a large screen for a couple of hours. The kinds of stories you can tell in a movie are different. The Godfather would not have played out the same on television. The Simpson’s doesn’t necessarily lend itself to being a good movie. Movies compact their character development into key scenes building up to a single climax. Television shows extend character development over months and years, with regular climaxes in each episode.

Internet video is very different. People online want information fast. YouTube videos are often just a few minutes in length. The only videos longer which are seen at all are clips which were shown on television: South Park, Colbert Report, presidential debates. I think the videos can be longer on television because of social effects. I can watch House knowing that I can relate to many others who watch House on FOX. If I watch a random video on YouTube, I don’t want to invest half an hour into something not entertaining that nobody else will watch. I might be willing to spend a couple of minutes for a quick entertainment snack.

Which gets me back to my idea. Movie producers constantly try to make quick money by adapting books to the silver screen (see Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and so on). But creating a screenplay usually demands that the screenwriter emasculate the book of much of its meaning. The movie format is far too compact. That’s why many recent book adaptions often exceed 120 even 150 minutes in length filled with action and dialogue, while pure movies are often just 90 minutes long.

I think books can easily be adapted not for the silver screen but for the computer screen. They would play out well. Each chapter can be an episode, just 5-10 minutes long. Or shorter. The Internet does not have the limitation of television in forcing the writers to extend or contract episode plots to a specific 23 minute time slot. Each chapter can naturally fill its vessel. Moreover, book chapters are inherently self-contained stories. Many books often end chapters with cliff-hangers. Cliff-hangers like those in The Giver would make me want to wait eagerly for next week’s show. Most TV shows don’t do that for me. IPTV book adaptation can be straightforward, cheap, simple, and much more faithful to the original than movies.

Catch-22 and Harry Potter each have about 40 chapters. A producer can release one chapter-episode each week for nearly a year. At 10 minutes each, that’s 400 minutes of content for the book. One year of a half-hour television show might yield a little more than that if you subtract out advertising. Typical movies are between 90-120 minutes, longer ones might be 150 minutes. An IPTV book show would be able to delve much deeper into the book than the movie with all that extra time. Why not put books on TV? It’s far too difficult to adapt the book to make an interesting show precisely every 30 or 60 minutes. Books aren’t so periodic: there are short chapters and there are long chapters. Only on-demand Internet episodes can handle this new format requirement.

I would love to watch Catch-22. Many other books, like all of Michael Crichton books, similarly would require little editing of the source material to make an entertaining show. The artform is new, and needs to be perfected, but I think it can be done. Robert Rodriguez faithfully kept to the source material for Sin City, and made a good movie. That fit well into a movie because comic books have less depth. Books need a different video adaptation medium.

I would love to make this video version of Catch-22. I would need some people to help me. I would love to learn how to direct and edit video. I imagine it’s incredibly difficult to turn ideas into good-quality video. I have no misconceptions that it would be easy. I do think it would be fun.