This weekend is being touted as “battle of the 80’s remakes” and one of the new releases on offer is Endless Love, a remake the 1981 version starring Brooke Shields, which is itself an adaption of a 1979 bestseller of the same name. However, original author Scott Spencer is not happy about the remake and wrote a rather scathing critique for The Hollywood Reporter:
I presume you have had the experience of having something you said repeated to a third party, attributed to you but mangled beyond recognition. I think it’s a common phenomenon, especially when relationships are unraveling – and one ends up sounding a bit hysterical as one insists, “But that’s not what I said! I never said that! I would NEVER EVER say that!”
This is why it’s a comfort to write down what you want to last.
Endless Love was botched – misquoted, as it were – once in 1981, when Franco Zeffirellitried to make a movie out of it, and it seems as if it has been even more egregiously and ridiculously misunderstood in the movie Universal Pictures is releasing. (I gave up control of the movie rights to my novel in 1980.) I had brief contact with the first filmmakers who tried to adapt my novel, and I had no contact whatsoever with the second wave. But now I don’t really need to raise my voice and say, “No No, that’s not what I said.” I can take my cue from James M. Cain who, when asked what he thought about what Hollywood had done to his novels, said something to the effect, “They didn’t do anything to them; my books are right there on the shelf.”
God, I hope I’m not misquoting Cain, garbling his meaning as I adapt his words to my essay. Luckily, somewhere or other what he actually said is printed and bound, somewhere there is a permanent record. Just as there is a permanent record of what I was thinking when I took four years out of my life to write hundreds of pages about the consequences of a relationship between a seventeen year old boy and a fifteen year old girl. My intentions are discoverable, word for word, in paperback, in ebook, or in hardcover –though hardcover copies will have to be obtained from used book dealers, which doesn’t do the author much good, so, if I were you, I’d think twice about that. Stick with the paperback or the ebook, and you can quote me on that.
Quite a mouthful. The original scores 25 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which you think wouldn’t be hard to top, but the 2014 remake is sitting on just barely half that with 13 percent. Have you seen the new movie, and is Spencer right?
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Originally published February 16, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
