book to film – The Giver

The Giver by Lois Lowry


WHAT IS IT

Set in a futuristic Utopian society where everything is mediocre and bland, down to the tiniest detail. The people don’t even see colors, that’s how bland shit is. Everyone lives with an assigned family unit (not natural families, of course, all births are created via artificial insemination and the brood of mothers – young women who are assigned to this “career” – and they’re all kept separate) and if a new baby doesn’t seem up to snuff, it’s killed. This is a dark secret, of course, definitely not general knowledge. But even if it were, I doubt anybody would care. Well, within this horribly boring society, there’s one man who acts as the caretaker of memories. He is in charge of remembering things that have long since been eliminated from their society. He’s basically only there for consultation, not repeating history’s mistakes and such. Well, he’s getting old, and we certainly can’t have him dying and releasing those horrible memories into the public. So a young man, as his career assignment, is told he will become the new caretaker. He will receive all the memories from the old man, known now as “The Giver.” Of course, as the process of transferring memories progresses, our young man gains knowledge that makes him begin to question his “perfect” society, especially once he learns that the town leaders happily kill infants that don’t make the cut.

WHY IT WOULD KICK ASS ON THE BIG SCREEN

Movies about future societies are numerous, but this future seems pretty original. The closest I can think of is the emotionless world of Equilibrium. So not only would this be an interesting take on the future, which I’m sure people would enjoy if not only for the “what if” questions it would elicit, but it’s got a nice element of tragedy thrown in there. Everyone would love these characters – the old man burdened by these memories, the boy growing to question the world around him. And in this movie we would get everything from fights for injustice to a awkward, sweet, and frustrating childhood romance to an exciting escape from the town compound and a thrilling flight through the surrounding woods.

WHY IT’LL NEVER SEE THE INSIDE OF A THEATER

Actually, the book’s been adapted for the stage by a children’s theater group in Oregon (Oregon Children’s Theatre) into a one-hour production which premiered in 2006 and has popped up on small, unknown stages across the country but never anywhere with any sort of prestige. In 1994, Bill Cosby and his production company actually got the ball rolling on a motion picture adaptation of The Giver, but over the years, the project has changed hands so many times, sometimes gaining a fairly large following of people willing to actually make the movie, but so far nothing that could be called progress has been made towards actual production since ’94. If you look on IMDb, you can see that this movie is shown with a release date of sometime in 2011, but obscure movies like this are often shown to be in the works and then inevitably fall apart despite the hard evidence on the IMDb page that says it’ll be coming soon to a theater near you. example: The Last Unicorn live action version, The Brazilian Job … RELEASING SOON (read “NEVER”)