What criteria should you use for book to screen evaluation?

Answer 1

I'm not quite sure what you mean-- are you asking how to determine if a book would make a good movie? That depends on a number of factors, but one thing would be to consider how "visual" the book is. In other words, is there a strong storyline that can be shown? There are a lot of very good books that are more concerned with the thoughts and feelings of a character without a lot going on externally, and that can be difficult to film in such a way to hold an audience's interest. Another thing to consider is the complexity of the storyline-- is it so convoluted that the audience won't be able to follow it? Or can it be simplified so that it is easy to follow and still have the movie make sense? In a book it's easy to have a character sit and discuss motives for a chapter, but it's much harder to have a character drone on for ten minutes straight on screen to try to explain things to the audience.

On the other hand, if you're asking about how to compare a book to its screen counterpart, then you have to balance faithfulness to the book with the need to make something visual. Sometimes a movie will make changes to make a book more appealing visually but the question then becomes, did the changes reflect the author's originial themes and vision or did they make the film say something entirely different from the original? That's why some authors HATE adaptations of their books.