Fierce Invalids Which Sound Poorly Adapted

So I'm blogging for The Film Stage when I come across this entry on the 2008 Black List - for those of you just in from distant lands (the second time today I've used that phrase, which I cribbed from William Goldman because it's funny), the Black List is a compilation of the best unproduced screenplays currently floating around Hollywood. This one made me want to scream:

FIERCE INVALIDS HOME FROM HOT CLIMATES by Eric Aronson
“Based on the novel by Tom Robbins. An irascible, world-weary CIA operative is duped by his boss into helping re-place a listening device back in Russian hands that is vital to spying on them.”

If you are a fan of Tom Robbins and that very fine, wild-ass book of his, I hope you're saying What The Fuck? right now. Come on, all together: WHAT THE FUCK?

I know, I know. I'm calm. It's just... the premise up there is not even remotely close to what the book is actually about. Like most Robbins novels, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (the title taken from an Arthur Rimbaud poem) is equal parts sprawling, funny, sexy and profound - and profoundly silly. Here's what the book is really about:

Plotwise, Switters is a CIA agent and bon vivant who finds himself in South America on a routine, tedious assignment. He ventures up the Amazon River and meets a tribal shaman with a pyramid-shaped head who gives him a hallucinatory elixir. The next morning, Switters is convinced that a group of cosmic overlords he saw in his revelries have exacted a price for all the truth poured into his noggin: his feet must never again touch the earth on pain of death.

He spends the rest of the book in a wheelchair, observing life from an inch and a half off the ground, which summarily astounds his grandmother, Maestra, as well as the sixteen-year-old stepsister he pines for, a middle-aged defrocked nun in the middle of an Arabia desert who he finds equally alluring, and his wingnut CIA pilot best friend.

That's just the "what happens" part of the story. Robbins has said that he writes another book when he feels it's been too long since he read a book that makes him think, make him laugh, and makes him horny. Switters is total contradiction, a man of action and former rugby star who is so squeamish about bodily functions that he imagines his digestive system as a kind of light-radiating crystal which magically transforms his food into a substance he doesn't like to think about. He wants to de-virginize his stepsister and then becomes fascinating by a fifty-year-old nun. He is as drawn to center stage as he is to the hermit's cave, and "the more advertising he sees, the less he wants to buy."

I know the nature of adaptation is change, and that you cannot and should not be literally faithful to the source material. But you should keep to the book's spirit. I admit I haven't read the script by Eric Aronson, so maybe he manages to pack in the novel's humor and Robbins's ever-present voice.

We'll see. The one other film adapted from a Robbins book is Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, starring Uma Thurman as a free-spirit with enormous thumbs who decides she was born to be a hitchhiker and ends up on a lesbian commune. That film was a total failure... and the book wasn't that great, either. There are other, more cinema-friendly Robbins books that should be explored (like his great Jitterbug Perfume, which features the Great God Pan, a thousand-year old janitor, and history's greatest bottle of perfume) and while Fierce Invalids has the potential for a great movie, the plot described above probably does not.

Oh well. Why do I let these things bug me?