[William Cloud Hicklin]

It's not because they were "not like the books" in the sense that the adaptation process necessarily changed certain things. My great disappointment (and it was truly that- I haunted TORC and TORN and lapped up every bit of leaked news, really looking forward to the release) stemmed from the fact that PJ so clearly didn't understand his source material. I was hoping for an epic-with-brains like Lawrence of Arabia et al, and what I saw (even in Fellowship, whose plot-alterations I didn't often mind that much) was instead a bigger, badder Indiana Jones movie. All of Tolkien's deeper currents beneath the shallow level of 'plot' had disappeared; and in the sequels were indeed frequently turned on their heads.

That I think underlies the distaste many book-fans have for the movies- we couldn't watch them without being painfully aware of how much was missing (not of the plot, but of the Tolkienian mental universe). And this isn't (at least in my case) due to some prejudice against movies or a lack of understanding of the cinemtic medium: I duly took 'History of Film' and 'Cinema as an Art Form' (and got A's)- so I'm reasonably aware of film's potential to convey a tremendous degree of intellectual content and subtext. A film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings didn't *have* to be superficial.

It's interesting that you bring up The Color Purple. *That* Spielberg, the Spielberg who also made Schindler's List, should have been the model, rather than that other Spielberg, maker of popcorn movies.