WHY AREN'T THERE MORE TONI MORRISON FILM ADAPTATIONS?

The New York Times on March 11 of this year ran a story titled “Netflix is gobbling up world literature. What could go wrong?” The sub-headline read, “The streamer keeps mounting lavish adaptations of beloved novels – and making them all feel like just more Netflix.” That headline made me wonder: With that flood of novel adaptations underway, why hasn’t there been more than one film or TV adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison? She has been called “one of the greatest authors in American history,” and “one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial modern authors,” among many other plaudits. As a blogger about stage and screen who has also read every one of Morrison’s 12 novels, I can personally attest the novels are highly cinematic, well-suited to cinema. And since 2020, there has been a push for more dramatic works by African-American and minority authors. So what gives?

The first answer is that since 2020 there have been in fact two announcements made that Morrison novels are under development. First, in 2021, Deadline.com reported that director George C. Wolfe was “in talks” to write and direct a mini-series adaptation of Morrison’s Song of Solomon. A year later, in 2022, Deadline reported that HBO was planning a limited series adaptation of her Sula, from writer Shannon M. Houston, who wrote Stations Eleven, and Stephanie Allain’s Homegrown Pictures. So the news in part is good for Morrison fans. But it has been four years since the Song of Solomon adaptation was announced, and three since the Sula adaptation, and no further news has emerged online. One Toni Morrison fan said, “I’m not holding my breath.” So it begs the questions, what took so long? And what’s taking so long?

The Toni Morrison estate, not surprisingly, did not immediately reply to my email asking why there haven’t been more adaptations. (Morrison died in 2019.) When I googled to see whether anyone else had written about this question (I couldn’t find anyone who had), Google AI was willing to leap in and answer the question: The content of Morrison’s novels is too dark for film and TV. It is true that Morrison unflinchingly approaches the trauma that comes from a history of bondage in this country—rape, murder, sexual assault. All the devils are here, as the saying goes. As I point out it in my ranking of Morrison’s 12 novels, also posted to this blog today, she has said that even Black masters like Ralph Ellison and Fredrick Douglass shied away from telling the full story of the horrific events that accompanied slavery. Ellison, she noted, would say so out loud, speaking of horrors too dark to relate in print. Thus Morrison became a considerable scribe not only of heart and humanity but also of history’s worst evils. But one can hardly say Hollywood has shied away from these subjects when the authors were white. So Google AI’s explanation does not entirely add up.

It is true that Morrison's novels often have a marked interiority, are written non-linearly out of chronological order, and jump between characters' perspectives. But even James Joyce's famously stylistically challenging Ulysses has been made into at least two movies. This sort of experimentation in style is not a dead end for many white writers. 

Another reason it took so long has been Morrison’s own reluctance to see her books turned into movies. Before Beloved, Morrison expressed a lack of interest in adapting her books to movies. Morrison told the Washington Post in 1977 that "the movies" were interested in making Song of Solomon. "Nobody had bought the book" but "all the right people have called." When more than one said the book reminded them of King Lear, apparently not a comparison with which she agreed, she said she decided to let her agent handle the movie people. By 1983, still with no film made, Morrison expressed a reluctance to see her books made into films. "My students ask me when I'm going to make my books into movies," she said in an interview with Claudia Tate that is reprinted in part on enotes.com. "I tell them I'm not terribly interested in that because the film would not be mine." 

However when Oprah Winfrey decided she wanted to adapt Beloved, she was unable to find any phone number for Morrison, as Winfrey reports in the 2019 documentary film Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (an interesting phenomenon in itself, as it had a healthy theatrical release in certain markets). She called the fire and police departments in Morrison’s hometown, and said “this is an emergency” and that she had to reach her right away. Morrison wondered how she got the number, and when Winfrey told her how, Morrison wondered how the police and fire departments got the number. Initially, she was wary of Winfrey’s proposal, asking her two sons whether they thought she should accept the offer. Her eldest son told her that she would still have the book. This is just another version. Thus, the film was somewhat reluctantly made.

It was neither a box office nor a critical hit, and that may have slowed down Hollywood producers for 30 more years. While Rotten Tomatoes shows a 71 percent rating for Beloved, the October release date for the film marred its chances at Oscar nominations, and for whatever reason the Academy Awards snubbed the film entirely. The movie may have been hindered in its reception by the popularity of the novel. It is impossible to recreate the magic Morrison packs into those pages. But the film is powerful in its own right, and the challenge should not deter further adaptations.

The reckoning in the entertainment industry that followed the death of George Floyd, leading to a greater attempt at promoting diversity in genres like film and theater, may have encountered an expiration date with the election of a new regime a year ago in America. The administration’s war on “DEI” hiring is rumored already to have led to layoffs in the entertainment industry of Black and minority employees. Multiple publications, including the New York Post and Afrotech.net, picked up reports from producers that people of color had been disproportionately affected by layoffs at Paramount last month, perhaps on the logic that the persons of color had been hired more recently. The rumors are sketchily documented, but if this is true it presents the prospect that the same employees who had been positioned to be champions of Morrison’s work might not be around to complete the projects. Time will only tell what that will mean for the adaptations of Sula and Song of Solomon.