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Jindabyne Directed by Ray Lawrence (Australia)
In the 1960s the town of Jindabyne was intentionally flooded by the damming of a river and left at the bottom of a newly-created lake in the middle of southeastern Australia's Snowy Mountains. Present-day Jindabyne, a skiing and fly-fishing resort, is the setting of Ray Lawrence's somber new film, in which the old settlement, now underwater, is occasionally mentioned. When it is, the implication of submerged life becomes a haunting, obvious metaphor, since "Jindabyne" concerns itself with emotions that lie under the surface of daily life, and with a mysterious past murkily visible through the membrane of the present.

Claire (Laura Linney) is a transplanted American who lives in Jindabyne with her husband, Stewart (Gabriel Byrne), a former racecar driver, and their young son, Dean. The marriage is shadowed by an earlier episode of trouble - Claire had some kind of breakdown and deserted the household shortly after Dean's birth. What brings their latent bad feelings out into the open, along with a good deal of fresh grief, is a gruesome discovery that Stewart makes while fishing in the mountains with some friends. He finds the body of a murdered young woman - she's a member of an Aboriginal community that lives nearby - and though he is horrified, he and the other men keep on fishing, allowing a day and a night to pass before they alert the police.

This incident and its aftermath - Stewart's unthinking insensitivity, Claire's horrified reaction to it and the local scandal that follows - are borrowed from a Raymond Carver story called "So Much Water So Close to Home." A great deal has been added, by Lawrence and Beatrix Christian, the screenwriter: a half-dozen or so secondary characters, each one carrying a carefully measured share of personal unhappiness. But "Jindabyne" at the same time tries to remain faithful to the ethical and dramatic crux of Carver's brief, unadorned vignette, which is related in Claire's rueful, matter-of-fact first-person narration. "She was dead. But don't you see? She needed your help," Claire says to her husband, raising an unusual and difficult moral problem: what are the obligations of the living toward the dead?

"So Much Water So Close to Home" suggests that men and women approach this question differently, and that the chill that falls over Claire and Stewart's relationship is partly an expression of the gender division embedded in every marriage. To this basic schism, "Jindabyne" adds more, including cultural and racial elements that are no less interesting for being altogether remote from Carver's concerns. In the film, Claire seems almost stereotypically American in the way she insists on working through the trauma of the dead girl's discovery, pushing toward the therapeutic goals of healing and closure while her white Australian friends urge her to move on and let go of her fury and shame. Their own unsentimental, shrugging ideas about death are at odds with the Aboriginal customs as well, and the mutual suspicion and incomprehension between the two populations, as well as the clumsy efforts toward tolerance and respect, are addressed with sensitivity.

That description could cover the acting as well. There are few actors who convey the wounded intelligence of an ordinary person in distress as well as Linney. Here, Claire's evident sanity and kindness draw the viewer to her side, and we are a bit startled to discover that she, like everybody else, has weak points and blind spots.

Everybody else includes not only the glowering, ferocious Byrne, but also a handful of accomplished Australian actors, notably Deborra-Lee Furness and John Howard as Jude and Carl, friends of Stewart and Claire, who care for their orphaned granddaughter and manage a motel and campground. The sense of place - of community as well as landscape - gives "Jindabyne" texture and detail, but the movie also has a heavy, overburdened feel.

Too many of the incidents, conversations and subplots seem to have been stuffed into the delicate vessel of Carver's story, rather than allowed to grow organically out of it. We know from the opening scenes that a hermit-like local electrician killed the young woman, and his inexplicable evil overshadows the human frailty that is the film's more cogent subject.

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Film review: In 'Jindabyne,' searching for clarity amid the mess of everyday life

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Jindabyne Directed by Ray Lawrence (Australia) In the 1960s the town of Jindabyne was intentionally flooded by the damming of a river and left at the bottom of a newly-created lake in the middle of southeastern Australia's Snowy Mountains.

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SO MUCH WATER SO CLOSE TO HOME V.S JINDABYNE (CHARACTERISATION &...

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SO MUCH WATER SO CLOSE TO HOME V.S JINDABYNE (CHARACTERISATION &...: SO MUCH WATER SO CLOSE TO HOME V.S JINDABYNE

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Curator's notes Jindabyne (2006) on ASO - Australia's audio and visual heritage online

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A Case Study for Cinematic Adaptation Jindabyne

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So Much Water So Close to Home in Jindabyne

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So Much Water So Close to Home in Jindabyne

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Locations and Relocations

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Jindabyne - Movie - Review - New York Times

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The best features of "Jindabyne" - the aching clarity of its central performances - threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification.

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These production elements, when combined with Lawrence's determination to keep things "real" (he insisted on minimal make-up, natural lighting and often only "one take") strip away any artifice that more conventional films embrace. As a result we are confronted with the "truth".

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An entire website dedicated to Gabriel Byrne!

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An entire website dedicated to Gabriel Byrne!

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Return to Mega Movie Pages Plus
role

Stewart Kane

production

Directed by Ray Lawrence
Screenplay by Beatrix Christian, based on the short story "So Much Water So Close to Home," by Raymond Carver

April Films, 2006

Filmed on location at Jindabyne, New South Wales, Australia

Received a 65% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 65 (generally favorable reviews) at MetaCritic

tagline

Under the surface of every life lies a mystery

In Australia, the town of Jindabyne is about to face a moment of truth

synopsis

On an annual fishing trip, in isolated high country, Stewart, Carl, Rocco and Billy ('the Kid') find a girl's body in the river. It's too late in the day for them to hike back to the road and report their tragic find. The next morning, instead of making the long trek back, they spend the day fishing. Their decision to stay on at the river is a little mysterious-almost as if the place itself is exerting some kind of magic over them. When the men finally return home to Jindabyne, and report finding the body, all hell breaks loose. Their wives can't understand how they could have gone fishing with the dead girl right there in the water-she needed their help. The men are confused-the girl was already dead, there was nothing they could do for her.

Stewart's wife Claire is the last to know. As details filter out, and Stewart resists talking about what has happened, she is unnerved. There is a callousness about all of this which disturbs her deeply. Stewart is not convinced that he has done anything wrong. Claire's faith in her relationship with her husband is shaken to the core.

The fishermen, their wives and their children are suddenly haunted by their own bad spirits. As public opinion builds against the actions of the men, their certainty about themselves and the decision they made at the river is challenged. They cannot undo what they have done.

Only Claire understands that some-thing fundamental is not being addressed. She wants to understand and tries to make things right. In her determination Claire sets herself not only against her own family and friends but also those of the dead girl. Her marriage is taken to the brink and her peaceful life with Stewart and their young son hangs in the balance.-from the official website

trailer in HD

video interview with Gabriel Byrne

promotional images

More promotional stills are in the Gallery.

quotes

[Father and son are fishing in Jindabyne Lake when Tom catches a clock]
Stewart: Wow, that's a funny looking fish.
Tom: It's a piece of junk.
Stewart: It's a clock fish.

Stewarts' mother (upon seeing his newly darkened hair): That hair makes you look like the kind of man who visits prostitutes.

-

[At the dinner on the eve of the fishing trip]
Stewart: (raising his glass to all): In a hidden valley-
Everyone (laughing): Here we go, here we go!
Stewart: Lies a hidden river-
Carl: Full of blarney (laughter).
Stewart: There dwells a fish, wild and cunning. A mysterious, wild... (pauses)
Claire: Stay with it! (much laughter). Baby, stay with it!
Stewart: Mysterious, wild fish, ancient, immemorial as time, lies waiting-
Carl: As we are all doing (laughter).
Stewart: Waiting for us. I knew this piece last year. Anyway, to the wild one!

Rocco: You're out of condition, old man.
Stewart: No, I'm not. Someone just moved the river, that's all.

-

Stewart: You think we did the wrong thing by that girl?
Carl: She didn't care what we did. She's got no opinion, no feelings one way or the other. She's dead.

[Stewart and Claire are talking to Tom before he goes to sleep]
Tom: Was it scary?
Stewart: No. Sad.
Tom: What did the dead lady look like?
Stewart: She looked like she was...she was asleep.
Tom: Caylin-Calandria says she has no clothes on.
Stewart: Caylin-Calandria doesn't know as much as she thinks she knows.
Tom: Was the dead lady under the water where it's deep?
Claire: Your dad took her out of the water and he wrapped her up in a sleeping bag and he made her all nice and warm and cozy.
Tom: (to his father): Caylin-Calandria says there's a serial killer. She says he's coming after you.
Stewart: Now listen. You don't pay any attention to what anyone says, no matter what they say. The river is a long, long way away and there are no bad men here, okay? Now go to sleep.

-

Stewart: I didn't want to upset you. I thought it could wait 'til morning.
Claire: What really happened out there?
Stewart: I told you. Nothing happened. We just got stuck, that's all. Jeez, I don't know what all the fuss is about, I really don't.
Claire: What if it had been Tom in the water?
Stewart: But it wasn't Tom. It was a stranger.

Stewart: I just want you to be okay. That's all. Jesus, I'm sorry I mentioned it.
Claire (whispering): Last night. How could you have touched me like that. After finding her?
Stewart: Claire, I am so exhausted.
Claire: She needed your help.
Stewart: She didn't need my help. She was beyond help. There was nothing anybody could do for her.
[Claire leaves the room]

-

Claire: What if you'd found a boy in the river? Wouldn't you have taken him out and covered him up?
Stewart: What? What are you talking about?
Claire: You don't know?
Stewart: No, no, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know where you're going with this. You're not making any sense.
Claire: Course not. That's because I'm the unstable one.
Stewart: Well, let's face it, you're not exactly behaving rationally.
(Claire throws her coffee in his face)
Claire: Aren't I!?

Stewart (after setting his own broken nose straight again): See? You do it while the adrenaline's still pumping. That way, you don't feel a thing...

interview from official website

What is "Jindabyne" about?
The story is about four men who come upon the body of a woman in the river and, not out of any sense of badness or lack of feeling, decide to leave the body in the river and not report it to the police until they get back from their fishing trip. Like many situations that we find ourselves in, in life, we're unaware of the consequences of our actions until those consequences come home to visit us in all kinds of unexpected ways. So the film is really about how this incident haunts these men and the lives of the people who are closest to them.
Tell us about Stewart, the character you play.
Stewart is a working-class, ordinary man who owns a garage. He used to be a rally driver and he has given up that life to become settled in this community. Not a simple man, but a man who lives a pretty simple predictable life up until this moment. As a result of this incident he's forced to examine who he really is morally, emotionally, and socially. Stewart and Claire have had their troubles like any couple in a long- term relationship. They love each other but as a result of this incident they're forced to examine not just who they are individually but who they are as a couple.
What was it that made you want to do this film?
I met Ray Lawrence in New York. When we met he talked about how he saw the film as a ghost story, the idea that this incident that's taken place haunted the lives not just of the men who it happened to, but all the people on the periphery by implication. It sounded intriguing. I'd seen "Lantana" and I knew that he would make something really interesting. This is a film that makes you think about your life. I remember Ray saying to me, 'I think you should do this film. It would be really nice if you came to Australia and did it. It would be a work experience but I think it would be an important spiritual experience for you.' That is what stuck with me. Nobody has ever said that to me before as a reason to do a film.

What has it been like working with Ray Lawrence and his one-take process?
This is the least conventional film I think I have ever done and it is letting go of all the things that you can usually rely on. The whole thing is about letting go. It's a scary sort of process for most actors. All the things that actors like to depend on, like make-up and lighting and so forth, the security and comfort of eight or ten takes, that's all gone. Every actor is different. Some actors get it on the first take, others, you know, are just warming up after take five or six or ten maybe, but you don't have that security. It allows you an incredible freedom and, ultimately, it's your responsibility. You can always ask for another take. Ray doesn't give much direction. He doesn't even say action. I've never worked with a director who never said action before, and he usually talks about the scene after it's over. So, yes, it's scary. Ray will say he's not directing the film, that he's trying to contain what's happened, but I think that everything, everything, in a way, comes from his vision. Ray thinks unlike any other director I've ever worked with, he shoots like no director I've ever worked with and his vision is unique to him.
Does this affect the way you approach your character?
In a more conventional approach to making a film, it is like climbing a rock, you have more places to grab hold of. Here you don't seem to have any places to grab hold of. I think that the closer I moved to thinking about the character as myself, the more sure the journey felt. When Stewart and his friends commit this transgression they don't even know they are doing it. They do this thing, they actually think they are doing something right, by tying up the body and leaving it in the water, but it is after they get back they realise what they have done. That has happened to me in my life. I have done something and didn't think about the consequences of it and sometime later I realise, how could I have done that? What did I do? It is something you never forget.
What do you think people will take from this story?
Everybody, I think, comes to a different conclusion. It brings up all kinds of questions about morality and, in Stewart's case, his marriage, and what is responsible behaviour. Guilt, regret, community, ritual, marriage, sex, love, friendship between men, friendship between women, all those issues to a greater or lesser extent are raised. The audience's reaction to it will be complex. On the one hand you have people who will disagree with the actions of the men. On the other, people will understand it. Hopefully people will identify with the reality of the dilemma that these people are forced to confront.

screencaps
Interview with Gabriel Byrne
A set of lovely screencaps provided by Lozzie is in the Gallery.

reviews

Claire is the one who understands that various rituals and forms of identification and self-understanding must be gone through to achieve reconciliation with the family. And equally that these involve a change in the relationship between men and women and a reassessment of what it means to be Australian. This handsome movie is a trifle overlong and its end, though moving, slightly glib. It is, however, a work of ambition and depth. Like Lantana, it is immaculately acted and Linney and Byrne are at their considerable best.

Gabriel Byrne deserves some serious silverware for his performance in this outstanding Australian film from director Ray Lawrence (who made Lantana) and screenwriter Beatrix Christian. The movie is beautifully shot, and succeeds in being deeply disturbing and mysterious, with richly achieved nuances of characterisation. I have seen it two or three times now, and each time it gets better...

Jindabyne addresses a gulf between articulate women and moody silent males, between the whites and the patronised Aborigines, and between scared humanity and the vast and frightening landscape of Australia itself, a landcape in which one may so easily lose one's bearings of Anglo-Saxon normality, and in which violence or loss are so terrifyingly possible. Jindabyne has the disquieting quality of Picnic At Hanging Rock and indeed the horror film Wolf Creek - which, like this film, transforms the real-life Falconio murder case. But Lawrence makes of his story something quite different: more serious, more complex, with moral shades of grey. In his boldly idealistic final scene, moreover, Lawrence ends the film on a note not of irony or despair or alienation, but forgiveness and hope. This is the kind of film to see and then talk about endlessly over dinner afterwards. It's real cinematic nourishment.

The Observer/Philip French

Lawrence, whose previous films include Bliss and Lantana, works in a very specific and unusually effective way. He shoots in natural light at almost all times, and he invariably goes with only one take. "I want the words to sound like they've just fallen out of their mouths," is the director's explanation. As a result, dialogue and situations have an urgency and emotional reality that can be lacking in more conventional films.

Not all actors are comfortable with this system - but Byrne, who plays an Irish-born mechanic, and Linney, as his American wife, have made it their own. They give deeply felt, sometimes lacerating performances as one of several couples whose lives of quiet desperation are about to get a whole lot louder.

poster
The Guardian/Peter Bradshaw
More posters are in the Gallery.
Kenneth Turan/NPR
listen to Kenneth Turan's review

premiere at Toronto International Film Festival

More pictures from the premiere are in the Gallery.

interview with Gabriel Byrne

From the Jindabyne interview at CinemaSource:

...Byrne goes on to tell a story about how his life was changed by the experience of working on Jindabyne. "I tell the story simply because it is true," he prefaces. "I'd never seen a dead body before. When my Mother died, my Father died, my Sister died and friends of mine had died I went to the mortuary and I looked at the floor, I looked at the ceiling, I looked around, I looked at everything, I looked at the chamber sheet in front of me but I did not look at the body. Part of me was kind of ashamed of that because people are told 'you have to look at the body. You can't be going into a Church and not looking at the body.' I wanted to remember those people that I had been close to as I remembered them in life. I didn't want to go to bed every night as an adult man thinking of a face done up by an embalmer to look like something that was going to haunt me. I felt that I would be haunted if I looked at that," stressing the word haunted with conviction.

"Three months after I came back from Australia having done this scene with this body that they'd spent four and a half months researching, photographing; and those guys came up with this prosthetic body that when you touched it weighed exactly and felt exactly as a real body because they had gotten it down that kind of detail. Three months after I came back from doing the film, a friend of mine, not a really close friend but someone I had worked with, died. The husband called me up and he said 'Listen, it would mean so much to the family if you came over to the mortuary house in Queens where the body is laid out."

Despite initial pangs of dread, Byrne mustered up the courage to go to the mortuary and face his fears once and for all. "I said to myself, "I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna look at her face and see what it is, why it's important to look at the face.' So I crossed the room, I didn't allow that moment of logic and practicality and consequence to get in the way, I just said I'm gonna do it. I walked over and looked into the coffin and I looked at her face," he pauses with reflection. "I mean just stared at it. I came back down in my pew and I started to cry. Really cry. The husband came over and put his arm around me and said you know 'she really liked you and was really fond of you.'"

"I walked out the door and got in the cab and I said to myself, 'What was all that about? What was that about?' And then I realized it taught me one of the most profound lessons of my life: that what death is, trite and all as it may sound, is the stunning absence of life."

"And that's what death is," he repeats quietly to himself. "Suddenly life started to make sense to me. In eastern religions they have this thing where you cannot truly live your life unless you truly embrace death and that is the truth."

In this world of $20 million-plus paychecks and endless commercial tie-ins, it's becoming rarer and rarer to find actors who truly and genuinely commit to their craft. If there is one thing that is evident from hearing Gabriel Byrne talk, it's that he truly respects his profession.

He recalls telephoning the director and professing his new-found outlook on life. "I called Ray and said 'I've gone through a lot working on this film, and maybe ten people will see it,'" he adds wryly, "'but it has made such a profound difference on my life that I can't ever thank you enough for giving me the opportunity to do the film. Now, the way I look at it is that every kind of film I do, I say 'I'm gonna learn something from this.' [I'll] work on something that will make me look at my life and figure out who I am. That's when I realized, maybe that's what it's all about."

deleted scenes

the making of Jindabyne

part two

fan reviews

from the reviews on the IMDB page for the film:

A sublime film
24 July 2006 | by Eric Rose (Sydney, Australia)
part one

Ray Lawrence has done it again. This film has made me see the Australian landscape in a way that I haven't really since seeing Picnic at Hanging Rock. The feeling as the lads start on the fishing trip is somewhat Hitchcockian, since we know that we're going to see the body sometime soon - we just don't know when. There's a sense of oppression and expectation overlaid on the natural beauty, that holds you transfixed.

The film may be criticised since it doesn't try and resolve anything on a a material level. However, Lawrence is more interested in the internal lives of his characters - all of them. He also doesn't want to hand us the exposition on a platter. There's back-stories that are unfolded gradually, making us think about the characters as we are pointed to knowledge of what lead them to their current lives. I'm glad to see a film made for people to think about, rather than spoon-feeding us some clichés about how hard life can be for the protagonists.

Water plays a significant role throughout the movie, from the river where the fishermen find the body, to Lake Jindabyne, and the ghost stories about the drowned town. We're made to dive into the lives of the characters, finding deeper and deeper layers of motivation as we move from the warm surface of their lives to the colder and more fragile hidden depths. We see that the body in the river acts as a sort of stand-in for each character's transformation in a death and rebirth of the spirit.

This is another masterpiece work from a master film maker.

fan art

blog postings

The film paints with fine brush strokes human behaviour in times of conflict and all involved in portraying this do it impeccably. Byrne and Linney are magnificent as the complex and slightly broken Kanes. As with the Carver story, Jindabyne shows no clear demarcation between right and wrong. That was one of the brilliant things Carver could do; take an everyday situation (or in this case a tragedy) and bring it to life without casting any judgements himself.

Gabriel Byrne Picspam: Jindabyne by Bowie28

Awakening an acute consciousness of the physical environment, Lawrence imparts an impressive recognition of the pull the natural world exerts on individuals in a country defined by so much space. In doing so, he extends sympathetic understanding to the circle of men at the pivotal juncture-when they decide not to immediately hike back to report the body, but continue with their fishing plans for the next day. As the camera caresses water rushing over rocks and leaves rustling in the wind, every shot accompanied by an amplified sound mix including the buzz of bees and birdsong, the foursome-unthinkable as it may seem with a body nearby, tethered to a tree to keep her from drifting downstream-cast their lines. But, swathed in the idyllic morning light, this surrender to their surroundings seems almost acceptable; we, like them, feel transported, and are able to grasp their rationalizations: She's beyond help; why not stay? We've been looking forward to this trip for weeks.

My Point Being: What's that underneath the water?
trivia

The screenplay is based on the short story "So much water so close to home" by American writer Raymond Carver. The song "Everything's Turning to White," by Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, was also inspired by Carver's story.
Reverse Shot: So Close To Home
Gabriel Byrne accidentally stepped on a Brown Snake, one of the world's deadliest, while walking through the bush one day on the set. If he'd stepped on the other end he'd have been bitten. Gabriel Byrne told the director Ray Lawrence that he was almost killed, to which Lawrence replied: "No worries mate. You would have had 24 hours..."

additional resources
Official website for the film
Many thanks to Hugo Bruckton for the great deleted scenes and "making of" videos!
IMDB page for Jindabyne Wikipedia page for Jindabyne Wallpaper by Stella Return to Mega Movie Pages Plus

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Return to Mega Movie Pages Plus Stewart Kane Directed by Ray Lawrence Screenplay by Beatrix Christian, based on the short story "So Much Water So Close to Home," by Raymond Carver April Films, 2006 Filmed on location at Jindabyne, New South Wales, Australia Received a 65% fresh rating at Rotten

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Short Stories The Elements of Short Stories Theme Central idea or meaning - the core message It is the author's point of view Best short stories have something to teach us about ourselves, our relationships, and our world. Common themes in short stories: Conflict between a person

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b Y 'So Much Water So Close to Home' Elements of the Short Story 2 X g m 1 p F Let's consider the important elements of short stories E Narrative - Plot - the sequence of events in the narrative, arranged so that they: generate interest, suspense and surprise Structure - the D C B

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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We will look at this together as a class.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Slides 1 - 15 from the super teacher Bronwyn Moran (GYC)

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Adaptation takes on many forms: re-telling (often from print to film) re-contextualising (older text to modern context) Adaptation to new genre (tragedy to comedy) Diplomatic negotiation were unsuccessful, and the inability to find a solution was a major political problem for

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·
Updated on Apr 27, 2019. Posted on Feb 24, 2018

"I could write a book about what a horrible job they did with this movie but I'm afraid they would try to turn that book into a movie and butcher it too."

🚨 Lots of spoilers ahead! 🚨

20th Century Fox

"A goddamn travesty, especially compared to the source material. They changed so much, including the characters' ages and the fact that the gods couldn't talk to their demigod children for...reasons? So much dumb shit happened, especially at the end, that my brain just kind of shut down to protect itself from the stupidity." -Aniela Krajewska, Facebook

2. The Dark Tower (2017)

Grant, Columbia Pictures

"The book series is my favorite and it's like the filmmakers took a few pieces, added in some Stephen King Easter eggs and didn't actually read the books." - melissac53

6. The Giver (2014)

Houghton Mifflin, The Weinstein Company

"The movie just seems like they were pandering to the Divergent and Hunger Games audiences by adding so many unnecessary things - like that stupid love story, and the dramatic action scenes. That book is so perfect and that movie was extremely disappointing." - marikoangel

19. The Golden Compass (2007)

Penguin Random House, Warner Bros.

"The His Dark Materials trilogy are hands down my favorite books. They are a complex and beautiful story about religion, love, philosophy, physics, and multiple dimensions. They're incredibly sophisticated and beautifully written. The movie is a generic, flat, children's movie with talking animals. It's terrible." - sharonmc28

Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.

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23 Book-To-Movie Adaptations That Were So Bad They Inspired Rage

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· Updated on Apr 27, 2019. Posted on Feb 24, 2018 "I could write a book about what a horrible job they did with this movie but I'm afraid they would try to turn that book into a movie and butcher it too." 🚨 Lots of spoilers ahead! 🚨 2.

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has wrapped up its 50 Shades trilogy with an absolute belter at the box office this weekend . An increase in ticket revenue propelled the female-fueled franchise past the $1 billion mark. In real terms, that means it is one of the studio's most profitable franchises of all time.

However, while the movie series might have momentarily spiced up the sex lives of sheltered housewives everywhere, the only thing shocking and scandalous about the franchise is that people continue to watch it. In the case of Anastasia and Mr. Grey, BDSM seems to stand for boredom, depression, sorrow, and (now) marriage.

Still, the films didn't stand a chance when originating from 's ongoing crimes against the written word. "Desire explodes like the Fourth of July throughout my body". . . groan.

In celebration of the trilogy hanging up its paddle and riding off into the sunset on its vibrating pommel horse, we thought we'd pluck out our list of the most atrocious book-to-screen adaptations in cinematic history - proving that some stories are better left to the imagination.

Owen Harris 's take on 's cut-throat novel was so rubbish that it made me want to kill my friends, random members of the general public, and whoever was involved in the production of this atrocity. The book was a wickedly gruesome satire on the music industry, while the film was tiresome and lacking in style, trying too hard to shock - something our protagonist Steven Stelfox would do.

This hugely popular 500-page fantasy novel by Christopher Paolini was whittled down to an hour-and-a-half film, which predictably meant the omission of numerous plot points and characters. Also, when the film's standout performance is from a dragon, you know you're doing something wrong.

With an excellent score, Bill Skarsgård in the lead, and in the director's chair, this series based on Brian McGreevy's horror novel should have been a smasher. However, the only thing scary about the show is how crappy it is - a tiresome muddle of horror tropes and painfully clunky dialogue.

Compared to some of the others on the list, Tran Anh Hung 's take on Haruki Murakami 's stunning romantic novel is not all that bad. However, when pitched against the book, it's a mere faded shadow, proving that it's impossible to encapsulate the magical power of Murakami's writing on the big screen. Let's just hope they don't try and take on Kafka on the Shore next.

"The book is always better than the film" has never been more relevant than with this remake of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic. Even with impressive visuals from Baz Luhrmann and solid acting from Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan , the film somehow felt like little more than an extended music video - the not-so-great-Gatsby.

From a fad book series to a fad film franchise, the only real mystery surrounding The Da Vinci Code is why it even gained popularity in the first place. Riddle us that, .

Stephen King 's Under the Dome seemed like the perfect premise to convert into a series, telling the story of a town that's completely cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible dome. However, the adaptation fell embarrassingly short, enraging King fans so much that the world-famous author himself was forced to explain why the changes were necessary. Damage control!

We had such high hopes for this, especially following the success of The Lord of the Rings , but alas, Peter Jackson 's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien 's was not a faithful one. Ultimately, the movie series turned out long-winded and not all that much fun. Childhood = ruined.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is considered one of the greatest comedy/ books ever written, so there were bound to be high expectations for the film. Sadly, the cult movie turned into a dud, and as is the case with a lot of these flops, there was just too much content to fit into one film. Stick with the book for this one, earthlings!

I n tries to travel from Transylvania to England to spread the undead curse. This TV series, with Bram Stoker 's novel, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, sees the titular character utilize the guise of an American entrepreneur as a mask to hide his sinister motives. If we're honest, the only thing that's book-accurate in this one is that both characters are called Dracula. It's that loose of an adaptation.

As with Norwegian Wood , David Lynch 's is not so bad - but when compared with the book, it's an absolute husk. There's just too much going on in Frank Herbert 's 1965 sci-novel to transport onto the big screen, and with the film trying to condense all of the essential plot points into one feature, Dune ended up a muddled mess.

This adaptation of the novel from Bret Easton Ellis is all the more upsetting when compared with American Psycho and Rules of Attraction , both of which hit the mark with stunning success. Less Than Zero , on the other hand, couldn't even see the mark, and the film was instead used to promote Nancy Regan 's 'Just Say No' anti-drug campaign. However, the saying seems more apt in the case of Marek Kanievska 's remake. When it comes to the film version of Less Than Zero , just say no!

The Vampire Diaries might have been a technical success, having finished up its run with eight seasons, it's a blood-sucking monstrosity compared with the book saga that inspired it. We had a lot of hope for this one, and there was plenty of time for improvement while it was on the airwaves, but choosing to ignore 's mythology in favor of turning the story into a teeny-bopper suck-fest was a bad call.

Rather than go through everything that's wrong with this franchise, we're instead going to sum it up in the name of a film-themed joke.

If you don't get the joke, we can't help you.

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The worst book-to-screen adaptations ever - Film Daily

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has wrapped up its 50 Shades trilogy with an absolute belter at the box office this weekend . An increase in ticket revenue propelled the female-fueled franchise past the $1 billion mark. In real terms, that means it is one of the studio's most profitable franchises of all time.

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Never let it be said that the people in the film industry aren't a rum bunch: rather than think of their own films to bring to the silver screen (does anybody still call it that?), they just let authors pen their finely crafted words and stories and then turn those into motion pictures (does anybody still call it that?). Like we said, a rum bunch.

Thankfully, not every book they adapt is Bridget Jones's Diary, as this list of 45 of the best film adaptations demonstrates.

Some remain faithful to the writer's original book; some take the source material into previously unimagined areas. All, however, are utterly brilliant.

Which are your favourites? Upvote them, and send others down the rankings with a downvote.

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The 45 best book-to-film adaptations ever

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Never let it be said that the people in the film industry aren't a rum bunch: rather than think of their own films to bring to the silver screen (does anybody still call it that?), they just let authors pen their finely crafted words and stories and then turn those into motion pictures (does anybody still call it that?).

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Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka's exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. "Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash," his mother, Ella Carver, said much later - and seemingly without irony.

Mrs. Carver might have had the right idea. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub's "Ghost Story": "The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America's bottom dogs."

Born in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, Wash. In 1956, the Carvers relocated to Chester, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. After that the moves accelerated: Paradise, Calif.; Chico, Calif.; Iowa City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Humboldt County . . . and that takes us up only to 1977, the year Carver took his last drink.

Through most of those early years of restless travel, he dragged his two children and his long-suffering wife, Maryann, the mostly unsung heroine of Sklenicka's tale, behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper of a jalopy that no car dealer in his right mind would take in trade. It's no wonder that his friends nicknamed him Running Dog. Or that when his mother took him into downtown Yakima, she kept him on a leash.

As brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Longtime A.A.'s know that drunks like Carver are master practitioners of the geographical cure, refusing to recognize that if you put an out-of-control boozer on a plane in California, an out-of-control boozer is going to get off in Chicago. Or Iowa. Or Mexico.

And until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. "He and I did nothing but drink," Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. "I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters." Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was "a very kind man." He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.

It was Maryann Burk Carver who won the bread in those early years while Ray drank, fished, went to school and began writing the stories that a generation of critics and teachers would miscategorize as "minimalism" or "dirty realism." Writing talent often runs on its own clean circuit (as the Library of America's "Raymond Carver: Collected Stories" attests), but writers whose works shine with insight and mystery are often prosaic monsters at home.

Maryann Burk met the love of her life - or her nemesis; Carver appears to have been both - in 1955, while working the counter of a Spudnut Shop in Union Gap, Wash. She was 14. When she and Carver married in 1957, she was two months shy of her 17th birthday and pregnant. Before turning 18, she discovered she was pregnant again. For the next quarter-century she supported Ray as a cocktail waitress, a restaurant hostess, an encyclopedia saleswoman and a teacher. Early in the marriage she packed fruit for two weeks in order to buy him his first typewriter.

She was beautiful; he was hulking, possessive and sometimes violent. In Carver's view, his own infidelities did not excuse hers. After Maryann indulged in "a tipsy flirtation" at a dinner party in 1975 - by which time Carver's alcoholism had reached the full-blown stage - he hit her upside the head with a wine bottle, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her. "He needed 'an illusion of freedom,' " Sklenicka writes, "but could not bear the thought of her with another man." It is one of the few points in her admirable biography where Sklenicka shows real sympathy for the woman who supported Carver and seems to have never stopped loving him.

Although Sklenicka exhibits something like awe for Carver the writer, and clearly understands the warping influence alcohol had on his life, she is almost nonjudgmental when it comes to Carver the nasty drunk and ungrateful (not to mention sometimes dangerous) husband. She quotes the novelist Diane Smith ("Letters From Yellowstone") as saying, "That was a bad generation of men," and pretty much leaves it at that. When she quotes Maryann calling herself a "literary Cinderella, living in exile for the good of Carver's career," the first Mrs. Carver comes across as just another whining ex-wife rather than as the stalwart she undoubtedly was. Ray and Maryann were married for 25 years, and it was during those years that Carver wrote the bulk of his work. His time with the poet Tess Gallagher, the only other significant woman in his life, was less than half that.

Nevertheless, it was Gallagher who reaped the personal benefits of Carver's sobriety (he took his last drink a year before they fell in love) and the financial ones as well. During the divorce proceedings, Maryann's lawyer said - this both haunts me and to some degree taints my enjoyment of Carver's stories - that without a decent court settlement, Maryann Burk Carver's post-divorce life would be "like a bag of doorknobs that wouldn't open any doors."

Maryann's response was, "Ray says he'll send money every month, and I believe him." Carver carried through on that promise, although not without a good deal of grousing. But when he died in 1988, the woman who had provided his financial foundation discovered that she had been cut out of sharing the continuing financial rewards of Carver's popular short-story collections. Carver's savings alone totaled almost $215,000 at the time of his death; Maryann got about $10,000. Carver's mother got even less: at age 78, she was living in public housing in Sacramento and eking out a living as a "grandmother aide" in an elementary school. Sklenicka doesn't call this shabby treatment, but I am happy to do it for her.

It's as a chronicle of Carver's growth as a writer that Sklenicka's book is invaluable, particularly after his career path crossed that of the editor Gordon Lish, the self-styled "Captain Fiction." Any readers who doubt Lish's baleful influence on the stories in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" are apt to think differently after reading Sklenicka's eye-opening account of this difficult and ultimately poisonous relationship. Those still not convinced can read the corresponding stories in "Beginners," now available in the sublimely portable and long-overdue "Raymond Carver: Collected Stories."

In 1972, Lish changed the title of Carver's second Esquire story - which he edited heavily - from "Are These Actual Miles?" (interesting and mysterious) to "What Is It?" (boring). When Carver, wild to be published in a major slick, decided to accept the changes, Maryann accused him "of being a whore, of selling out to the establishment." John Gardner had once told Carver that line-editing was not negotiable. Carver may have accepted that - most writers willing to submit to the editing process do - but Lish's changes were wide and deep. Carver argued that "a major magazine publication was worth the compromise." Lish, who tried unsuccessfully to edit Leonard Gardner (who would go on to write "Fat City") with a similarly heavy hand, got his way with Carver. It was a harbinger.

Was Gordon Lish a good editor? Undoubtedly. Curtis Johnson, a textbook editor who introduced Lish to Carver, claims that Lish had "infallible taste in fiction." But, as Maryann feared, he was - in Ray Carver's case, at least - much better at discovery than development. And with Carver, he got what he wanted. Perhaps he sensed an essential weakness at Carver's core ("people-pleasing" is what recovering alcoholics call it). Perhaps it was the strangely elitist view he seems to have held of Carver's writing, branding the characters "grossly inept" and speaking of "their blatant illiteracies, of which Carver himself was unaware." This did not stop him from taking credit for Carver's success; Lish is said to have bragged that Carver was "his creature," and what appears on the back jacket of "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"(1976), Carver's first book of stories, is not Raymond Carver's photograph but Gordon Lish's name.

Sklenicka's account of the changes in Carver's third book of stories, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (1981), is meticulous and heartbreaking. There were, she says, three versions: A, B and C. Version A was the manuscript Carver submitted. It was titled "So Much Water So Close to Home." B was the manuscript Lish initially sent back. He changed the name of the story "Beginners" to "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," and that became the new title of the book. Although Carver was disturbed by this, he nonetheless signed a binding (and unagented) contract in 1980. Soon after, Version C - the version most readers know - arrived on Carver's desk. The differences between B and C "astounded" him. "He had urged Lish to take a pencil to the stories," Sklenicka writes. "He had not expected . . . a meat cleaver." Unsure of himself, Carver was only three years into sobriety after two decades of heavy drinking; his correspondence with Lish over the wholesale changes to his work alternated between groveling ("you are a wonder, a genius") and outright begging for a return to Version B. It did no good. According to Tess Gallagher, Lish refused by telephone to restore the earlier version, and if Carver understood nothing else, he understood that Lish held the "power of publication access."

This Hobson's choice is the beating heart of "Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life." Any writer might wonder what he'd do in such a case. Certainly I did; in 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading Sklenicka's book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance Doubleday paid for "Carrie." Now I realize it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.

One needs only to scan the stories in "Beginners" and the ones in "What We Talk About" to see the most obvious change: the prose in "Beginners" consists of dense blocks of narration broken up by bursts of dialogue; in "What We Talk About," there is so much white space that some of the stories ("After the Denim," for instance) look almost like chapters in a James Patterson novel. In many cases, the man who didn't allow editors to change his own work gutted Carver's, and on this subject Sklenicka voices an indignation she is either unwilling or unable to muster on Maryann's behalf, calling Lish's editing of Carver "a usurpation." He imposed his own style on Carver's stories, and the so-called minimalism with which Carver is credited was actually Lish's deal. "Gordon . . . came to think that he knew everything," Curtis Johnson says. "It became pernicious."

Sklenicka analyzes many of the changes, but the wise reader will turn to the "Collected Stories" and see them for him- or herself. Two of the most dismaying examples are "If It Please You" ("After the Denim" in "What We Talk About") and "A Small, Good Thing" ("The Bath" in "What We Talk About").

In "If It Please You," James and Edith Packer, a getting-on-in-years couple, arrive at the local bingo hall to discover their regular places have been taken by a young hippie couple. Worse, James observes the young man cheating (although he doesn't win; his girlfriend does). During the course of the evening, Edith whispers to her husband that she's "spotting." Later, back at home, she tells him the bleeding is serious, and she'll have to go to the doctor the following day. In bed, James struggles to pray (a survival skill both James and his creator acquired in daily A.A. meetings), first hesitantly, then "beginning to mutter words aloud and to pray in earnest. . . . He prayed for Edith, that she would be all right." The prayers don't bring relief until he adds the hippie couple to his meditations, casting aside his former bitter feelings. The story ends on a note of hard-won hope: " 'If it please you,' he said in the new prayers for all of them, the living and the dead." In the Lish-edited version, there are no prayers and hence no epiphany - only a worried and resentful husband who wants to tell the irritating hippies what happens "after the denim," after the games. It's a total rewrite, and it's a cheat.

The contrast between "The Bath" (Lish-edited) and "A Small, Good Thing" (Ray Carver unplugged) is even less palatable. On her son's birthday, Scotty's mother orders a birthday cake that will never be eaten. The boy is struck by a car on his way home from school and winds up in a coma. In both stories, the baker makes dunning calls to the mother and her husband while their son lies near death in the hospital. Lish's baker is a sinister figure, symbolic of death's inevitability. We last hear from him on the phone, still wanting to be paid. In Carver's version, the couple - who are actually characters instead of shadows - go to see the baker, who apologizes for his unintended cruelty when he understands the situation. He gives the bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. The three of them take this communion together and talk until morning. "Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," the baker says. This version has a satisfying symmetry that the stripped-down Lish version lacks, but it has something more important: it has heart.

"Lish was able . . . to make a snowman out of a snowdrift" is what Sklenicka says about his version of Carver's stories, but that's not much of a metaphor. She does better when talking about Lish's changes to a passage in "They're Not Your Husband" (in "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"), pointing out that the Lish version is "meaner, coarser and somewhat diminishing to both characters." Carver himself says it best. When the narrator of "The Fling" finally faces up to the fact that he has no love or comfort to give his father, he says of himself, "I was all smooth surface with nothing inside except emptiness." Ultimately, that's what is wrong with the Ray Carver stories as Lish presented them to the world, and what makes both the Sklenicka biography and the "Collected Stories" such a welcome and necessary corrective.

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Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka's exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash.

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'The American Chekhov' ... Raymond Carver. Photograph:

Earlier this month marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Raymond Carver. Why this is more important than his being dead for 19 I don't know, but somehow it felt that way. So on a hot night with a few beers, I settled in to re-read some of his stories, the greatest hits of Carver, if you will.

Are these actual miles?, Cathedral, What's in Alaska, and especially Why don't you dance? did not disappoint. Each one was as soulful, deft and affecting as it was the first time I read them. These are my some of my favourite stories; pared-down tales of urban dismay, of losers and liars, of drunks who never know when to stop. But reading some of his other work - Feathers, for example - I was surprised to find myself rather unimpressed. Ten years ago, I'd have defended every adjective-less noun, but now I wasn't so sure.

As venerated as Carver has become - his status as "the American Chekhov" (as Peter Kemp in The Times described him) is surely preserved - I began to wonder if I was guilty of reading his stories through the prism of his untimely death. Was I seeing a different story because I knew about his struggles with alcohol, his recovery, his failed marriage and the one that saved him? Briefly I considered whether I was reading each story as though it was part of a greater framework - Carver's actual life. I wasn't comfortable with this thought, or my next: without this tragedy, would Carver be considered the undisputed king of what came to be known as " dirty realism"?

In a wholly unscientific way to prove the point, I went back to my bookshelves to look for other examples of dirty realism (probably the best name for a literary movement in history). The dirty realists, a bunch of writers that burgeoned in the 70s and 80s, were concerned with the dispossessed, the other America, the people at the margins and the trailer parks. In the main, the tone was minimal; spare to the point of the inarticulate. While grouping writers is usually a futile and ultimately hollow gesture, there did seem to be a kind of camaraderie between these authors.

Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Richard Bausch were all friends with Carver, and the similarities come from a shared sensibility and a shared sense of what stories should convey. At the time, I suspect, it was wildly refreshing - a Schlitz-flavoured antidote to the bloated, picaresque novels of Thomas Pynchon and his ilk. But viewed now from a distance of over a quarter of a century, sometimes it's hard to tell which one of Carver, Ford, Wolff or Bausch wrote which story.

Take this sentence for example: "Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St Pete where I still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn't turn me in to the police."

Initially, lines such as this are great to read, but after a few stories you're checking the index to see who was responsible. In their manly, capable, Hemingway and Yates-inspired hands, dirty realism could often feel like a collection of boxes ticked and adjectives deleted. That Richard Ford made his name writing in a more expansive manner about Frank Bascombe's middle class life is perhaps telling. Dirty realism was just too constrictive for him to be able to continue on its lonely highways.

Leaving Ford aside, the other writers that comprise Carver's contemporaries have, like so many of their characters, not delivered on their promises. Bausch and Wolff have had the odd flash of inspiration (Wolff with his non-fiction in particular), while Joy Williams' novel The Quick and the Dead is the highpoint in a career that has never fully recovered from the critical mauling of 1978's The Changeling.

So, does this mean that from all those scribes I would still pick out Carver as the genius writer? Probably. But not without making mention of a neglected voice: Jayne Anne Phillips.

Fast Lanes, her collection from 1984, follows the same trajectory as many of the other collections of the period: downbeat, drunken, lost. But her writing - kinetic, hallucinatory in places - is quite unlike anything else I'd come across in the group. I remembered that somewhere I had a copy of Machine Dreams, and took its battered covers to bed. Considered a masterpiece on publication in 1984, it still very much reads like one 20-odd years later.

As Carver's stock rises with every anniversary, I hope his fellow dirty realists are not forgotten - especially the superlative work of Jayne Anne Phillips.
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Raymond Carver: king of the dirty realists?

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'The American Chekhov' ... Raymond Carver. Photograph: Earlier this month marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Raymond Carver. Why this is more important than his being dead for 19 I don't know, but somehow it felt that way.

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For much of the past 20 years, Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A. Knopf who is now retired, has been quietly telling friends that he played a crucial role in the creation of the early short stories of Raymond Carver. The details varied from telling to telling, but the basic idea was that he had changed some of the stories so much that they were more his than Carver's. No one quite knew what to make of his statements. Carver, who died 10 years ago this month, never responded in public to them. Basically it was Lish's word against common sense. Lish had written fiction, too: If he was such a great talent, why did so few people care about his own work? As the years passed, Lish became reluctant to discuss the subject. Maybe he was choosing silence over people's doubt. Maybe he had rethought what his contribution had been -- or simply moved on.

Seven years ago, Lish arranged for the sale of his papers to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Since then, only a few Carver scholars have examined the Lish manuscripts thoroughly. When one tried to publish his conclusions, Carver's widow and literary executor, the poet Tess Gallagher, effectively blocked him with copyright cautions and pressure. I'd heard about this scholar's work (and its failure to be published) through a friend. So I decided to visit the archive myself.

What I found there, when I began looking at the manuscripts of stories like ''Fat'' and ''Tell the Women We're Going,'' were pages full of editorial marks -- strikeouts, additions and marginal comments in Lish's sprawling handwriting. It looked as if a temperamental 7-year-old had somehow got hold of the stories. As I was reading, one of the archivists came over. I thought she was going to reprimand me for some violation of the library rules. But that wasn't why she was there. She wanted to talk about Carver. ''I started reading the folders,'' she said, ''but then I stopped when I saw what was in there.''

It's understandable that Lish's assertions have never been taken seriously. The eccentric editor is up against an American icon. When he died at age 50 from lung cancer, Carver was considered by many to be America's most important short-story writer. His stories were beautiful and moving. At a New York City memorial service, Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of The New Yorker, said succinctly, ''America has just lost the writer it could least afford to lose.'' Carver is no longer a writer of the moment, the way David Foster Wallace is today, but many of his stories -- ''Cathedral,'' ''Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?'' and ''Errand'' -- are firmly established in the literary canon. A vanguard figure in the 1980's, Carver has become establishment fiction.

That doesn't capture his claim on us, though. It goes deeper than his work. Born in the rural Northwest, Carver was the child of an alcoholic sawmill worker and a waitress. He first learned to write through a correspondence course. He lived in poverty and suffered multiple bouts of alcoholism throughout his 30's. He struggled in a difficult marriage with his high-school girlfriend, Maryann Burk. Through it all he remained a generous, determined man -- fiction's comeback kid. By 1980, he had quit drinking and moved in with Tess Gallagher, with whom he spent the rest of his life. ''I know better than anyone a fellow is never out of the woods,'' he wrote to Lish in one of dozens of letters archived at the Lilly. ''But right now it's aces, and I'm enjoying it.'' Carver's life and work inspired faith, not skepticism.

Still, a quick look through Carver's books would suggest that what Lish claims might have some merit. There is an evident gap between the early style of ''Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?'' and ''What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,'' Carver's first two major collections, and his later work in ''Cathedral'' and ''Where I'm Calling From.'' In subject matter, the stories share a great deal. They are mostly about the working poor -- unemployed salesmen, waitresses, motel managers -- in the midst of disheartening lives. But the early collections, which Lish edited, are stripped to the bone. They are minimalist in style with an almost abstract feel. They drop their characters back down where they find them, inarticulate and alone, drunk at noon. The later two collections are fuller, touched by optimism, even sentimentality.

Many critics over the years have noticed this difference and explained it in terms of biography. The Carver of the early stories, it has been said, was in despair. As he grew successful, however, the writer learned about hopefulness and love, and it soaked into his fiction. This redemptive story was burnished through countless retellings by Tess Gallagher. Most critics seemed satisfied by this literal-minded explanation: happy writers write happy stories.

Sitting under the coffered ceiling of the Lilly, I began pulling out folders from the two boxes marked ''Carver.'' Here were the stories from his first two collections as well as from ''Cathedral'' in versions from manuscript to printer's galleys. I had previously seen some manuscripts in the Carver holdings at Ohio State University, an archive to which Gallagher has said she will ultimately give the Carver papers in her possession. The manuscripts at O.S.U. are clean, almost without editing marks, as if they'd gone straight from author to typesetter. Where there are multiple drafts of a manuscript, the procession is unremarkable: the annotations in Carver's tiny handwriting drive the story confidently from draft to draft until the story achieves its finished form.

The Lilly manuscripts are different. There are countless cuts and additions to the pages; entire paragraphs have been added. Lish's black felt-tip markings sometimes obliterate the original text. In the case of Carver's 1981 collection, ''What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,'' Lish cut about half the original words and rewrote 10 of the 13 endings. ''Carol, story ends here,'' he would note for the benefit of his typist.

Carver began to object to Lish's editing, but he wasn't sure what to object to. He wrote a five-page letter in July 1980 telling Lish that he could not allow him to publish ''What We Talk About'' as Lish had edited it. He wrote, ''Maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no one had ever seen these stories, maybe then, knowing that your versions are better than some of the ones I sent, maybe I could get into this and go with it.'' But he feared being caught. ''Tess has seen all of these and gone over them closely. Donald Hall has seen many of the new ones. . .and Richard Ford, Toby Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff, too, some of them. . . . How can I explain to these fellows when I see them, as I will see them, what happened?'' He begged to be let out of his contract or at least to delay publication: ''Please, Gordon, for God's sake help me in this and try to understand. . . . I've got to pull out of this one. Please hear me. I've been up all night thinking on this. . . . I'll say it again, if I have any standing or reputation or cedibility [sic] in the world, I owe it to you. I owe you this more-or-less pretty interesting life I have [but] I can't take the risk as to what might happen to me.'' In the same letter, he wrote imploringly, ''[M]y very sanity is on the line here. . . . I feel it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story.''

Lish does not recall being moved. ''My sense of it was that there was a letter and that I just went ahead.'' He knew what was best for Carver -- even if Carver didn't see it that way. In the end, ''What We Talk About'' was published much as Lish wanted.

The book received front-page reviews. Critics praised its minimalist style and announced a new school of fiction. Even so, Carver continued to press for stylistic control over his work. He insisted that if Lish wanted to edit his next collection, he would have to keep his hands off. ''I can't undergo [that] kind of surgical amputation and transplantation,'' he wrote Lish in August 1982. ''Please help me with this book as a good editor, the best . . .not as my ghost,'' he pleaded two months later.

Lish reluctantly complied. ''So be it,'' he wrote in December 1982 after giving the manuscript to ''Cathedral'' only a light edit -- although he wrote some acerbic criticisms in the margins. Even then, Carver feared a sneak attack. ''I don't need to tell you that it's critical for me that there not be any messing around with titles or text,'' he warned Lish. Publicly, Carver also began to make a break. He made a point of telling interviewers that he controlled every aspect of his stories, invoking the adage that he knew a story was finished when he went through it once and put the commas in, then went through again and took the commas out.

Lish was angered by Carver's rebellion. He began asking his friends whether he should make his ''surrogate work'' public. They advised him to keep quiet. Don DeLillo, for example, warned him against taking Carver on. ''I appreciate, and am in sympathy with, everything you say in your letter,'' he wrote to Lish. ''But the fact is: there is no exposing Carver. . . . Even if people knew, from Carver himself, that you are largely responsible for his best work, they would immediately forget it. It is too much to absorb. Too complicated. Makes reading the guy's work an ambiguous thing at best. People wouldn't think less of Carver for having had to lean so heavily on an editor; they'd resent Lish for complicating the reading of the stories.

''In the meantime,'' he ended, ''take good care of your archives.''

Once Carver ended his professional relationship with Lish, he never looked back. He didn't need to. ''Cathedral'' was his most celebrated work yet. Famous writers wanted to meet him; Saul Bellow wrote him an appreciative note. The collection was nominated for both a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Proudly, Carver wrote a letter to Lish in which he noted that the title story ''went straight from the typewriter into the mail.''

Indeed, many writers and critics see Carver's later work -- stories like ''Blackbird Pie'' and ''Errand'' -- as his best efforts, his final brilliant flowering. Seen in this light, the Lish period, though responsible for bringing him to national attention, was an apprenticeship to be transcended. Some of Carver's friends certainly saw it that way. The poet Donald Hall read a manuscript copy of ''The Bath'' before Lish cut it. He asked Carver's permission to publish the original version under its original title, ''A Small, Good Thing,'' in Ploughshares magazine. In this more expansive, uplifting form, the story won a 1983 O. Henry Award. ''I was hearthurt at what had happened to that story,'' Hall remembers. ''I've wondered in my head why Lish did what he did. Was it unconscious jealousy?''

Between these two examples sits Carver. To be sure, some of the early stories were so transformed by Lish that they should be considered the product of two minds. But what about the later stories Gallagher claims to have influenced? It's hard to say. That Carver's relationship with Gallagher was consensual rather than antagonistic matters, but what's most compelling is that the stories from ''Cathedral'' feel as if they came from him. They share a common voice, a brightness. If Gallagher helped him, so much the better. To paraphrase Mona Simpson, who would want a wife who didn't? Of course, one day, Gallagher may reveal a deeper level of collaboration. It's one thing to guide the pen; another to hold it. If that day comes, I suspect I will start to feel about Carver the way I do about Wolfe: namely, that he was a writer who never left a clear record of his talents. DeLillo is right: this is a culture in which we want a single name on the front of the book.

But why place so high a price on purity? The stories are what they are, regardless. Perhaps that's why Carver was not inclined to talk openly about the editing process. He was a private man and nonconfrontational. ''Ray once said to me, 'Who needs trouble?' '' remembers Tobias Wolff. ''He wanted everything to be peaceful.'' When interviewers asked Carver about his relationship with ''Captain Fiction,'' he always acknowledged Lish as a friend, a talented editor, a man who had been there for him at a crucial time. But he carefully avoided talking about the back-and-forth of their editing relationship, why it had ended or what it might reveal for those interested in his work.

In 1982, however, he came close. He was in a discussion with students at the University of Akron and, in response to a student's question, he began talking about the editor-writer relationship. He ticked off all the famous examples of heavy editing: F. Scott Fitzgerald's cutting of Hemingway's ''Sun Also Rises,'' Perkins and Wolfe, Pound and Eliot. Carver quoted Pound's explanation of the process: ''It's immensely important that great poems be written, but it makes not a jot of difference who writes them.''

Then he paused. ''That's it. That's it exactly,'' he said.

Literary Spin Control

The work will find its own way: that's the gospel of literature.

All the same, in a world where not even the Nobel Prize guarantees immortality -- think Henrik Pontoppidan -- nothing is certain. Some writers disappear only to come back, like Zora Neale Hurston (thanks to the interest generated by Alice Walker). Others fade, it would seem, for good. Not surprisingly, writers or their descendants make efforts to stack the deck.

Posthumous publication is most helpful in keeping the public interested in a dead writer. With the publication of All of Us: The Collected Poems next month, there will have been almost as many Raymond Carver books published after his death as before. That's no match for Virginia Woolf, however. Her letters, diaries and miscellany now take up at least 30 volumes, giving her a publication rate only Joyce Carol Oates could match. Henry James rewrote his own texts for posterity; Norman Mailer engaged in a similar ploy with his recent anthology, The Time of Our Time, providing his own greatest-hits guide to his work.

Finding the right biographer is crucial. The idea nowadays is to pick someone you like before someone you don't picks you. Tess Gallagher, who hasn't authorized a biography of Raymond Carver, is now talking to Jay McInerney, who studied with her husband, about writing one. Such plans don't always work. Robert Frost put his fate in the hands of his friend Lawrance Thompson -- only to watch Thompson's admiration turn to dislike. It was perhaps Thomas Hardy who took the matter to its logical conclusion, secretly writing his own biography and then having his widow publish the work under her own name.

Beyond that, the best you can do is try to control the information that gets out. Franz Kafka took the famously extreme view when he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his work, even to the last page. (Brod decided not to honor this request -- and who can blame him?) Other authors carefully arrange their papers for posterity. Saul Bellow has placed his manuscripts and letters at the University of Chicago. Toni Morrison used to keep hers at home -- but after a fire almost consumed them, she placed them at Princeton. Allen Ginsberg sold not just his letters and journals, but also a pair of old tennis shoes and other personal memorabilia to Stanford shortly before his death. Access to the documents (or the shoes) is available to interested scholars.

Widow's Work

Who looks after an author's work after he or she dies? Usually, it's the writer's spouse or lover; sometimes it's another family member, a friend or a scholar. These watchdogs are formally known as executors -- and informally as keepers of the flame.

Keepers of the flame must make decisions about everything from the placement of archives to posthumous publication. They tend to be loyal, beleaguered and a bit capricious. Their ace in the hole is permission to quote from the work, a power that prompted the following advice from the biographer Justin Kaplan: Shoot the widow.

T. S. Eliot's widow, Valerie, has been a typically unpredictable executor. Peter Ackroyd had to insert paraphrases into his 1984 Eliot biography after Valerie refused him the right to quote from letters and unpublished works. Although she has guarded many Eliot manuscripts with secrecy, she did allow the poet's bawdy juvenilia to be published in 1996. And she provided Andrew Lloyd Webber with unpublished poetry fragments for his musical Cats.

Executors tend to be protective by nature, but this instinct can turn extreme. Ted Hughes, widower of Sylvia Plath, destroyed the last volume of Plath's diary after her 1963 suicide. It was an act, he claimed, designed to protect their two children from additional grief. Although feminist scholars condemned Hughes, his act had many precursors: Lord Byron's friends, for example, torched the poet's supposedly salacious memoirs, fearing scandal. More recently, letters written by James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, were burned by her nephew Stephen Joyce. He did so pre-emptively after his grandmother, Nora, was the subject of a biography. I didn't want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them, he told dismayed Joyce scholars in 1988.

Other executors tirelessly promote the deceased's work. Tess Gallagher is of this school. She has been Raymond Carver's constant champion, doing everything from reading his work in public to issuing posthumous works and encouraging film interest. (She worked with Robert Altman on the 1993 movie Short Cuts.) At times, all this vigilance can seem thankless. Widows don't get much applause in America, Gallagher has lamented.

Alas, not all the work in the world will bring the beloved back. As Elaine Steinbeck says: The hardest part of being a keeper of the flame is just being lonely for your husband. I think we would all say the same thing.

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D T Max article on evidence among Gordon Lish's papers that supports his long-dismissed claims to have made crucial contributions to the early short stories of Raymond Carver; says Lish is still embittered by Carver's ingratitude; also discusses assertions by Tess Gallagher, Carver's widow, that some of his later stories owed a lot to her; photos (L)

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Vladimir Nabokov referred to editors as "pompous avuncular brutes." T.S. Eliot said that many of them were just "failed writers." And Kingsley Amis, that laureate of cantankerousness, spoke of how the worst kind

prowls through your copy like an overzealous gardener with a pruning hook, on the watch for any phrase he senses you were rather pleased with, preferably one that also clinches your argument and if possible is essential to the general drift of the surrounding passage.

Raymond Carver, at least to begin with, was on altogether better terms with his editor, Gordon Lish, to whom he once wrote, "If I have any standing or reputation or credibility in the world, I owe it to you." Elsewhere Carver acknowledged his debt to Lish by saying simply that his editor held an "irredeemable note." This brief, eloquent tribute is paid in the essay "Fires," which Carver wrote during a stay at Yaddo, the artist's colony in upstate New York, in the summer of 1981. He had every reason to be feeling grateful. A few months earlier his second short-story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, had been published and was still being hailed and heralded by the literary world.

The book made Carver famous and, for the first time in his chronically impecunious existence, rich. It has since come to be regarded as the cornerstone not only of his reputation but of an entire literary movement, whose members might loosely be said to include Richard Ford, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tobias Wolff, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison, among others. Few books of the last quarter-century have been more widely imitated. Attend a creative writing workshop or open a magazine of short stories nowadays and the chances are you will encounter one of Carver's numberless epigones.

What critics admired-and what Carver's heirs would strive to emulate-was the book's lean, reticent prose style, which seems to register every detail with the same neutral intensity, the same dispassionate precision. There is, for example, almost no difference between the manner in which Carver describes a woman ordering a birthday cake for her son-

The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and a launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars. The name SCOTTY would be iced on in green as if it were the name of the spaceship.

-and the manner in which, shortly thereafter, he describes the son being hit by a car:

At an intersection, without looking, the birthday boy stepped off the curb, and was promptly knocked down by a car. He fell on his side, his head in the gutter, his legs in the road moving as if he were climbing a wall.

Carver's prose does not flinch. The fictional world he uses it to...

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The editors of the new Library of America edition of Carver's Collected Stories made the decision to include the manuscript version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the book that established his reputation, under the title Beginners. Beginners is twice as long, and about half as interesting.