Roman Polanski turned Rosemary's Baby into one of the most stylish horror movies ever made. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar
Ira Levin, who died this week at the age of 78, was one of the world's most movie-friendly authors. His relatively svelte output of seven novels was converted, via the dark arts of voodoo mathematics, into 10 features (several tales were adapted twice; others spawned semi-official sequels). These include a brace of turkeys (Sliver, the recent Stepford Wives), a pair of flawed classics (Boys From Brazil, the original Stepford Wives) and one bona-fide masterpiece (Rosemary's Baby). Overall, that's a pretty good strike rate.
Authors traditionally grumble that they are ill-served by Hollywood (after witnessing an adaptation of one of his books, John Le Carre likened the process to "taking a cow and boiling it down to an Oxo cube"). But the best Levin pictures were an improvement on their source material.
Roman Polanski took Rosemary's Baby - a skimpy wisp of pulp fiction - and conjured it into one of the most stylish and unnerving horror movies ever made. And while The Stepford Wives remains a sharp, satisfying read, its basic thrust was later honed and augmented by Bryan Forbes' under-valued 70s thriller. Levin was good for Hollywood and Hollywood, by and large, was good for him.
So where does this leave the author? Some might regard him as an example of that charmed and clownish breed: hack writers who indirectly inspire great movies. Yet it's not as simple as that. Yes, Levin was a rudimentary prose stylist - but then a Nabokovian prose style doesn't amount to a hill of beans in Hollywood. What matters are stories and ideas, and Levin had these in abundance. His books worked well as slick dime-store entertainments. But they worked better as blueprints or outlines; brilliant raw matter that required the input of others to make them fly.
I felt the same way after reading Rosemary's Baby as I did after zipping through The Godfather, Psycho and Jaws. We are so conditioned to think the adaptation process is about condensing and reducing that it comes as shock to realise that it can sometimes work the other way; adding whole new layers of texture and meaning. And while one could perhaps class Levin, Puzo, Bloch and the like as mediocre novelists, that emphatically doesn't make them mediocre writers. Without their spade-work, a good number of film milestones would simply not exist. They were cinema's ace draftsmen; natural collaborators in an isolationist medium.
