Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 72

68 Popular Culture Review does the Follett formula from Eye o f the Needle and from his other novels: a strong woman, caring for a child and therefore vulnerable, unknowingly lives with a spy and is in great danger. The television screenplay changes almost everything else, except some of the action/ambush scenes towards the end. On its release, the television version of Lie Down with Lions was panned by People Weekly as a “convoluted, uninvolving processional” and a “dreadful, four-hour dud” (Hiltbrand 14). While there are numerous examples of successful television miniseries broadcast over several nights—Lonesome Dove, The Far Pavilions, the adaptation of Follett’s The Key to Rebecca, for that matter—these are all productions that build tension consistently throughout the narrative, both within scenes and across scenes. In such productions, multiple plots serve the larger purpose of advancing the main plot and of building suspense within it. The Andrews-Bond television script of Lie Down with Lions was singled out in a Variety review as “stupefying, by the numbers,” with the critic commenting that “[t]he project might have looked promising on paper, what with a veteran cast and a story adapted from a Ken Follett novel.. ., but the finished result is flat, uninspired and grueling.. . . ” (Loynd). Follett’s assessment of the finished product, as noted earlier, was equally gloomy, and it is difficult to see how the production would not have been aided by Follett’s more structurally solid script; at a minimum, it wouldn’t have made it any worse. As we have seen, Follett’s various forays into film and television scriptwriting allowed him, early in his career, to experiment with certain types of scenes, formulaic devices, and settings and to develop a screenplay sensibility, all of which he would put to effective use in the crafting and pacing of his mature works. His work for visual media also represents a turning away from the path he had charted for himself, first as an aspiring writer of series thrillers and later as an established author of international bestsellers with wartime settings. This seems especially the case with the drafting of the unproduced adaptation of Lie Down with Lions, composed at a time of significant personal and professional change. Although the “cinematic conception” of his novels has meant that at one time or another several other Follett works have been considered for production— Code to Zero and Triple among them—it is only with the recent announcement by the German television company Network Movie that they would adapt the author’s novels A Dangerous Fortune and Whiteout as the first episodes in the series The Ken Follett Collection that the lingering question of why more of his novels have not been adapted for film or television can be laid to rest. The filmic qualities of his books have always been there; if Follett’s efforts at writing for the small and large screen were only minimally