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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