Pity Poor Alice Munro

by Melissa Bell

I have to feel bad for her, in some way. Here's this woman – considered by many to be one of the greatest [insert additional adjective here, eg. living, woman, English-language, etc.] writers around, and yet no one's adapting her work for feature films.

Okay, that's a bit of a lie. A perfunctory Google shows that an adaptation of Ms. Munro's short story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain", is currently in post-production. Directed by Sarah Polley, executive produced by Atom Egoyan, it stars Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Wendy Crewssssssssssszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Oops. Sorry. I nodded off there for a sec.

And you. C'mon, admit it. You unsuccessfully tried to stifle a yawn in the interest of Canadian politesse, didn't you?

So would adding a few exclamation points to the second paragraph above make it sound more exciting? Or should I just go ahead and add some cricket sounds and cue the tumbleweeds?

Looking back to an earlier bitchy post of mine where I was kvetching about a certain Mr. Steve Martin writing his novella, Shopgirl, solely with a view to eventually triple-dipping his Hollywood chips, I still have to wonder why, with the incredible body of work Alice Munro has created in her lifetime, zero has yet made it to the "big screen". Sure, Boys and Girls picked up an Oscar, but…yeah, yeah, didn't you know? Neither did I. Oh, nobody you'd know, of course. It was back in the early '80s. Best to just forget about it – everyone else has.

Okay, another look at imdb.com shows that Julianne Moore is "in talks" to do Hateship, Courtship, Friendship. I suppose that's promising, but "in talks" pretty much means…whatever. Meanwhile, Paul Gallico's The Poseidon Adventure was just remade. Did it need remaking? And who the heck is Paul Gallico when he's not marginally famous among sports trivia fans for organizing the Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition?

Of course I realize that most of Ms. Munro's work comprises short stories. But that certainly doesn't mean that all short stories are destined to be nothing more than overlooked short films. So why has so little of her work been produced in other media? And, of the handful of her works that have made the leap from the page to the screen, how did a two-bit schmuck like me get cast in two of them? (Yes, alright, it was in a whole other life, but honestly, people - when a crappy ex-actor like myself can claim two Alice Munro adaptations in my sorry-ass and wince-inducing list of past screen credits, all is seriously not right in the literature-to-film world.)

She's no diva. I doubt she's playing hardball with the Big Boys. Permit me a self-indulgent "brush-with-greatness" anecdote, but I did meet the lady once. I was doing summer stock in Blyth, Ontario, and she showed up one late afternoon to the strawberry social held at the Town Hall. And, god bless her, she wore a long white cotton dress with hand-embroidered strawberries on it and just kind of wandered around drinking tea and eating pie. This is not the kind of woman one imagines screaming into her cell phone at her agent with a "Fuck 'em, Marty, they want Half a Grapefruit? I want six points, a Hummer, name above the title, or no fuckin' deal. Ya got that?" Nah, our Alice doesn't do that.

Maybe that's the problem. She's just too fuckin' nice.