"Endless Love" Author Scott Spencer Is Not a Fan of the New Film Adaptation

Guess he's not getting any royalties...

Image via Relativity Media

While thousands of girlfriends dragged their men out for a Valentine's weekend viewing of the latest pretty-teengaers-chick-flick Endless Love, the critics have been trashing it—it has a Metascore of 31 and 13% on Rotten Tomatoes—but the film's latest detractor is none other than its source: author Scott Spencer, who penned the 1979 bestseller which has now received the film treatment twice.

Authors being less than pleased with Hollywood adaptations of their work is nothing new, but Spencer's open letter, penned for and posted by The Hollywood Reporter, is pretty funny nonetheless. He basically kicks the low-graded, under-performing (it came in at #5 at the box office with just $13 million) while it's down, trashes the original adaptation too and ends it with the scathing kiss-off, "Stick with the paperback." Here's an excerpt:

Endless Love was botched – misquoted, as it were – once in 1981, when Franco Zeffirelli tried to make a movie out of it, and it seems as if it has been even more egregiously and ridiculously misunderstood in the movie Universal Pictures is releasing. (I gave up control of the movie rights to my novel in 1980.) I had brief contact with the first filmmakers who tried to adapt my novel, and I had no contact whatsoever with the second wave. But now I don’t really need to raise my voice and say, "No No, that’s not what I said." I can take my cue from James M. Cain who, when asked what he thought about what Hollywood had done to his novels, said something to the effect, "They didn’t do anything to them; my books are right there on the shelf."

Read the rest of his letter at THR here.

[via THR]

Latest in Pop Culture