Imagination Stolen

For regular readers of my blog, you know that I'm a John Irving fan (in fact over Christmas, I'm planning a re-reading of A Prayer for Owen Meany.) Anyway, I went to Amazon and looked up a John Irving book then went to the "If you like this book, you may also like" section and found Nick Hornby. You probably know him from Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, and About a Boy. So here's the deal -- I've started reading About a Boy, and frankly I'm kind of ticked off because I can't get Hugh Grant out of my head. This happens all the time. Whenever Hollywood makes a movie out of something, it steals my imagination. It takes away my mind's ability to create characters and it does all the imaginative work for me. I could be saying the same thing about all kinds of other books/movies: Tolkien (please go AWAY Elijah Wood -- I want MY Frodo back!); Narnia (I liked my Aslan better -- he had more soul and more laughter); Harry Potter (my castle was even more magical), etc., etc. I think that these are all good movies that were faithful to the books, but I don't want my imagination to get lazy -- I don't want to just take movie stars and substitute them for the characters that I've created. I don't want Hollywood cheapening my private Neverland.