Let’s begin with a quick game of “Jeopardy…”

Answer: “The sanctity of marriage versus a love of money, the Jew versus significant non-Jews such as shiksas and sheiks, skill versus luck, materialism versus spirituality, Israel versus the Arab countries, the past versus the future, and the religious world versus the secular one.”

Question: “What is Indecent Proposal?”

Both of the above come from a review in the New York Times.But that, if I’m guessing right,is not what you're pondering. This, you're saying, is not the movie I saw!

Exactly. It happens to be the book—this book—that you likely never read. That’s why it’s being reintroduced, to, in a sense, set the record straight.

Do I object to the movie that is based on this novel? Not at all. I’m pleased with the result. Liberties were taken by the filmmakers, but that’s the chance you take when you sell your book to Hollywood. Here’s what Hemingway said about that, and I’m paraphrasing: Run to the border of Hollywood, throw your book over the line, and then run back from where you came. Run like hell.

That’s more or less what I did. I figure that Hollywood’s job is to make the movie appealing to a wide audience, so—particularly in my case—it often skims the top and leaves the substance to where it fits better—in the book. As Gertrude Stein would have said: book is a book is a book, movie is a movie is a movie.

Books and movies are two different things and each must live and breathe and succeed singularly and apart. Plainly, here’s my take on adapting one artist’s medium to another. You can’t tell the other guy how you see your work. You see it your way, he sees it his way and it’s not for you to get all sensitive and touchy about changes. You’ve got your vision. He’s got his. Beethoven would not dare tell Picasso how to paint his Fifth Symphony.

Besides, the movie clicked, Big Time! Directed by Adrian Lyne (of Fatal Attraction fame and starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore, the movie broke box office records here and abroad and went on to collect some 350 million dollars worldwide – quite stunning for an R-rated picture. The movie’s fame got the novel translated into 22 languages, and the book (give me this moment to revel) had legs, repeatedly joining the bestseller ranks around the globe. That’s the upside. The downside is that a movie so big can swamp the book that was its sire. But that’s another story that we’ll touch on briefly in a moment.

Yes, I am very pleased with the movie, I mean it’s so romantic, so Hollywood. In addition, the key elements of my novel were retained; temptation, sin, regret, retribution, forgiveness.

Let me pause here to note that I’ve been kissed and slapped on the cheek for, one, coming up with a High Concept (slapped), and a Big Idea (kissed). The big idea began half-baked, such as—take a highly moral happily married couple, and now, introduce something that tests their love and their morals. But what? Introduce what? A snake? That’s already been done. Months after that inspiration arrived, I paid a visit to an Atlantic City casino, and there, playing an entire table of $10,000 blackjack all by himself was a magnificent Arab prince, and I thought, with all that money, is there anything he cannot buy? Can he buy a happily married couple, especially with the husband being Jewish? I put the two together, and was on my way at the typewriter.

Sure, I would have been much happier if Hollywood would have stuck closer to this novel’s controversial sum and parts, but I did not object when I saw the outcome. That’s life, I said, or rather, that’s Hollywood. Others, however, did object. Readers who became fans of the novel were irked. What have they done to you! they protested.

The Los Angeles Daily News was first (by no means the last) to take up the cause. A reporter wanted to know if I was being shoved aside, given that even while the movie was breaking box office records and was the talk of the nation, the novel that started it all was hard—no, nearly impossible—to find. “Is your novel being suppressed?” I was asked—suppressed because the movie is so different. Is there conspiracy afoot to deflect criticism from the fact that book and movie under the same name are so different, especially since the book deals with “primal” issues— that wonderful word used by the New York Times in its book review.

Maybe. Maybe the book was suppressed. Maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know. I only know that when it was republished from hardcover to softcover as a movie tie-in, it was not readily available [in any book store]. Perhaps the filmmakers in Hollywood and the publishers in New York (both owned by the same company) were afraid that the book’s themes were too controversial for the movie going public. The fact is that while the movie received a roaring publicity campaign, the novel that originated it was practically kept secret.

Talk about a blessing and a curse! At once the movie made the book—and swamped the book. But as disproof of Fitzgerald’s rule that there are no second acts, along came Rob Huberman of ComteQ Publishing, who asked, “Do people know about the hidden themes of your novel? Do people think the movie said it all?” Of course I said no to all that, and he responded, “So let’s do it right this time.”

So here it is. For your consideration (as they say in Hollywood) the real, the true, the original Indecent Proposal.

Finally, here’s the banner so many newspapers wanted in the first place – At Last, The Controversial Worldwide Bestseller Hollywood And New York Tried To Hush!

For a writer it’s always a comfort to get that second act. For a reader, listen, speaking in general terms, there’s a special place in heaven for people who’ve read the book but had not seen the movie. There’s even a special place for people who’ve done both. So – consider yourself blessed, dear reader.

Jack Engelhard
September, 2001