Bleak Hotel: The Hollywood Saga of The White Hotel by DM Thomas

The Sunday Times review by Andrew Holgate

Modern literary history is littered with tales of famous books that failed to make it to the screen. JD Salinger, for instance, has consistently refused to allow The Catcher in the Rye to be made into a film (“Holden wouldn't approve,” apparently), and nearly four decades after Francis Ford Coppola bought the screen rights to Jack Kerouac's On the Road in 1971, a film version of the Beat classic is still stuck stubbornly in neutral.

DM Thomas's Booker-shortlisted The White Hotel may not compare in literary splendour with either of the above, but it can certainly outshine them both when it comes to tales of film-development disasters.

Twenty-seven years after its publisher, basking in the reflected glory of the Booker, first stamped the words “Soon to be a major motion picture” on the newly published novel's jacket, Thomas is still waiting for the title to go up in lights. Since 1981, The White Hotel's path to celluloid success has been blocked by war, death, relationship splits and vicious litigation.

The list of famous directors and film stars who have been associated with the project reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood. Thomas's surprisingly up-tempo book is, in part, a blow-by-blow account of the whole sorry mess.

Read the full piece at The Sunday Times online.