It would appear that labelling a book "unfilmable" is a sure-fire way to get a filmmaker's attention.
How else to explain the multitude of book-inspired features currently at the multiplex, a good number of them drawn from challenging literary works chock full of the very things popular cinema generally tries to avoid?
Rambling storylines, monumental themes, complex structures, detours into wild fantasy and innumerable characters are proving little impediment to the perennial search for the next big blockbuster.
This week, Yann Martel's long-considered-unfilmable tale Life of Pi appears in theatres as a 3-D spectacle, the painstaking work of Oscar-winning director Ang Lee.
It follows the ambitious adaptations of David Mitchell's literary puzzle Cloud Atlas and Salman Rushdie's magical, historical tale Midnight's Children.
And next month, theatres welcome a big-screen take on J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy-laden The Hobbit while January will see Jack Kerouac's meandering Beat Generation novel On the Road.
As film critic and curator Jesse Wente notes: "A book is only unfilmable until someone makes a movie of it."
Whether that adaptation is a good film or not is another question entirely.
Reaction has been mixed to the cinematic incarnations of the two-hour-and43-minute Cloud Atlas and the two-and-a-half-hour Midnight's Children - each elaborate ventures that faced distinct challenges in wrestling their sweeping narratives into script form.
Cloud Atlas co-writer-director Lana Wachowski admits that figuring out a plan often "seemed too impossible." But her passion for the centuries-spanning book - a collection of six tales crossing genres including historical drama, '70s murder mystery, slick sci-fi adventure and dystopian thriller - instilled an against-all-odds determination she shared with co-writers-directors Larry Wachowski and Tom Tykwer.
"The novel was the most exciting thing we'd read in a long, long time," Wachowski gushed when the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September.
"Sometimes we'd give up and [Tykwer] would go: 'No, we must keep going!'"
The trio decided early on that getting Mitchell's blessing was key to making the venture work. Then they set about reworking his tale entirely - chopping it into segments and rearranging the pieces into a single, fully integrated story.
"The book feels a little more like an anthology and it's a little bit more acceptable in literature to write a book like that," says Lana Wachowski.
"But for a movie, we thought that it would be too hard to start over or start a new story an hour or so, an hour and a half into it with totally new characters."
Recognizing the different storytelling demands of film and literature is paramount to any adaptation, agrees Rushdie, who wrestled his own 600-page Midnight's Children into a 120-page screenplay.
The Booker Prize-winning writer says he and director Deepa Mehta made it clear from the get-go that the goal was to make a film - "not just a faithful adaptation of a literary text."
"It required a lot of sometimes very painful editing-out of elements in the book," says Rushdie, who mixes magical realism and period drama in his sweeping take on India's early days of independence.
"Some of the characters in the book that I'm most fond of didn't make it onto the screen. But in the end, I thought, I'm enough of a movie person [to let them go].
"I just thought in the end the important thing is to make a film that works as a film. You don't want people to be sitting there constantly saying, 'Where's that bit of the book?' Or, 'I didn't think of this character in this way.' "
The computer-generated imagery on display in Life of Pi certainly didn't exist when the book came out in 2001. It's a big reason its Saskatoon-based author says he had a hard time imagining how a film could be made from his Booker Prize-winning tale, about an Indian boy stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger in the middle of the Pacific.
Plus, so much of the story unfolds through reflection, with the hero Pi struggling with deep philosophical and spiritual questions - hardly the stuff of box-office smashes.
"Those are easy words to write on the page. But how would one bring them to life on the screen?" Martel writes in the forward to the behind-the-scenes book, The Making of Life of Pi.
"The challenge seemed forbidding. Who would be crazy enough to try?"
It took a decade for someone to work out a viable strategy, with would-be directors Alfonso Cuaron, M. Night Shyamalan and Jean-Pierre Jeunet among the casualties.
When Lee took on the project, the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon director brought ambitious plans with him: He would build a massive wave tank to recreate a swelling, open ocean; use real Bengal tigers that would be seamlessly integrated with computer-generated images; and shoot it all in 3-D to simulate the depths of the Pacific.
Although the power of the book will draw fans into the theatre, an adaptation can only succeed on its own terms, says Rushdie.
"You want people to be absorbed by the characters and the emotions and the narrative line," he says.
"At the end of the film, what you want people to think is, 'Oh, that was a good movie.' "
