Lolita

In Adrian Lyne’s version the literature professor Humbert rents a room from the widow Charlotte Haze to be near her 14 year old daughter Dolores, and marries the mother for that reason. This was Stephen Schiff’s first produced screenplay. The producers had commissioned scripts from James Dearden, Harold Pinter and David Mamet and rejected all three; Pinter was paid and used a contract clause to take his name off. Dolores is 12 when Nabokov’s novel opens. The film makes her 14, compresses the span from 5 years to 3, and closes in 1950 rather than 1952. No American distributor would take it for a long time. It went out on the Showtime cable channel on 2 August 1998 and reached cinemas only on 25 September, in a run small enough to qualify for awards; Showtime held the United States rights until 2003. Box Office Mojo gives the budget as 62 million dollars and The Numbers the domestic gross as 1,147,784. In Salon, Charles Taylor wrote that the much advertised fidelity does not hold, and that manufactured lyricism stands where the novel’s cruelty and comedy were. A good fit if you treat a film’s distribution history as part of the work. Not for anyone unwilling to sit with an adult’s sexual abuse of a child told from the abuser’s side.