Adapting Worth the Candle into a Pixar Movie

Worth the Candle is 1.6 million words and covers a lot of characters, themes, and events. The average Pixar movie is around 90 minutes.

How would you stuff one into the other?

The first answer is that you wouldn’t, obviously. But that’s boring, so I’m going to try to game out how I would attempt it, if I had to, mostly as a writing exercise that involves stretching the planning/plotting muscles. This post will spoil most of the story, in the same way an adaptation would, while also missing like 99% of what actually happens in the story.

We start with a scene of Juniper playing some tabletop game with his friends. His friend Arthur is introduced. This is a short scene, maybe of their first game together, and then we immediately go into montage, showing the character sheets stacking up, the book collection growing, the endless campaign notes, all that visual story-telling passage-of-time goodness. Some of the other players rotate, but Juniper is always there at the head of the table, behind an increasingly tattered screen, and Arthur is always by his side.

Then we have another scene where someone wants to start without Arthur, and Juniper says “no, no, he’ll be here, he’s never late”, and he gets a phone call, and we see his eyes widen, and then we go to another montage of time passing, this one showing the world darkened, the same game table, the seats slowly emptying as more and more people drop out, until it’s just Juniper alone. We see behind his screen, images that evoke his pain and anger, plans for a game that no one wants to play, and Arthur’s empty chair beside him.

I think for pacing reasons you probably have to draw out the next bits, but Juniper walks home alone in the rain, feeling worse and worse, maybe with some portents of what’s to come around him, until eventually he finds himself in the fantasy world.

We’re now five to ten minutes in, depending on just how fast we’ve been going. (This is close to being the beginning of Up, I am aware of that and absolutely fine with cribbing from one of the greatest movie openings of all time for this exercise.)

Juniper quickly meets Amaryllis, she’s in trouble, we probably use a different exclusion zone from in the book, there are monsters to fight, they fight those monsters in an action scene, hardly pausing for breath. Juniper recognizes the monsters, they’re from one of his campaigns, and if we don’t trust the audience, we can have him say that or directly flashback, but presumably this was something from the montage. Eventually the fighting ends, Amaryllis introduces herself, and Juniper is just obsessed with her name, because that’s the name of one of Arthur’s longest-running characters.

After that, our first act is them getting out of the exclusion zone, past the monsters. Juniper proves himself at least once by knowing things that he shouldn’t, domain expertise, how to defeat the evil things. We get the story of how Uther, the lost king, went away and never came back, and Juniper becomes determined to find him. Amaryllis does too, mostly because her country is in dire straits. They meet up with Fenn, a half-elf who provides comic relief. The end of the first act comes when they’re in relative safety, in Anglecynn, with Amaryllis in disguise, hiding from her relatives.

Most of the second act is a single adventure, like we’re highly truncating a million words of bumbling around the world into maybe thirty minutes of runtime. My copy of Save the Cat suggests that on the beat sheet this is where “Fun and Games” portion comes in, so we have Juniper use his foreknowledge to understand the layout of the castle, the nature of the magic, etc. to prove his worth. We’re going for a “false high point” here, in Save the Cat terms. They’ve got the gang together! They’re doing adventure stuff! It goes off without a hitch! Any seeming setbacks were all part of the plan! Fenn gets a cool magic hat!

And then whatever MacGuffin they’ve stolen points them in one single spot: Fel Seed. Of all the dark and scary things that were on Juniper’s DM screen in that opening montage, this is the darkest and scariest of them all. Juniper has to explain that he … well, he made some things. Not monsters that were set up to be knocked down, not a castle that was meant for a heist, not a cool hat, something that was evil, something that was not meant to be beaten. Rocks fall, everyone dies.

But they go ahead anyway, pressing forward after, maybe, a speech by Amaryllis about doing the necessary thing, not just stopping because it all feels lost and hopeless.

So they go, and they fight, and they lose, and all hope seems lost, until Juniper throws down his sword and gives his own speech, about how this isn’t what it’s supposed to be, how his friendship at the table was about creating a story together, about setting up a villain to be knocked down, and then Fel Seed looks at the sword that’s been cast aside, and says that it’s not enough, that if you want to win you have to fight. So Juniper fights and wins.

And then Juniper finds Arthur, who is middle-aged and a fearsome warrior, and we do a highly abbreviated Long Stairs thing, Arthur trying to escape this world and its cycles, pushing on forward in spite of Juniper’s objections. I would really want to have another montage similar to the opening ones, where Arthur describes what life was like, how the adventures ground him down, how it felt like he was being urged forward all the time, pushed when he felt like standing still. Like there was some Juniper up above who wanted to keep playing, who wouldn’t let go.

I do think this comes off more deathist than in the original. Uther’s not trying to escape life, he’s trying to escape narrative, or more than that, to escape his life as an object of worship. This is definitely an execution problem, especially because we have like … maybe 20 minutes to spend on this. I think it’s doable though, especially with flashback, a long sequence showing Uther’s life.

And then Uther is gone, and all the hopes of restoring the kingdom to its former glory with him, and Amaryllis slumps down, because this was her shot at fixing the fractious fighting. But Juniper offers her his hand, because he’s at peace now, and he’s going to do what he feels like he’s always done best: build things, side by side, with her.

(And then we imply that this goes better than we naively think it should, maybe because of Juniper’s detailed knowledge of the world, or his superior ability to adventure.)

Alright, I think that’s it.

There are some obvious issues. Runtime is probably fine, but I did not actually fill out my Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, so there would be a lot of work to turn this into an actual script … which I might do just because I told myself that this would be the year that I write a movie script.

Also, I cut your favorite part and hacked away at some of the themes you liked. Sorry about that. There’s no Bethel, no Raven, no Maddie, no Grak … though I actually do like the idea of a Grak that is more beard than anything else, a quirky side character that’s mostly silent, since it does seem like we’d want to fill out the team in the second act. This is disrespectful to the vision of Grak as a character, which I find funny. But the list of things that are getting removed is very very long, I acknowledge this, and there are entire themes, mechanics, etc. that are being slashed.

And of the things that aren’t getting slashed, some of them are getting sanded down. You cannot depict Fel Seed as he is in the books in a big budget animated movie, because if you did, the movie would not make its money back. You can’t have a scene where your protagonist ejaculates into an elf’s mouth. Sorry, just not possible with standards and practices, in a world where this was even remotely possible to get made. The very inclusion of a “handjob police” joke in the book would probably preclude this movie from ever getting made, even if that was nowhere in the script, to say nothing of the other elements.

Still, I think this is sort of what you would need to do for this extreme of an adaptation. I think that as a movie this could work. I also think it would be highly dependent on execution, as most things are, finding an art style that works, hitting all the beats correctly, making sure the writing is very very polished and that we have continuity going forward and backward, callbacks and call forwards and brick jokes.

At least as a quick half-hour exercise, I think I am happy with the plan as outlined here. This was not created for purpose, just because I thought it would be interesting. If you’re trying to rescue a core story that can be told in 90 minutes, pulled from a sprawling web serial, I think this is how you do it.