It seems like the deeper I get into my writing career, the more these publication anniversaries are popping up… And this month is no exception, marking two decades since I wrote an adaptation of J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress’s script for the movie The Butterfly Effect…
Change One Thing… Change Everything…
Struggling with the psychological effects of his repressed childhood memories, a young man – Evan Treborn – devises a technique of traveling back in time to inhabit his childhood body. As he attempts to mend the broken lives of those closest to him, he finds that every trip into the past brings chaotic results into the present, leading him to travel back again and again, causing irreparable damage. With his past in tatters and his future just as bleak, Evan realizes that some things may be better left untouched!
The Butterfly Effect has a unique place in my body of work for a lot of reasons: it was my first novelization, my first experience adapting someone else’s writing for a different medium; it’s one of my few ventures into fiction that edges into the horror genre; it was my first work of tie-in fiction, based on an existing intellectual property (IP); and it was my first novel for an adult audience, after having written my Sundowners steampunk western series, which was very much aimed at a YA readership.
I was hired on to adapt the script of the New Line movie in the summer of 2003 by Marc Gascoigne, who at the time was lead editor at Black Flame, a sister imprint to Black Library (the home of fiction based on the Warhammer franchises). I was developing novels for BF’s Judge Dredd fiction line and BL’s Warhammer 40,000 books (which would become Eclipse and Deus Encarmine) but it was The Butterfly Effect that would come out first, thanks to a tight writing deadline and the need to synch up with the release of the movie.
I was fortunate to get a free hand to choose how to adapt the film, and with just a handful of set photos as reference, I came up with a narrator framing device based on the main character of Evan (played by the then-popular Aston Kutchner) and his journals, which serve as the means of time-travel in the story; I was also able to add back in a lot of early scenes in the original script that were cut for time, and even find moments to tie up a couple of loose threads that the movie couldn’t get to.
If you’d like to hear more about my work on this project and some fun discussion of the book, the film and the whole business of writing novelizations, check out this in-depth discussion I had last year on an episode of the Authorized Novelizations podcast…
I learned a lot working in this adaptation, and I chalk it up as a good experience – although I would have liked to dial back on the bad language, I was given a lot of creative freedom to fit the movie script into prose form.
As well as UK and USA releases, the novel was also translated for the Japanese and Russian markets, but after twenty years, The Butterfly Effect is long out of print, and I’ve seen second-hand copies going from anything up to £200 (!) online. It’s not likely it’ll ever see print again, even in digital form, as the rights to the book reverted back to New Line Cinema when the Black Flame closed down, and New Line have since been absorbed into Warner Bros – so if you do stumble upon a copy in the wild, grab it… It’s become a rare bird!
