An interesting, if very matter-of-fact, account of how Christopher Priest's novel The Prestige became a feature film. It is required reading for anyone who has ever moaned about how their particular favourite book or short story has been turned into film or a tv series; Priest is under no illusions over the role of the author once rights have been sold and actually picked up. It is rarely any sort of path to riches for an author, though if the studio is sufficiently serious about the project, the renewal of rights - as happened with The Prestige - is useful.

Priest expresses considerable admiration for the film, though he is not uncritical over certain parts of the screenplay, or of some aspects of modern film technique, such as some excessive softness of some of the key dialogue. He is also very critical of one key scene in the film (which was not in the novel) where the judge in the trial of Alfred Borden views Edward Angier's apparatus in camera, accompanied only by Angier's ingénieur, Cutter. Priest says that he does not believe that such an event could have happened because in a court hearing, especially for murder, the judge would have to be accompanied by both counsels and the jury. I am unconvinced by that argument; 19th-century courts did not necessarily operate to the same standards of equity as their modern descendants, and although I've been unable to find chapter and verse on this (most sources tend to look more at case histories from earlier in the 19th century), I remain dubious of Priest's claim.

He also doubts that the same judge would have used the phrase "bells and whistles" when referring to Angier's equipment: "I'm sure beneath its bells and whistles it's got a simple and disappointing trick.." he says; Priest doubts that such a phrase would have been used, because the use of the term "bells and whistles" to reference to accessories and appurtenances of some device or other is a specifically late-20th century usage.

Again, I disagree. The origin of the phrase "bells and whistles" comes from 19th and early 20th-century fairground organs, which had just those very things. I saw the judge looking at Angier's machine and thinking of it in the same terms as a fairground organ. Furthermore, such things were not extras, but integral parts of the whole; and I cannot imagine that a 19th century judge would treat a piece of stage magician's machinery, no matter how technologically advanced it might have happened to be, with any more seriousness than a fairground organ. Though I'd be prepared to be proved wrong on the matter of the conduct of 19th-century courts, I think I'm much more with Christopher Nolan on this one.

But these are minor quibbles. The book, from Priest's own GrinGrim Studios imprint, is nonetheless a useful glimpse behind the scenes of something that a lot of people may think they known about, but in truth do not. ( )