Five reasons why Hollywood ruined this book (spoilers in places)

Yes, I know that books and films are separate art forms, and that you have to make changes and adaptations to turn a written medium into a decent visual medium. But here are changes made in this adaptation that cut the heart out of this controversial, vibrant (and yes, at times overwritten and melodramatic, in my opinion) book, turning it into yet another Heartwarming Hollywood Story. Or changes made that don't necessarily betray the book, but are just so relevatory of much of Hollywood's weird tunnel vision and inability to take chances. Spoilers (of both book and movie) throughout.


1) The whiteout (literally):
In the book, Astrid's various journeys go through various strata of multicultural and immigrant L.A. She befriends Yvonne, who is most definitely Mexican-American (you can tell by her slang); she is mentored by Olivia, who is a Black woman living a wealthy lifestyle off of the world's oldest profession; she is the White Girl among Latinas at a foster home and at Mac. One caseworker is white, another is Black, another is a Latina. In the movie, Astrid spends four years navigating the L.A. County foster care system, and encounters only *two* nonwhite people among the foster mothers, foster kids, caseworkers, staff, etc. That's statistically impossible in a county which is 53% nonwhite (and the foster care system is disproportionately more nonwhite than that). It's so ludicrous as to be deliberately insulting.

2) The whiteout (metaphorically):

This to me is the most unforgivable. The movie systematically cuts out or avoids the most controversial and compelling aspects of the book, as Astrid finds herself looking desperately for guidance and role models, and ending up being guided by the most dubious and even dangerous of people -- again, pretty realistic for someone bouncing their way through the L.A. county foster care system, or any foster care system for that matter. Fourteen-year-old Astrid having a sexual affair with a man nearly 50 years old? In the movie, he's made into the still-creepy but less-threatening 30something boyfriend, completely missing the point about Astrid seeking a father figure. Astrid's flirting with prostitution as she's both trying to seek attention and trying to emulate the prostitute who's become somewhat of a mentor? Gone. Her smoking pot with her various mentor figures? Gone. Her coming to a crucial epiphany while tripping on acid? Gone. Her ill-advised affair with yet another boyfriend of a foster mother, while she was flirting with the thief/hustler life that the foster mother was living? Gone.
Also not as controversial, but still gone, was the way that Astrid kept finding herself caring for others -- her foster "siblings," her foster mother Claire, her fellow foster kids -- when she was in so much need of care herself. Yes, much of the plot had to be trimmed down to fit it into movie length, but all of what was cut was anything that involved any kind of bravery or daring on the part of the filmmakers, who chose to go for a PG-13 rather than an R rating. Nobody should ever have allowed that to happen -- it forced the movie to lose much of what was unique and important but messy and controversial about the book.
And, Ingrid's character is cleaned up for the movie -- gone are the references to her sending a cellmate off to the SCU "babbling about witchcraft," her lists of amusing cruelties she'd love to commit, her opportunistic affair with another cellmate, etc. And the fuller context of her relationship with her daughter is gone, and any instances of Ingrid's scarce tenderness, what she did try to teach her daughter, etc, are left out, leaving the viewer with no way to understand why Ingrid is so dangerous or why Astrid even bothers with her at all.
Similarly, the language itself is ridiculously contrived in how it avoids R-rated profanity: can you really imagine a conversation in which a trashy, drunk woman is accusing her live-in boyfriend of an affair with a fourteen-year-old, and she cries out, "You've been screwing her"??? No -- she'd use the f-word.

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The Hollywood version of Los Angeles (!)

3) In L.A, everyone is blonde.

The character of Starr, who is never once portrayed as blonde is, of course, blonde in this movie. Not only that, but though there's no indication that she's from the South, she of course has a Southern accent -- this is supposed to indicate that she's a trashy character. Because, of course, former strippers and cocktail waitresses are never redheads or brunettes, and they always come from the South.
The same blonde-izing happens to Claire, who in the book is a brunette, and Yvonne, also a brunette, and Nikki, whose hair is dyed magenta/red. One reviewer called this "Blonde Oleander".


4) In L.A, nobody is poor.

In the book, Astrid and her mother live in sparse, bare surroundings, an austere environment commanded by Ingrid's ironclad aesthetic rules and by their poverty. They have little money and live in a studio apartment with the bed in the living room and Astrid's bed on the screened porch, in Hollywood (the actual city of Hollywood, despite being the center of the American movie empire, is not very wealthy and has a lot of problems with drugs and homelessness.) But no -- in the book, they live in a two-story, well-decorated home with nice furniture. Because in a Hollywood movie, nobody can be portrayed as poor.
A similar, and senseless, upgrade happens to the Richards' house -- the solidly middle-class, two-bedroom home in a middle-class and working-class neighborhood has become a fantastically expensive two-story beach home. And Rena's cluttered home has become literally and metaphorically cleaned up -- no more moving stolen merchandise for Rena's thief of a boyfriend, no more fire-dangerous clutter or battered kitchen full of takeout, and furniture nicer and less junky. Gone is the *visual metaphor* (hellooo!) of Astrid trying to find her way in a "mess without precedence," a home where she sleeps in her clothes in fear of the drunken partiers burning down the house with their candles and cigarettes, a home full of junk that Rena takes and gets money from -- the same way she takes and gets money from her foster children.


5) In L.A, all rich people live in beach houses, and everyone goes to the beach.

The book was an all-too-rare exploration of the wide variety and diversity of real L.A -- punks and homeless kids in Hollywood, trailer kids in Sunland, valley culture in Van Nuys, coffeehouses and artists' lofts downtown, the freeway-trapped ghetto of Frogtown, artsy middle-class life on Fairfax, hippies and tourists in Venice. Part of the novel is how Astrid learns to navigate all of these different worlds, as every time she is given a new placement, she finds herself in a totally different world within L.A.
Example: In the book, the Richards' house is a warm and inviting place painted in reds and whites and festooned with flowers -- a clear visual metaphor for Claire's desparate need for perfection in decorating, her desire for a warm nest, her "attention to rituals and rules", her cooking and cleaning to keep her husband home. Anyone not blinded by Hollywood stereotypes should have taken that (again!) visual metaphor and used it -- hello, film is a visual medium. Nope -- because in Hollywood, the only way to connote wealth and loneliness in a movie set in L.A. is a beach house, stark and white and open to the wind. Gone are all the different worlds, the cultural scenes, the extraordinarily wide and varied places one can be within L.A. The movie is just trailers, beach houses, and generic bungalows -- and the cloyingly obvious and cliched visual symbol of the beach (which hardly figures at all in the book). Same thing with the music -- music is, again, a fantastic and very important tool in movies, and it figures prominently in the book. Astrid's introduction to jazz and Billie Holliday, Claire's depression washed in Leonard Cohen, Rena's Russian-expatriate's obsession with 70s- and 80s- era glam rock (completely fitting with her hedonistic lifestyle): all that is gone in the movie, when it would have been so easy to incorporate it into the film as part of Astrid's journey and, again, a depiction of the various universes of L.A. In short, the book is full of visual metaphors (architecture, home decor, Astrid's art itself), layers of characterization and nuance of language, music, neighborhoods, etc -- that are completely squandered, flattened, changed, or disappeared. And this isn't some foreign city that is being depicted here. It's Los Angeles -- where everyone making the movie lives, and where the movie was shot. There's such an irony to this: the book's author, Janet Fitch, talks in an interview about how there are so many universes within L.A, that most of the time nobody sees, even if they've lived in L.A. their whole lives. And even after reading her book, the filmmakers still couldn't see it.