I recently read and re-watched the book and the movie "Seabiscuit" (I had seen the movie on an airplane a few months ago, but you know how it is with movies on airplanes), and I found them to have an interesting book-movie relationship.

I have graduated from the mindset that believes that movies based on books should resemble the book as closely as possible (one has only to see the original "Harry Potter" movie to see how that can be a very bad idea).  I now understand that the different media have different requirements and different things that can and should be done to advance the story.  Books by their nature offer more opportunity for detail and complexity.  Movies require exciting scenes every now and then to keep your attention.

The book "Seabiscuit" (which is a pure nonfiction history of actual events), of course, has a lot more detail than the movie.  But what I found was the most interesting thing was the fact that most of the big things that were left out of the movie were the very things that made the story in the book so compelling.  They might have made the movie a little more compelling, but they also would have made it longer and clunkier--it was right to leave them out.

For example, Red Pollard, the jockey, got hurt not once but twice.  He had to make two comebacks.  And when Seabiscuit was chasing War Admiral, asking for a match race, they actually entered Seabiscuit in a lot of races War Admiral was in, but had to scratch because of dangerous track conditions or Seabiscuit's health.  They even had the match race all set up, but Seabiscuit pulled out because they thought he was hurt.  The bitter irony was that Seabiscuit kept hounding War Admiral for a race, but then kept pulling out every time he got the chance.  That, of course, incensed the public and made the match race an even bigger deal when it did happen.

The movie certainly is better for not including those extra facts (and even for adding falsehoods like Pollard openly declaring his half-blindness (the existence of which is only speculated by the book's author) and Seabiscuit sustaining his career-threatening injury in a competitive race), but I just thought it was a little odd that the movie had to exclude compelling pieces of the story in order to make a better film.