Adapting My Book

My book two is The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. For those of you who haven't read it this is an amazing book about a symbologist named Robert Langdon. He is mysteriously awakened in the middle of the night by the French police.They demand that he come to help them analyze the death of the curator of the Louvre who has painted puzzling symbols and arranged himself in painful positions in order to send a message to his granddaughter, Sophie Neveu, a decoder for the French Police. However the police misinterpret "P.S. Find Robert Langdon" and Langdon is accused of the murder. Sophie and he must now run from the law while trying to solve the murder and decode Sophie's grandfather's final message.
Difficulties of adapting this to screen would be the fact that the curator is naked, Sophie and Langdon go through a stripper street and the length of the book. The first two obviously either need to be taken out or somehow "fixed" so that a pg13 audience is able to see it or the filmmakers risk losing money. As for the last one, it again makes them take scenes out of the book that readers may have liked but since it didn't drive the plot it was found useless by the directors. This brings down ratings and causes the story to lose a little which is often felt by the audience.
The three scenes that have to be kept are when Langdon sees the body, the discovery of a betrayal, and the final resolution. In case you wish to read this book I won't go into too much detail for the last two scenes. The first one is where Langdon meets Sophie and the plot is started by giving them a mission and an extra little challenge, solve the murder, decode the curator's clues, and evade the police while you're at it. This begins the book and sets the action filled pace of this book. The second scene, the betrayal, is equally important because it gives Langdon a huge choice to be able to reveal the Holy Grail or keep it hidden as the Priory of Sion seems to want. This scene allows for us to finally get a good idea of where Langdon stands and who he feels loyal to at the moment. The resolution is important for obvious reasons, it ties the plot together and was actually satisfying. It was a good ending and deserves to be kept. I would say more but I don't want to spoil anything.
Two scenes that would have to be cut from the book in order to fit time for the main plot would be Langdon's flashbacks of his lesson's at Harvard would have to go and so would Aringarosa's, a bishop, little scene where he is debating the morals of what he has been forced to do to hopefully keep his denomination as part of the Catholic Church. The first was added into the book to help us to understand Langdon better and gain more background knowledge behnind the symbols. While this is valuable they take up a lot of time and don't drive the plot making them incompatible with the screen. Aringarosa's dilemma on the plane is explained elsewhere in other, more exciting, scenes rendering this one unnecessary and time consuming. Because of this, and the fact that the audience cannot of course read his mind, makes this one of the more ideal cuts.