'How did they ever make a movie of "Lolita?" '

The Novel to Screen Film Festival will examine three National Book Award nominees alongside their screen adaptations in New York next month.

It was in 1962 – three years after the novel received a National Book Award nomination – that Stanley Kubrick's film version of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" was released. Kubrick later said that, had he realized how tough it would be to get past the censors, he probably never would have made the movie.

But he did. And next month his achievement will be honored at the first Novel to Screen Film Festival, created by the National Book Foundation and the Pratt Institute. The inaugural festival will be held on April 4-5 on the Manhattan campus of Pratt, to celebrate Kubrick's "Lolita" and two other movie adaptations of National Book Award nominees. The three movies will be screened and each will be followed by a panel discussion by actors, writers, filmmakers, critics, and scholars who will consider the faithfulness of the adaptation.

On the 4th, Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of  Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" will be screened.  Both Warren Miller's "The Cool World" (adaptation by Shirley Clark) and Brian Selznick's "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" ("Hugo" adapted by Martin Scorsese) will be screened on the 5th.

The film version of "The Cool World" – a 1960 National Book Award nominee – was released in 1964. "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" was a 2007 National Book Award for Young People's Literature finalist. The film version – Scorsese's "Hugo" – was released in 2011 and was nominated for 11 Academy Awards.

Of the three, "Lolita" is the only one for which book's author also wrote the screenplay. Nabokov received an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation.

The National Book Award website says, "All screenings are free and open to the public, but seats are limited. To reserve your seat, send an email to Sherrie Young at syoung@nationalbook.org with “RSVP for Novel-to-Screen” in the subject line."