Books You'd Like To See Made Into Film
 

I've got a quite a few rattling around but I'll start with these from my sci-fi bend -

A Wrinkle In Time -

Seems like the natural progession now that Narnia Chronicles & The Hobbit are underway, The LOTR is complete, and The Last Mimzy is coming. One of my favorite stories growing up.

Neuromancer -

Still one of my alltime Gibson favorites although "The Idoru" set comes close to displacing it.

Hyperion -

This one moved the bar for me on malevolent machine intellect.

What are your choices?

"Warday" by Whitley Strieber & Jim Kunetka. A novel set 5 years after WW3, it is done in a quasi-documentary style. New York got it, of course, Washington got turned into glass, as did the missile fields in the Dakotas. The South & California remained pretty much unscathed, except for San Antonio, Texas. The war only lasted about 1/2 an hour, after Washington & Moscow blasted each other it was over. It now seems fairly quaint, as it was written 1983 when the Soviet Union was still very much in business. Due to EMP damage, most of the solid-state electronics were rendered inoperable, most cars didn't work due to electronic ignitions being fried. Another one was "Guns of the South" which was a "What if?" novel, by Harry Turtledove. In it, white supremacists from the future go back in time, & give Gen. Rob't E. Lee & the Army of Northern Virginia AK-47s...The 1st part is pretty much fun, as Bobby Lee & Co. get to soundly thrash the Yankees-Hehehehe-but the 2nd half is kinda preachy about slavery & all that. I'd like to see 'em give Gen Patton about 5 B-52s & 2 or 3 companies' worth of M1A1 Abrams & see how fast he coulda won WW2...

I was just thinking about "Warday" today as I was reading "The Road". Nuclear hell aftermath. I'd go for "Guns of the South" too. Enjoyable read as Turtledove usually is.

After London, by the Victorian era nature writer Richard Jefferies. It was one of THE first science fiction books...even before some of HG Wells' classics. The story of London (and Great Britain) after some kind of worldwide disaster...natural or manmade. Jefferies also wrote his remarkable mystic autobiography, The Story of My Heart, shortly before his death in the late 1880s.

Like many other now public domain works, it's available here at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13944
The Victorian era writing takes some getting used to, but stick with it.

I'm going to have to check out Jefferiers.

I was thinking HG Wells myself.

Tono Bungay, likely his best novel and not science fiction. It's about the end of Victorian England and the rise of industrialism.

Or as it's sez here

http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/tonobungay/

I read it here first, I now own the book. It inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams "London Symphony".

Again Victorian English is a pill but well worth it.

I'm off to read "After London", I love this era.

After London is REALLY special as a First Edition, and even a late 19th C reprint. There's just something about an old book.

The Pageant of Summer is pretty special too, but not as a movie: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/414

The Story of My Heart is here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2317

The complete Arkady Renko series from Martin Cruz Smith. Gorky Park was made into a so-so movie, but I bet all of them would be great with some effort.

Always thought that Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness would make a terrific film, in the right hands of course. Last weekend,one of my twins said some decent director (don't remember who, I'm not a follower of cinema at all) has it on his plate as a future project, finally.

I swear I had this very thought a few days ago.

Not Decent, excellent is more like it. http://www.deltorofilms.com/ProjectPage.php?projectid=9

1000 Destroyed

The Life and Times of the 4th Fighter Group.

Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov....

Atlas Shrugged

L. Ron Hubbards' "Mission Earth" dekology.

I think it would make a great 2 or 3 part movie.
Definately, one of my all time favorite stories.
Full of plot twists, action, and political controversy.
Heh.
I've read it twice.....
And i'm working on the third time.
Mostly because I gleen new information from it every time I read it as i get older.

You know.....wisdom, savvy and all. :)

It's a true sci-fi satire..
....and at 1.2 million words, could be edited to any given degree.
Literally.


Regards,
John.

"The Earth Abides"- A plague kills 99.99% of the people on earth. The people and domestic animals have to cope with a new reality.. Great read!

Del Toro is the best of all possible worlds as a choice for director of this material.But did you see the note about the studio wanting to add a love store,but the director told them to get lost.
Jimmy

That is a perfect story to put to film or digits. Probably one of the most disturbing & intriguing stories I've read. Did not know it was being made into a movie either. Del Toro is a good choice although Ridley Scott's work certainly comes to mind. When the ancient beings are first described I could not help but think of H.R. Giger & the foreboding tension of Alien.

somebody above mentioned The Road, by C. McCarthy--i think it is already in development. i am a long time Cormac obsessive, and would nominate Blood Meridian as the book i'd most like to see made film. by the right directors of course.

and The Road, FWIW, is probably THE most gripping, wrenching, spooked, agonizing, can't put it down/must put it down, hurry up and get it over with so you can go back to normal life books i have EVER read. when i finished the last sentence, i almost literally threw it down and stared at it for about 5 minutes.

Cryptonomicon -- this, in particular, would translate well onto the big screen, there's some very Indiana Jones type action in there
Snowcrash -- I've already rewritten a scene to translate it to movie

Ringworld--Larry Niven. Who would you cast as Louis Wu?
The Mote in God's Eye--Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Still my favorite re: alien first contact.
City--Clifford D. Simak. Humans are pretty much legends---smart dogs and robots inhabit the Earth.
Rendezvous With Rama--Arthur C. Clarke. Would be spectacular.
The whole dragonrider thing from Anne McCaffrey would be a CGI-fest.

I'd like to see "A Catcher in the Rye" made into a movie, but Salinger has never released the movie rights. And if it WAS made into a movie, would you set it in 1949-50, or 2007 ?

When I read that book the state of the art for special effect's would have never been able to do it. They can now.:D It would be spectacular.

What always stands out in my mind is that the people are the same as they are today. Society is different, but people remain the same.

I'm an HG Wells fan and I'm always struck by the fact that these storys were often written a century (or more) ago. Replace the telegraph with the internet and it's 2007. The books may be old but the story is still fresh.

Anything by Heinlein.

Stranger in a Strange Land would be incredible. I've always imagined Danny Devito could play an excellent Jubal Harshaw.
Any of the Lazurus Long books, too. They could have a Bond-like mega-series from these!

Goodbye to a River
- John Graves (WWII Marine vet takes a month-long canoe trip with a dachsund)

Grendel
- John Gardner (The Beowulf monster as hero)

Gravity's Rainbow
- Thomas Pynchon (V-2s, and post-war Germany, and some 400 characters)

The Oath
- Frank Peretti (evil and a dragon live in the Cascade Mountains)

Hard to believe, or should I say grok, that this one has not been made into a movie.

I am indeed among friends. I'll reread this one every 5 years or so. (Crazy Eddie is not a former NY hifi merchant.)

Staying in the Niven/Pournelle theme, I'll add Lucifer's Hammer.

Diamond Age too. I was not real enamored with it the first time through but decided to read it again and could not put it down. Amazing how frame of mind affects your inital take.

Speaking of Heinlein-"Door Into Summer"

Say no more about it. I am not finished with it yet. I'm at the point where they found the bunker and have real food again.

I've noticed that there are a number of post apocalypse story fans -

Post Apocalyptic Fiction

This is a great resource for books and films. Some of the websites listed catalog foreign works as well.

"The Second Son" by Charles Sailor

Read some of the Amazon.com reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/Second-Son-Cha.../dp/0380455676

My copy, I believe, is the second printing and it says on the back "Soon to be a major motion picture by MGM" or somebody. It never became a motion picture.

Rumor has it, this book was ready to become a movie and the Catholic Church stepped in and payed the author some ungodly (no pun intended) amount of money to not only keep it from becoming a movie, but to take it off the shelves completely!!!

Weird huh....... :scratch2:




Retro

Apocalyptic? Then why not Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins? For that matter, it's hard to believe that NONE of Percy's works have received movie treatment.

Dhalgren ~ Samuel R. Delany. First read that as a teenager and it was probably as mind expanding as psychodelic drugs. I doubt they could do it justice in a film's time limitations, and it'd be even worse if they cut it down for TV.

oh, my goodness, scorpion!! cannot believe you mentioned Dhalgren, the only other book i've ever read that comes close to The Road in recreating a mysterious post apocalypse that is at once utterly surreal and horrifying and totally familiar and believable at the same time. it has always seemed to me that you could go out and mention the book to a thousand people and never come across another sould who's read it. am always kinda stunned when i come across another reader. i think i've met about 3 or 4 people in the 30 years or so since i read it first who have also read it. now another. have you read other Delany stuff? i used to be absolutely crazy about the guy, and read everything i could find, but its been a while now. somewhere around age 30, i lost the sci fi thing.

It's interesting to note the definite lean towards SF in this thread. I have no idea what it means...but it's still interesting.
To toss a couple more in the hopper:
It would take a most talented screenwriter to effectively translate "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner to the screen. Gotta dig that one oout and re-read it for the umpteenth time.
My wife isn't particularly a big SF fan, but one night, she was searching for something to read herself to sleep by. I handed her "The World Inside" by Robert Silverberg. Needless to say, she didn't get a heckuva lot of sleep that night.
The CGI crew would have a field day with "Cities in Flight" by James Blish. The island of Manhattan as an interstellar craft, anyone?
There's a LOT of C.J. Cherryh's work that would look good on the big screen, too.

"Dhalgren" !! I thought I'd made that one up...I read something about that book 25 yrs ago & decided I'd just dreamed it up-NOTHING could be THAT "off-the-wall"...I may have to get that book & try to read it...Sounds like sort of a REAL "Mind-Pheck"...

I have to second that one. great story ...sometimes hard to follow ...but that could be made up with graffix.

Using a lot of CGI...it could be made into a story much like star wars...but there would have to be more action scenes...and some kind of romance...if not all out... er...stuff!:D :smsex:

As for the roles ...Christopher Ecclelston(sp)..as Louis Wu...some unknown blond as Prill...dont ask me to try to spell her full name ... its six sylibles ...

Some of the best shots and effects would be of the Ringworld itself... Trying to imagine it while reading it 25 years ago left a wild image in my minds eye.. and I would love it on the big screen. Just think ...The Fist Of God...a mountain bigger than the earth itself!...

Have not read Dhalgren yet. I've got it and it taunts me. Maybe on my next long plane ride. I've still got the PB I bought in the late 70's and never cracked.

Stand On Zanzibar, oh man what a book. Brunner was brilliant. SoZ is amazing in how contemporary it is. Check out Total Eclipse by Brunner too. Warning, you may be compelled to slash your wrists.

I've never come across Walker Percy before. After reading some of the reviews I am really surprised. Oh well, another one for the to do list.

Walker Percy was a genius. Period.

Totally concur.

He has to be my favorite modern novelist. I reread his novels about every 10 years.

The Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan seem made for movies. I've read Altered Carbon and Broken Angels.

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester would be a visual feast.

And to see Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness as a movie could spawn plently of nightmares.

If any of Jorge Luis Borges' tales have been made into movies, I have failed to notice, but several have the potential, perhaps as a group of related short reels.