Could it be said that Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series became a little better-known upon the release of the Ramona and Beezus film last year? I think it could.
Perhaps among adults who somehow missed it or forgot about encountering it as children. Beverly Cleary’s books about Henry Huggins, Beezus, and Ramona have been mainstays of children’s literature since the Eisenhower administration.
Fantastic Voyage would qualify on this count. It was originally a story by Jerome Bixby* that was turned into a screenplay. The producers asked Isaac Asimov to novelize it. He did, but the book was released six months before the movie (Hollywood didn’t know how to handle tie-ins back then). The book didn’t sell particularly well until the movie came out (and people complained about how poorly they had adapted Asimov).
*You may not know his name, but you know his work if you’re a Twilight Zone fan. Bixby was a good writer and it was good that he wrote the story.
How about “Paul Clifford” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton? Granted the book isn’t read much but the “peanuts” comic strip and others have mad the phrase “It was a dark and story night” infamous.
This is a tough thread because, I think, most books that do get turned into a visual medium get their popularity boosted. Even genre-defining, fantastic books will get a popularity boost by an adaptation – Harry Potter was already a massive success as a book, but the film adaptations turned it into a huge cultural phenomenon. It’s hard to have people waiting in costume for midnight launches of a book if nobody’s quite defined what those costumes look like.
I’m trying to think of anything rescued from true obscurity by a succesful adaptation. Can’t think of anything immediately; most adaptations I’m aware of are made from bestsellers or critical darlings. In the cases I can think of where the source material is truly obscure (Roger Rabbit comes to mind), only the adaptation is really succesful.
I think the comics that Little Nemo mentioned are a good call, although it’s cheating a bit since comics are already a visual media. I’d also add Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the list – a violent, goofy, offbeat comic turned into a major cultural phenomenon by the TV show, but the comic (and comic universe) getting a popularity boost as a result.
Good Books, Better Movies:
Fight Club
Basic Instinct
The Rules of Attraction
In the Cut
Bad Books, Worse Movies:
The Beach
Striptease
Meh book, good movie: Jaws.
Sex and the City comes to mind, although I’m not sure how well the book actually sold before the TV show aired. They managed to make a great TV show out of a terrible book.
It really amazed me how terrible the Jaws book is.
I mean, obviously, Mrs. Brody wanting to be raped by a black man is much more interesting than a giant killer shark and the crazy shark hunter who goes after it.
Sure it was a best seller – for books. It hardly matters, if the movie is at all popular, it will be seen or talked about by 10x the number of people who know about the book. It’s just the nature of the medium, or perhaps the nature of the marketing of the medium.
I can hardly think of a book that wouldn’t be given a big boost by a successful movie. Maybe the bible – hard to imagine the bible would have an impressive jump in sales.
Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption were both Stephen King stories. Both excellent reads, but don’t know how popular they were before the movies came out. It’s pretty much impossible not to hear the voice of Morgan Freeman when reading Shawshank now…
A Song of Ice and Fire, I think, hit the mainstream once the HBO version came out (judging by whether my sister had heard of it, which is how I usually judge such matters).
I personally had never heard of the book Ragtime (though I had heard of Doctorow) before the musical came out… I still like the musical better.
As sometimes noted above, many of these were immensely popular as books before the adaptations. James Bond was not only popular because of JFK’s endorsement, they were very popular beforehand – if they hadn’t been, Fleming couldn;'t have written and published so many of them. Casino Roylae was adapted for televisiion in 1954!
Jaws was on the bestseller listm, as noted. Wicked wasn’t exactly unknown – I was aware of it well before the play came out, and it was selling pretty briskly in a trade-paperback edition. It didn’t need the play to become a success. I wouldn’t characterize it as “barely a cult following.”
I might say that of Philip K. Dick – although well-known in the science fiction community, I don’t think he made much of a dent in mainstream audiences until they started basing movies on his books (and changing them outrageously. Although Dick is famed for his is it live or is it unreal plots, that is not present in several of his stories that have been turned into films.)
A correctiion to the usually-accurate (especially onscience fiction) Reality Chuck – Jerome Bixby (who also wrote the excellent It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which deserves to be much better known, and IMHO is a helluva lot better than Alien). Otto Klement wrote the original, apparently as a periood piece, and Bixby rewrote and updated it to present day. When the Asimov novelization came out, my recollection is that every edition of it carried a notice that it was a forthcoming movie, and that Klement and Bixby wrote the screenplay. People who thought the movie was a bad adaptation of Asimov weren’t paying attention. By the way, that book, like Planet of the Apes and 2001, remained in print forever, it seems, with the same cover saying that it was also a movie.
Other cases of stories probably not well known until the movie:
they Live — I never heard of ray Nelson or Eight O’Clock in the Morning untuil this came out.
The Thirteenth Floor – Similarly, never heard of Daniel F. Galouye and Simulacron 3 before this (even though Werner Fassbinder had turned it into a German TV movie
Who Framed Roger Rabbit – I had seen and read Gary Wolfe’s Who Censored Roger rabbit? before this came out, but I’m pretty sure that in this case I was in the minority
** Touch of Evil** – I understand Orson Welles deliberately chose the obscure Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson for this film.
Rear Window – Cornell Woolrich wasn’t exactly unknown, nor were his stories, but I’ll bet this one got a big boost when Hitchcock filmed it.
The Bride Wore Black – Frqancois Truffaut’s tribute to Hitch used another story by Woolrich that undoubtedly gave it a boost. (He used composed Bernard Herrman to do the score, to, one of Hitchcock’s composers)
2001 – How many people heard of Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sentinel before the movie came out?
Then I guess you weren’t aware that it was made into a movie a decade and a half before it was adapted for the stage?
And notable for being James Cagney’s first theatrical movie in the previous twenty years (as well as his last).
Kids these days…mumble, mumble…
Martin Caidin’s book Cyborg was by no means unheard of, but the TV show based on it is iconic for it’s era: The Six-Million Dollar Man.
Nope. The Princess Bride - the book - was published in 1973, while the movie of the same name came out in 1987.
As far as I know, you’re right about 2001, though.
Atonement
The short story that became the basis for Brokeback Mountain (for all I know, that was the name of the story as well)
Both IMHO, of course…
I don’t think the Sookie Stackhouse books count. Those books were Danielle Steele levels of popular for years before the TV show.
It surprises me every year how many movies are based on other source material. (I don’t know why it still surprises me, but it does.) I wish I could remember some of those surprises now. We’ll be watching the opening credits and at least half the movies we choose to watch are based on a book.
I suppose Castle would be the opposite sort of thing. The books were written by ghost writers as a tie in for the tv show. (I’m assuming on the ghost writer thing. I suppose Nathan Fillion could have time in his life to write books that quickly.)
They were published in the same volume, Different Seasons (along with Apt Pupil, also made in to a movie, which bombed). Because it was by Stephen King at the height of his fame, the book sold well.
They were mildly popular, but “Danielle Steel popular” is a level the Sookie Stackhouse books never sniffed until the TV show premiered.