Books That Would Make Great Movies

Cafe Society
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After seeing DAREDEVIL the other week, it’s utter shittiness got me thinking about the complete waste of resources–60 million from what I hear–that was expended on that tripe. What could a better director, like Lynch or Kubrick, do with that amount of money? Kubrick supposedly spent his last twenty years frustrated that he couldn’t get the funding for his dream project, NAPOLEON. And I can’t imagine anyone handing 60 million dollars to David Lynch to make his dream project, an adaptation of Kafka’s METAMORPHOSIS. It’s a fucked up world. Anyway, here’s a list of books that just scream out make me into a movie.

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon–Pynchon fans will scream out “Sacrilege!” when I suggest this, but think about it for a minute. Aside from being the most influential book of the last 50 years, GR has a truly cinematic scope and Pynchon’s bizarre characters, some of them influenced by B-Movie villains, seem tailor-made for the movies. And thanks to the popularity of MEMENTO and MULHOLLAND DRIVE, audiences are getting used to odd structural devices being used in film. There are a few problems though. First, to realize the huge amount of imagery in that book–The Zone or the huge underground chamber where the V2 is built and that’s just scratching the surface–would require at least 200 million dollars and it’s hard to see anyone investing that kind of money in a book as bizzare and,as occasionally obscene GR (the Nazi coprophilia scene probably wouldn’t make it). Second, the movie would have to be over 6 hours long. Anyway, the chances of Pynchon selling the movie rights to GR are exactly zero, but, still, it’s fun to speculate.

PERFUME by Patrick Suskind–A S-Doper introduced me to this book over at my “Obscure/ Neglected Masterpieces of Literature thread”. It’s a beautiful, horrifying book and ends on an apocalyptic note that will take your breath away. The difficulty here would be to find a young actor freakish enough to play the main character. But Crispin Glover comes to mind.

BLINDNESS by Jose Saramango–This guy won the Nobel prize a while ago. BLINDNESS is a deeply disturbing book, a parable about a form of blindness that spreads like a disease, except for a single woman, first in a mental hospital and then throughout an entire city. Characters begin to live a brutal, Hobbesian existence, slaughtering each other for food and resources. It’s also quite relevant to the current geo-political climate.

FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM by Umberto Eco–15 years before Darren Aranofksy ripped off the idea for his movie PI, Eco wrote this popular novel about a secret, centuries old cult attmpting to use a computer to discover the mysterious name of the Hebrew god, a name supposedly known to only a few inititates over the centuries–those guarding the Ark of The Covenant. It’s true the book contains a wealth of learning and detail that might not translate to the screen, but it’s also a thrilling mystery that changes the way you look at history and the acquisition of knowledge.

So those are justa few. I would also mention Pynchon’s “V” and a live-action adaptation of Stephen King’s THE EYES OF THE DRAGON, which is a nearly perfect little book.

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The Alienist by Caleb Carr, a mystery novel set in New York in the late 19th Century, which has a reporter, an alienist (an early criminologist/profiler-type), and Teddy Roosevelt as the chief of police tracking a brutal serial killer, long before there was a term for such thing. The book perfectly captures the social divides of the Gilded Age, and features several historical figures in cameos. I’ve always thought it cried out for a big-screen treatment.

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As my sig testifies, I’m currently reading Patrick Wright’s wonderful social history of miltary tanks, and I think the section concerning the development and first use of British tanks (featuring crews hired from outside the military and characters such as an eccentric artist brought in to design camouflage schemes), with shell-shocked WW1 tankers went back to England to display their battle-scarred machines in promotion of war bonds, has the germ of a movie in it.

In a completely different vein, one of Iain M. Banks’ sci-fi novels is looooong past due for movie treatment; probably Consider Phlebas or Use of Weapons.

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When I finish the short film I’m working on now, I’m going to look into adapting James Thurber’s story “Nine Needles” into my next short.

By the way, My first name is Adam, middle initial P; the OP’s username is what my father and no one else calls me. I did a vertebra-popping doubletake when I saw it, thinking for a moment, “Did I post that?”

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Geek Love by Katherine Dunn I heard that Tim Burton wanted to take a stab at directing it. Tim Burton or David Lynch would be great in directing that movie about a family of chemically bred circus freaks and the meglomatic oldest brother, Arturo the Aqua-Boy.

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My Dad is a big Clive Cussler fan. He gave me one of a series to read (I don’t remember the title - something about body surfing down some underwater rapids or something) and the whole time I was reading it I wondered why this character wasn’t made into a movie. I didn’t think the book was all that great - too much action! action! action! for me, but I imagined it would transition easily enough into the big screen.

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Ooh, Geek Love would be terrific for David Lynch.

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Lovely Bones (can’t remember Author)

or

On the road - Jack Keroac.
Jack himself could be played by Robert DeNero, or maybe James Woods. Uma Thurman would make a great 2nd wife, or even first.
Throw in jude Law, John Cusack, Kevin Kline and Nicolas Cage as his band of misfitted mates and you have a classic!!
And a whole bunch of unknown actors to keep it real.

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Looks like they are going to do a movie based on Sahara. It was one of the better Cussler books so it may turn out OK.

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Tripmaster Monkey would make a fun movie. You could have a lot of fun with the theatre sequences and the girl who turns into a boar. The Dark is Rising books would make a great fantasy series, now that Harry Potter is making it more popular.

Of course, I’d also like to see a version of A Beautiful Mind that actually utilizes the book, instead of just lifting the names and a detail or two…

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Samuel R Delany’s Nova: space opera about a quest between good guys and bad guys to get Illyrion (a sought-after power source) from an exploding star. Neat multifarious characters, hissable villain, wonderful possibilties for FX - including conclusion with star going nova.

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Steven Gould’s Jumper and Wildside. I love those books, one about a kid who learns he can teleport (‘jump’), and another about a guy with a portal to a parallel world in his uncle’s barn. Both have lots of action, and there isn’t so much internal dialog that it would be awkward cutting or altering it to a movie’s format.

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Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius would make an excellent film, although I feel I would end up being disappointed because the movie never lives up to the wonderfulness of the book . . .

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I hope that this does the Iliad justice.

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Critique of Pure Reason

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I still can’t believe that Replay, by Ken Grimwood, one of my all time favorite ‘lite-reads’, hasn’t been made into a book*.

[sub][sup]* of course, I actually quite like anything that exudes the lost innocence of the late 50’s or early 60’s, especially when there’s sweetly colored cinematography of lush lawns and screen doors that creak open onto nostalgia (eg. Peggy Sue Got Married).[/sup][/sub]

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Of course, I meant to say "hasn’t been made into a movie.

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When we had a previous book swap on the board, I sent a copy of Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley. It’s a hilarious political satire with great dialogue and plot. I was casting it with actors as I was reading it. I can’t understand how it never got filmed.

And while I know one of the books was filmed, I’d also love to see the whole Flashman series done as an epic miniseries.

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I think Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent would make a beautiful movie.

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Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, set in a London where Dracula defeated Van Helsing and made vampirism fashionable, would make a terrific movie.