Film adaptations that influenced the original source material

I was struck by a quote in one of the other threads, about the various adaptations of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The television version starred Alec Guinness, who nailed the role of George Smiley, and…

QUOTE
*Le Carré was so impressed by Guinness’s performance as Smiley that he based his characterisation of Smiley in subsequent novels on Guinness.
*UNQUOTE

You can write é by pressing alt-gr and e, at least on my keyboard. That way you can type John Le Carré fluently, like a native. One of the few good uses for the alt-gr key there. It’s a shame that alt-gr plus o equals ó, and not ö, because it pleases me more to use the letter ö than the letter ó. In fact ó freaks me out. It looks like Tintin’s face, but without any facial features. Just a blank white space. And that’s sinister. But, yes, I’m fascinated to know if there are any other interesting cases where a film or television adaptation of a source text has influenced subsequent instalments or revisions of that text.

My first thought was the James Bond novels, but as far as I know Ian Fleming completely avoided cross-pollination with the Connery films. All but one of the novels he wrote post-1962 were radically different in tone and style from the film series - they were much darker and more turgid. The exception, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, was adapted for the screen almost verbatim, which meant that the resulting film was out of sync with the movie milieu (seriously - You Only Live Twice is a fun cartoon, Diamonds Are Forever is absolutely effing awful because nothing happens and it looks like a TV movie, whereas OHMSS is awesome). And even in the 1980s the new novel series was a lot more serious in tone than the Moore films. So James Bond, no. The first long-running film/novel series I can think of where both strands existed in parallel.

The oddest one-off I can think of is the case of Dr Strangelove. Peter George wrote the original novel, which was Two Hours to Doom in the UK, Red Alert in the US, and it was deadly serious. Stanley Kubrick decided to turn it into a film, and hired George to help write the screenplay, although it didn’t work out, and Kubrick eventually turned the film into a comedy. George the wrote the novelisation of Kubrick’s version of Strangelove (presumably as some kind of contractual obligation), which apparently stuck quite close to the Kubrick script, and has gone on to completely obliterate the memory of George’s original book.

(which was very different. The base captain is Brigadier General Quinten, not Ripper, and he’s not nearly as mad. He’s dying of a genuine terminal disease, presumably cancer. He hates the Russians, not because they’re perverting his bodily fluids, but because of their actions in Hungary and Eastern Europe. Buck Turgidson is called Franklin, and although the basic thrust of his character is still the same - he’s callously confident that his B52s will deal the Soviet Union a crippling blow - he’s played straight. The President knows already that the Russians have a doomsday device; he was apparently told by his predecessor, and when the Joint Chiefs recommend reinforcing the accidental attack against the Russians he uses his knowledge of the doomsday bomb to strike their plan down. The ending is slightly happier.)

No, hang on. 2010. The book of 2001 had the Discovery going off to Saturn, and Japetus. The film changed this to Jupiter, and Clarke ran with that for 2010. Logically the film of Clarke’s book of 2010 should have moved sunwards one planet again and set everything around Mars. There was the “full of stars” line, too, which was in the film of 2010 but not 2001, although everybody pretended that it was (brain explodes)

Fleming changed his mind after the successful Dr. No premiere; he was so impressed, he created a half-Scottish, half-Swiss heritage for the literary James Bond in the later novels.

I think one of the most interesting examples is Jurassic Park. In the original novel, Ian Malcolm dies at the end.

The movie gets made - Malcolm survives.

Michael Crichton writes The Lost World and oh! Malcolm’s back through a little bit of fun retconing in the beginning of the novel - apparently he was only “pronounced dead a number of times”.

Not true, as the film was not based on the book.

The film and the book were created simultaneously, with minimal communication between Clarke and Kubrick.

They were both based on a treatment Clarke and Kubrick wrote, itself based (relatively loosely) on Clarke’s earlier short story, The Sentinel*, and the book was released later. (Not sure if that was deliberate, or if Clarke just worked more slowly than Kubrick.)

  • I’m not sure where the treatment had it set - possibly the moon, as that was the setting for The Sentinel.

Slightly?

I think J K Rowling mentioned being influenced by Daniel Radcliffe’s growth spurt (and Hermione’s actress attractiveness), but I find that odd because he’s fairly short even now.

If what you’re calling “not true” here is that the film changed Discovery’s destination from what it was in the book, okay, as technically the two works just took different paths. But I think the original point (in the spirit of the OP) was that the book 2010: Odyssey Two simply ignored the fact that Discovery went to Saturn in the original book. Clarke states outright in the introduction that he consciously made this change to match what Kubrick did in the film.

Fleming mentions in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service that Ursula Andress, who is skiing near Piz Gloria, looks as if she has a tan. This was right after they made the film Dr. no, in which she starred. It’s the only case I know of where Fleming acknowledged the films in his written work.

Actually, my friend, who is a Bond-o-phile, has suggested that the television version of Casino Royale, which appeared on the US series Climax! in 1954, influenced the character of Bond. Most critics ignore this show, or dismiss it, but there is something interesting about it – James Bond (“Jimmy Bond” in the show) makes wisecracks and tosses off witticisms in the face of danger. (“Are you the man who was shot?” “No, I’m the guy who was missed.”)

Bond didn’t do that in the book Casino Royale. Bond is a cold operative and killer. The bon mots he is known for in the films did not appear in the early books. But after Climax!, he started to develop a sense of humor.
Craig Thomas, thriller writer, acknowledged the quality of Clint Eastwood’s Firefox, and clearly based his sequel, Firefox Down, in part on the visualization of the movie.

James Cameron stated that he hated the novelizations of his movies, especially Aliens. He swore that he wasn’t going to toss off another novelization to a hack writer*. So when he was doing The Abyss he brought in SF writer Orson Scott Card to write a novel of his movie, but he insists, in the foreword to the book, that it isn’t a “novelization”. He acknowledges that Card came up with better characterization and backstory on the characters, and gave copies of the book-in-progress to the actors, for them to use in defining their performances. Very clearly the film and the book influenced each other.

*presumably Alan Dean Foster, the king of mvie novelizations.

Hermione’s buck teeth were fixed in a book that was published before the first film even began filming.

John Mortimer’s “Rumpole” stories were strongly influenced by the casting of Leo McKern as Rumpole. Mortimer wrote:
“He not only played the character Rumpole, he added to it, brightened it and brought it fully to life.”

My point is that’s not the spirit of the OP, since the book was not the source material - it’s closer to the truth that the change in 2010 brought the book side of the series closer to the source material, since the whole project started with the movie, which was released first, even after the book was added.

Not exactly a film, but three characters from the Batman: The Animated Series ended up being introduced and used in the Batman comics. Harley Quinn, Lock-Up, and Detective Renee Montoya.

Harley even had her own comic series for awhile.

Feedback between the comics and other media happens a lot - Kryptonite, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White came from the radio show and moved to the comic. More recently, Chloe Sullivan (created for “Smallville”) was introduced to the comics

Let’s not forget Roxy Rocket!

I’ve noticed that the some of the covers of the Dune knockoffs feature Fremen wearing the stillsuits designed for David Lynch’s movie. Having read one of those, I figure the stillsuit design is the best part.

In A Few Good Men, the original play had Caffee pulling the actual flight logs out of his hat in the courtroom. For the movie, director Rob Reiner told writer Aaron Sorkin “I could win the case with this plot!” Sorkin rewrote the scene with the two bogus witnesses and a colossal bluff; then he went back and rewrote the ending of his play.

Many comic book movies make changes that the comics themselves go on to adapt, if only for a little while: Spider-Man’s organic web shooters, the X-Men’s leather uniforms, Superman’s still-living foster parents, Batman’s costume, Iron Man’s plug-and-play heart and power source, Captain America’s wartime costume. I hope Thor embraces its film’s multi-ethnic Asgardians (It makes perfect sense for Odin to adopt survivors of pantheons that he has conquered) and the characterizations of the Warriors Three.

This is really obscure but after the film Hunt for Red October came out and they cast sonar-man Jonesy as black, in Clancy’s next Ryan novel (Sum of All Fears I think) there’s an exchange between his former Sub capt and Ryan alluding to, “guys like him have a tough road to promotions…”

As an aside it sucked when Baldwin bailed after one film cause after that, when I read the next Ryan novels I couldn’t help but still imagine it being him while reading them! Plus he was better than Ford (I’ve never even bothered watching Affleck’s turn). Damn commie-liberal Baldwin…

Not a movie, but the book of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was adapted (by its author) into a successful TV series, which continued into a second and third series. Each of those latter seasons had a subsequent book adaptation (the reverse of the former) and this time the dialogue was clearly modelled on the actors who were cast in the series, most obviously Leonard Rossiter and John Barron.

Richard Donner’s Superman movie, AIUI, established the look of Krypton as being composed of giant crystals, which carried over into a lot of the comics.

Cabaret, the film, influenced most subsequent productions of Cabaret, the musical.