Summer of '42, Love Story, and 2001 are all dubiously novelizations. In each case, the screenwriter wrote and published the novel before the movie came out, although probably the screenplay was finished first. The screenwriter may or may not have thought of the novel as being just an afterthought. I would only call it a novelization if the novel is written by someone unconnected to the screenplay or if it was written by the screenwriter after the movie came out.
Alan Dean Foster is the King of Novelizations. I’m sure he’s done more than anyone else.
Officially, George Lucas wrote the novelization of Star Wars, but persistent rumor has been that Foster really wrote it. Heck, it reads like Fostoer’s stuff. And Foster wrote the very first Star Wars novel (Splinter of the Mind’s Eye) , which came out well before the second movie, and which read like the Star Wars novelization.
I haven’t read Fostoer’s novelization of Alien, but I have read some of his others, and I haven’t been all that thrilled (even though I do like his original works). As I observed above, James Cameron evidently didn’t like the stuff Foster did with his other movies.
All the Star Wars Novelisations were published before the movie with the exception I think of the Phantom Menace. All of them were based upon George Lucas’s ideas and he was closely involved in all.
Indeed its not uncommon for novelisations and “making off specials” to be published before the movie is released.
Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, by Fritz Leiber, based on the 1966 Sy Weintraub movie. One of the rare Tarzan adaptations authorized by Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. It doesn’t read like ERB, but it’s not bad.I like it better than the authorized Tarzans by Philip Jose Farmer or Joe R. Lansdale.
As a kid I read William Kotzwinkle’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial many times, enjoyed it more than the film, really filled in a lot of gaps.
Another good one for Alan Dean Foster is his novelisation of The Thing which has some extra stuff not included in the movie, a good read (and it will only take an afternoon to get through).
I hated the film 2001: A Space Odyssey until I read the novel and found out what the hell was going on with the Star Child.
One other in similar vein. Arthur Conan-Doyle wrote a one act Sherlock Holmes play “The Crown Diamond”, which he later adapted into a short story, The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone. The story is written from the audience POV, rather than an account by Watson.
Believe it or not the novelization for Flash Gordon, by Arthur Byron Cover is worth the read. While it follows the plot well Cover (of whom, other than this, I have not heard) fills in some great lines about Flash’s football career and other characters.
It does include this HILARIOUS bit during the reunion of Flash and Dale in Vultan’s throne room:
The run together…
Flash: Save 'em for our kids.
Dale, thinking: Kids? Should I tell him about my operation? Oh, he’s a liberal. He’ll understand.
Dale, speaking: Ooo, I accept.
I’m telling you, that is some quality funny.
Well, it’s not that confusing. Fleming had sold the movie rights to his novels to Cubby Broccoli (except the first one, Casino Royale, which he’d sold for a pittance long before and which had been made into a little-known TV movie) and saw that potentially serious money was in writing the screenplays directly, so he took a series of meetings with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, at which they kicked around a number of ideas including one about a criminal organization stealing an atomic bomb for high-stakes blackmail. Fleming, needing an idea for his newest novel, ended up using this work-product (which didn’t belong exclusively to him) as the basis of Thunderball. Broccoli claimed he now had the movie rights to these ideas as part of his agreement (and, I gather, he preferred the idea of international criminals as bad guys instead of Russians) which kicked off the legal battle that led to the oddball authorship of Thunderball (it is always given as “Based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and Ian Fleming”) and, eventually, to Never Say Never Again.
AK84 writes:
> All the Star Wars Novelisations were published before the movie with the
> exception I think of the Phantom Menace. All of them were based upon George
> Lucas’s ideas and he was closely involved in all.
Then by my definition, they’re novelizations. They weren’t written by the screenwriter. If anything, all this shows is that there isn’t a clear line between novelizations and novels which are adapted into films. Consider the following examples: An author writes a novel. He shelves it for a few years because he’s not satisfied with it. Or he submits it to publishers and is rejected. Several years later he writes a screenplay which is made into a film. He arranges to get the novel published around the time the movie comes out. Or perhaps he changes a few things in the novel before it’s published to fit the plot of the movie better. Or perhaps a ghost writer changes a few things in the novel for the same reason. Or perhaps the ghost writer reads the novel and the screenplay and completely rewrites the novel. There’s no clear difference between novelizations and novels adapted to movies. The categories blend into each other.
I loved novelizations when I was younger; I remember reading and enjoying Twilight Zone: The Movie: The Book in particular, and I’m pretty sure I also read a novelization of Krull. I also read the Gremlins book, which contained interesting details about the Mogwai’s background; apparently they’re an alien species, big surprise, and only about 1 in a thousand is “good”, like Gizmo, rather than destructive. There was one scene I can recall that involved Stripe experimenting with the rules, finding that sunlight was deadly; he came to Gizmo grinning, saying, “Clorr is dead.”
One book that really stands out for me was The Dark Crystal, which had several details not in the film, such as the names of the individual Skeksis and urRu (who are just called “Mystics” in the film) and had the Skeksis speaking their own language, which was apparently the original intent in the movie, but they ditched the idea because their likely audience members weren’t big readers yet.
:smack:
The post-Fleming Bond novelizations are interesting. They publisahed *Diamonds are Forever[/io] as a movie tie-in, despite the fact that the movie plot had almost nothing to do with the novel. They even put the movie poster on as a cover. It was the last Fleming novel, AFAIK, to be published as a Bond movie tie-in (To the best of my recollection all the others had been puvlished as tie-ins, with the exception of You Ony Live Twice. This one diverged sharply from the film, as well.)
When Christopher Wood’s two Bond films, Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me came out, they had tie-ins, too. These were the first Bond novelizations written as tie-ins to the films, rather than reprints of Fleming, and Wood himself wrote them. The Wood films were the worst and most puerile of the Bond films, but his novels are actually better than the films. Fortunately, Wood had nothing to do with the later Bond films, going on to script the even more puerile Remo Williams … the Adventure Begins. Wood didn’t try to rewrite the Sapir and Murphy Destroyer books, though.
John Gardner, who had been doing the “new” Bond books, did the nove,lization for License to Kill. It added characterization and tried to patch up the errors in the screenplay (such as explaining that they must have been using training Stinger missiles at the end, to explain the lack of target lock).
After him, Raymond Benson, who took over the writing of the Bond books after Gardner, also did novelizations for the Brosnan films. They were competajntly done.
Yeah, but Conan the Barbarian is based more on the movie script than on their earlier work. Granted, the crypt scene is based directly on their story “The Thing in the Crypt”. The scene in the novelization pretty much reprints the short story. But the rest of the movie is based on other people’s work.
Been meaning to ask, which ones in particular?
I really enjoyed the novelization of The Blues Brothers. I read it many years ago, and still remember some of it. It added background to a lot of the characters, mostly the band members. Very very light, but funny.
This was different from the other book which was mocked up to look like the briefcase Elwood Blues always carried. I think it was called The Blues Brothers Files or something, and had a bunch of stuff in it like the orphanage records of Jake and Elwood, the menu from the Soul Food Diner, band reviews of the Good Ole Boys, etc. That was a fun book too.
I think that the only novelization I’ve ever read was Piers Anthony’s version of Total Recall, which I remember liking fairly decently. I was a kid and the movie was rated R, so the book was all I could see - and likely far more smutty than the film.
The recent movie, while fun, dropped all of the mystery and ambiguity that was in the original story. The book did a good job of keeping you uncertain as to what was the truth and what wasn’t, all the way through to the end.
Not science errors so much as plot holes. Two spring to mind:
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The submarine loses its air supply, so they go to the lungs to restock. Plot hole - the air molecules would be too big for them to breathe. Asimov corrects this, by explaining how they were able to shrink the air so it was breathable.
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At the end, the sub and the bad guy get eaten by white blood cells. The others swim out of the eye ju8st before they enlarge. Plot hole - the sub would still enlarge, and kill the patient, being eaten wouldn’t prevent this. Asimov corrects this by describing how the wrecked sub is removed before it expands.
There’s probably several other similar ones.
None of what happened in the film is possible.
(It was a really short book.)
Snakes on a Plane. I’m not kidding.
The novelization of Stargate (the movie) was great as well.
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s Serenity novelization is written with true Browncoat love.