Stranger In a Strange Land
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I’m proven correct by the movie of the same name that came out a couple of years ago.
Nah. I really wanted to see the live-action film that Morgan Freeman was hoping to make with David Fincher.
I still consider it unfilmable.
It could be done visually, but they’d be hard-pressed to find a substitute for the narration. Who knows, with the right reveals, it could work. Hell, it SHOULD be done, but it would be be butchered with the slightest deviation from the layout in the book.
There seem to be two categories of works declared unfilmable: long and expensive, or LotR unfilmable, and hard to capture the subtleties of the original, or Watchmen unfilmable. The first is easier to surmount; you can put pretty much anything on screen if you throw enough money at it, and for all its length LotR is a pretty simple narrative with clear themes, told in a straightforward manner. The second is much harder to pull off: although the basic plot of Watchmen can be summed up without too much trouble, how that narrative was implemented both graphically and textually - and how that implementation was in itself a commentary on its own medium - is much, much harder to evoke.
I was surprised at how much of the original Watchmen the movie did manage to capture, but in terms of fidelity to the original, it necessarily had to jettison much of what made it a comic, and even more of what made it a comic deconstructing comics themselves. LotR, in comparison, was a snap. So which category does JSaMN come under? The first, I suspect: it’s certainly a lengthy book, it spans a number of years, and the magic effects and battle sequences would be fairly costly, but I can’t see any inherent reason why Faerie is any more unfilmable than Narnia.
I agree with Sandman, however: although the main narrative, insofar as there is one, spans about a decade, it really covers the whole of time to date, there is a vast cast who drift in and out {and the ones who get the least “screen time” are the often most important to the plot}, there are a multiplicity of settings and eras, and the narrative is distinctly non-linear, and the titlular character barely features in half of them. Unless you’re going to make Morpheus don a cape, fedora and gasmask and fight crime, it’s pretty much the second category of unfilmable, no matter how much money you threw at it. Plus they’d probably cast Keanu Reeves as Dream.
The plots of The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders and The Fan by Bob Randall were nothing out of the ordinary - both were fairly standard crime thrillers. What made the books interesting were the authors writing them as epistolary novels. The Anderson Tapes was supposedly the transcripts of a series of audiotapes and The Fan was a series of letters. In both cases you essentially had a bunch of seperate pieces that fit together and added up to the overall story.
This effect didn’t translate to the screen (although with the rise of video surveillance cameras, Adam Rifkin was able to use this technique to make an epistolary movie, Look, in 2007) so the resulting adaptations had to throw out the interesting parts of the books and tell them as fairly straightforward movies.
I’ve sometimes wondered if it would be possible to film any of Neal Stephenson’s novels in anything less than a multi-month maxiseries.
Really? I thought *The Stand *was pretty good, considering.
I remember hearing that they first wanted it to be a feature film, but a mini-series was the only way to go.
Totally agreed. Watchmen was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the thread title, and the recent movie only strengthened my opinion that it’s unfilmable.
There’s a third type of unfilmable. One of the sequels to A Wrinkle In Time involves knowing things without seeing or hearing them. How the heck can you convey that on screen? By having the characters monologue everything?
Watchmen may not have been filmed perfectly to the book, but I’m pretty sure it could have been, even if it would have been a really long, boring movie that wouldn’t have made much sense.
Books that feature amazing, genre-defining writing but have a very simple story don’t tend to be filmable. Or rather they are filmable, but the film can’t capture the magic of the prose and ends up being very pedestrian. So you have a massive divergance in quality between the two.
The canonical example might be Ulysses - majestic, gnarly book but really a simple story at heart. Has there been a film of Ulysees? Has to have been at some point - difficult to see how it could be that exciting. Man walks around Dublin. Goes into pub. Someone throws a bisuit tin at his head.
Cormac McCarthy’s All the pretty horses also fits the bill for this type of novel. The story again is simple and actually quite lame. He slips it in there and you don’t notice under the glory of his prose. The film was OK - better than you might think if you’ve not seen it - but still a bland treatment of two blokes trotting round Mexico on the pull. I’m not holding out high hopes for The Road for similar reasons.
I think House of Leaves would work well in the cinema - do you think there would be a problem with linking the two storylines up? The author is a film maker himself of some sort IIRC, and the book had a cinematic feel to it IMO. I agree that there would be a risk that the House storyline would end up as just another straight to DVD horror story - it would be hard to capture the essence of what makes it different.
One problem I had was some that parts were too close to the original: some of the scenes which worked in the comic, for example Dan and Laurie getting in on in Archie with the culminating spurt of flame, when filmed as written and drawn just came across as cliched and overwrought. Scenes like that and “Two Riders Were Approaching” needed interpreting for the screen rather than just treating the original comic as a storyboard for shooting.
Believe it or not- AND it’s available on DVD.
Oh shite!- TWICE!!
Btw, one of the ad campaigns for the Kubrick version asked “How could they make a movie of LOLITA?”
In a similar vein, though this isn’t really a book that anyone would be racing to turn into a movie, “Thousandstar” from the Piers Anthony Cluster series has a central conflict and a huge number of pages devoted to one ‘character’ being stuck in the body of her alien leading man, who has no senses of sight or sound, just an overdeveloped sense of taste(/smell) to compensate, and can’t even think in terms of pictures until she teaches him to.
(And despite the rep that PA has around here, I do think it’s a fun little romantic comedy.)
“Perfume” was always said to be unfilmable, to the extent that the author refused to release the film rights for that reason.
The film was OK, but lost the power that the descriptions in the text provided.
I thought “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” was the same… the joy of the book is the language used, and all the different authorial voices; simply showing what happens removes 90% of the point, it’s the words themselves as much as what they are describing that are the point of the book.
I think Louis De Berniers said watching the film was like seeing your child with it’s ears put on backwards. 
Cujo. Yeah, yeah, it WAS made into a movie. A movie that left out all the subtle, creepy stuff, like the dead serial child killer taking over the rabid dog’s brain. From the time I read the book, I KNEW they wouldn’t be able to capture that on film. And they didn’t.
When I heard they were making Misery into a movie I wondered how they could possibly make it into a movie. It takes place basically in one room and the main action is writing a book. Kudos to William Goldman and Rob Reiner for making such a great movie out of it. Maybe they should take a shot at Gerald’s Game.
Although The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant was optioned a few years ago, that has to rank WAY up there on the “unfilmable” list. A huge chunk of the exposition takes place as internal monologue; but even if you overcome that, the anti-hero nature of Covenant himself would pretty much guarantee box-office doom, especially since his worst act would occur in the first 45 minutes of any movie.