"How the hell are they going to make that book into a movie?"

[HPL]

100 years of Solitiltude will probably never be made into a book. If it does, it’ll probably end up looking something like the Catch 22 film in terms of structure.

Pretty much any book by Umberto Eco, due to being so heady. Too bad, because I’d love to see Foucaults Pendulum kick the Da Vinci Code’s ass.

In the Hands of the right director/writer, somebody might be able to pull off The Island of the Day before, which was my first Eco and probably favorite still.

[KneadToKnow]

@HPL

100 years of Solitiltude will probably never be made into a book.

[Cornelius_Tuggerson]

Any part of the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons would probably turn out to suck as a movie. There is just too much going on, hard not to get even more preachy then the books do, time travel aspects would have to get dumbed down for the movie going public to digest. It would be a great big mess, probably long too.

[Simplicio]

@HPL

Pretty much any book by Umberto Eco, due to being so heady. Too bad, because I’d love to see Foucaults Pendulum kick the Da Vinci Code’s ass.

I liked the Name of the Rose movie with Sean Connery, though apparently it didn’t make very much money.

[Skott]

My first thought was Nostradamus Ate My Hamster. Of course, I think Rankin wrote it specificially to be unfilmable.

I wonder if The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse is within the realm of possibility…

[HPL]

@Simplicio

I liked the Name of the Rose movie with Sean Connery, though apparently it didn’t make very much money.

I should have said “Other then The Name of the Rose”. I’ve seen it, I know it exists, but somehow forgot to mention that.

[HelenGawn]

Gravity’s Rainbow, despite being a very cinematic novel. You could shoot a lot of rousing scenes, like the banana breakfast, but putting them together in a coherent whole would be impossible, and perhaps missing the point.

[don_t_ask]

Surely the best example is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (the British original not the US ripoff), which is taken from a book that has absolutely no story. It is a series of essays by Hornby about his obsession with a football team and his family relationships.

Later Hornby wrote a nice book about the making of the movie that includes his movie script.

For those that don’t know his stuff here is the start of the book.

[Morbo]

@Scissorjack

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 un-filmable than Narnia.

I tried to explain in my OP what parts of JSaMN were un-filmable (which nobody seems to have noticed was the book example that made me create the thread) but I was trying to be vague as not to spoil it. So, don’t read this spoiler unless you plan on reading it: There are scenes that involve the man with thistle-down hair enchanting people; once enchanted, they walk around in Faerie, amongst everyone else that walks around in the real world. So you have some people in the same scene with others, in which one character is in a completely different landscape than the other person standing right next to them. You have trees existing in one place but not the other, so that a lamp post in London is a giant tree in Faerie, in the same spot. I just don’t know how they’ll film that.

[PapSett]

@LateComer

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.

OMG… Gerald’s Game is seriously the creepiest book I have ever read! If they could make that one half as horrifying as the book they would have a WINNER!

I have often wondered why no one has tried.

[filling_pages]

The movie Naked Lunch was more about the book than based on the book.

My nomination is the novel **Hogg **by Samuel R. Delany. I mean, I guess you could film it, but I’m pretty sure you’d have to break some laws to do so.

[Antinor01]

@It_s_Not_Rocket_Surgery

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.

there are scenes that would be truly amazing though. The bloodguard fighting the invisble guardian in The One Tree, the lords setting up the word of warning and one of them facing down a giant-raver solo, the battles, Elena and the power of command, etc.

[It_s_Not_Rocket_Surgery]

@Antinor01

there are scenes that would be truly amazing though. The bloodguard fighting the invisble guardian in The One Tree, the lords setting up the word of warning and one of them facing down a giant-raver solo, the battles, Elena and the power of command, etc.

Well, sure, it could be great, but we’d have the theater to ourselves. We’d probably get to see the Ritual of Desecration instead of hearing about it and that would be cool, but I don’t think the public at large would accept a protagonist who

is a rapist.

[Antinor01]

@It_s_Not_Rocket_Surgery

Well, sure, it could be great, but we’d have the theater to ourselves. We’d probably get to see the Ritual of Desecration instead of hearing about it and that would be cool, but I don’t think the public at large would accept a protagonist who

is a rapist.

I’ll see you there.

[Push_You_Down]

@bouv

They’re making “World War Z” into a movie, and I’m wondering how that will pan out…

I read the screen play J Michael Strazyskcizzyyis(SP(… no idea) did a few years back.
If that was what they wanted to film… not panning out well at all.

[jackdavinci]

Obligatory nomination: The Orchid Thief

@Mach Tuck

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I actually thought this was pretty decent. There were definitely some mistakes made, and I wasn’t overly fond of the forced love story, but the movie actually did a better job than the book in some respects - the dolphin bit was wonderful and very Adamsy, the Vogons as British bureaucrats was brilliant. The “book” segments were great. Marvin was fantastically portrayed, he looked perfectly like both a state of the art robot and also one that was depressed, something that I found hard to imagine. The casting was great for the most part, especially Arthur, Slartibartfast, and Marvin. Ford Prefect was a really interesting choice, unexpected, but worked out well. There were a few mistakes definitely, but I think they were eclipsed by all the great stuff that happened with it.

@Cornelius_Tuggerson

Any part of the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons

I could be mistaken, but I think this is in preproduction…

@filling_pages

My nomination is the novel **Hogg **by Samuel R. Delany. I mean, I guess you could film it, but I’m pretty sure you’d have to break some laws to do so.

Heh. Maybe with a really young looking 18 year old or a body double. Or maybe filmed in another country. Kids and Lolita got made. And there’s plenty of gay kink barely legal porn out there…

[Ellen_Cherry]

I’m not seeing how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy even qualifies for this thread. It was not originally a book but a radio series, adapted by the author into books and other media, with numerous revisions along the way. It would seem to be the perfect “adaptation” into a movie, since you can pretty much film what you want.

[Freudian_Slit]

@PapSett

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.

Subtle? Stephen King is a lot of things, but subtle isn’t one. I kind of thought that the child killer taking over the dog’s brain didn’t really work…at least not for me. I haven’t seen the whole movie, so I can’t really judge it. Then again, a lot of what I liked was the inner monologue stuff that movies can’t really do. What the person’s thinking and so on–like Donna, in the car.

[Steve_Wright]

I’m not holding my breath waiting for an adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men or Star Maker

[CalMeacham]

Some candidates for this:
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)

The Naked Ape (Twice!!)

Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol

C.S. Forester’s The Gun

These last two are heavily episodic – they filmed them by assigning actions by multple characters in the books to single individuals in the movie – so Michael Caine, for instance got a big part in The Fourth Protocol. They also gabe The Gun a happy ending, and a classier-sounding title (the Pride and the Passion ).

I’m amazed that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings came out as close as it did (especially after Ralph Bakshi showed whayt a fiasco you could make of it). And the Watchmen came out as faithful as it did.