I just finished reading an old mystery/old dark house sort of novel by Ethel Lina White called “Some Must Watch”, published in 1916 or so. Partway through I thought that whoever wrote the movie “The Spiral Staircase” (1945) must have stolen most of the plot from this book.
Well, apparently they didn’t steal it, they paid for it (credit on the movie).
Boy, howdy did they change a lot of the details. But the bones of the plot are the same, to the point where I knew who the murderer was way before the end (I’m not usually good at that).
Did you ever accidentally read a book that turned out to have been the basis for a favorite movie?
Roddy
Yes and no - the Spindrift Island series is pretty much the basis for Jonny Quest.
Hm, precocious kid of a widowed scientist, gnarly action GI Joe sort of guy as an assistant, Hindu orphan sidekick for the kid …
The wiki page claims “Rick Brant never graduated to any other medium of entertainment, although there are notable similarities to be found in the Jonny Quest franchise”
My ass.
A “favorite” movie? No- but I’ve often read books and found myself thinking, “I’ve seen a movie version of this.”
For instance, when I read the mediocre Edgar-winning mystery novel ***A Case of Need ***by Jeffrey Hudson (an alias Michael Crichton was using at the time), I realized I’d seen a godawful James Coburn movie called The Carey Treatment, which was based on that novel.
Any TV show, especially any ‘genre’ TV show that runs long enough will invariably (ahem) “pay homage” to some classic old movie plot.
Examples:
Star Trek: the Next Generation - Cmdr Riker was put on trial for murder in a storyline that brazenly ‘paid homage’ to Kurosawa’s Rashomon; there was also a Geordie-meets-and-falls-in-love-with-a- girl plot directly lifted from Otto Preminger’s Laura; and then there’s Dr. Crusher’s infamous "sex-with-a-ghost episode that was lifted from an Anne Rice novel.
And lest you think I am just picking on TNG, I will point out that Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a takeoff of Bunuel’s film The Exterminating Angels.
The first Addams Family moviepretty much rips off the plot of Brat Farrar.
Murder at the Baskervilles. Yes, I expected it to be Sherlock Holmes, and it starts with him matching wits with Moriarty and seems as faithful to the novel as the Robert Downey, Jr. version. Then they go to the home of the Baskervilles and suddenly, it’s a faithful adaptation of “Silver Blaze.” (It goes back to Moriarty after that mystery is solved.) The UK title was indeed Silver Blaze, but the US took the new title.
I remember seeing the ads for Tortilla Soup and thinking, “Boy, that sounds like Eat Drink Man Woman.” Turned out it was an adaptation.
Snakes on a Plane pretty much rips off the plot of Fer-de-Lance, though at no point does David Janssen shout “I’m tired of these motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking submarine!” Or maybe that’s in the director’s cut.
Not exactly the same thing, but as a kid in the late 50’s, my favorite show was the western series Cheyenne. The episodes had little continuity with one another – he would be a marshal one week, a ranch hand the next, a prospector the next — but one stood out as really anomalous, as he had a freight hauling business in Mexico that turned into smuggling rebels, a lovable but addled old sidekick, and a very smooth way with the ladies. For whatever reason, it was my favorite.
Years later, I realized that it was as close an adaptation of To Have and Have Not as a Western could be. And IMO they did a really good job of compressing it to 45 minutes.
By the way, the episode where he was a gold miner wasn’t as memorable to me, so it wasn’t until I caught a rerun on Starz Westerns a few years ago that I realized that it was a ripoff of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.