Which prose work that has not been done would you like to see made into a film?
What would your choice be, regardless of Hollywood (or even independent film) criteria for adaptability, commercial length or popularity of subject matter? It can be a work of fiction, non-fiction or even in essay form, which I’ve seen. In which venue would it work best? Theatrical release? Indy film houses? Made-for-TV? Masterpiece Theatre?
My 2nd choice is Savage Holiday, by Richard Wright. If careful attention is paid, it has the potential to be a great psychological thriller, in-period (50s) or modernized. Although one of the first books in which Wright tried to tell the story of a white person, when I first happened upon this book in the late nineties, my immediate thought was that it would work well with either a white, black or mixed cast.
Any director who would be able to keep a tight focus on the theme* of an unmoored and ill-satisfied society, as portrayed by the main character, Erskine Fowler, could make this story work either in the period it was written or updated to reflect today’s societal ills.
I can’t tell you my first choice, because I’m actually currently developing a screenplay from a hard-to-adapt, but best selling work of fiction.
Instead of the way Patricia Highsmith’s sociological and cultural tale was ruined in The Talented Mr. Ripley but the director applying modern notions of homosexuality to the main character living in the 50’s.
Tenar, I’m not familiar with the work but I’ll look into it.
Why, offhand, do you think you would hate the result?
Do you think your being in charge of making it could help you come closer to realizing your vision for it? Is there something about the story that you feel couldn’t be translated into film? What approach do you think would come closest to something you would like?
I’d kinda like to see Dante’s Inferno as a movie. It would be kind of long, I suppose but that’s what the pause button is for: bathroom breaks. I suppose it would be an art house indie oriented film. With CGI I think one could make a very cool hell. I’m just not sure how I’d want to handle translation.
I’ve always wanted to see a movie or miniseries about the Marquis de More.
They’d probably have to leave out the anti-Semitic parts from his later life, I suppose, unless they wanted to do a “There Will be Blood” sort of treatment.
I’ve always loved George R.R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging, a scifi novel about a schlub/antihero space merchant who finds an enormously powerful derelict starship. He then decides to make a living as an ecological engineer, with results that vary from the very funny to the pretty damned scary. Hollywood would probably never touch it, but when I earn my first billion I’m going to get it made, dammit.
One of Spielberg’s near-future movies is going to be a biopic of Abraham Lincoln, starring Liam Neeson. I think George Washington deserves similiar treatment - he had a fascinating life, even though we think of him today as little more than a marble statue.
Fantastic choice! An incredibly smart and funny book, with plenty of opportunities for special effects.
Actually, *The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever * comes up fairly often around here. (I was about to link to a thread, but, well, even after all these years, I’m not the most skilled poster. Even doing multiple quotes in one post is a challenge for me.) If you search Cafe Society for Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, you will see that there was an active thread about the series as recently as yesterday.
As far as why I would hate the result, well, Thomas Covenant is a hard guy to love; he is NOT your typical fantasy hero, and it’s difficult to be sure whether his whining, self pitying and temper tantrums would be even less appealing on the big screen. I’m even ambivalent about the source material, but it was once so very meaningful to me that I have never written it off completely. Not to put too fine a point on it, Thomas Covenant is a rapist. I like to compare *Chronicles of Thomas Covenant * to *Chronicles of Narnia * in this respect: picture someone being swept off to Narnia and, rather than rejoicing in his good fortune and trotting off for tea with Mr. Tumnus, deciding that the whole thing is a hallucination and taking the opportunity to rape Lucy, believing that she isn’t real anyway. Sure, Covenant has his reasons, but anyone trying to translate his story to film would have to either leave the rape in and alienate a fair percentage of the audience, or leave it out, and render huge chunks of the subsequent storyline impossible. I know people nowadays are more used to anti-heroes than once they were (I’m looking at you, Tony Soprano), but I still see this as a big problem in the world of fantasy, where we are expecting to see sometimes flawed but unfailingly well-intentioned hobbits, elves, etc. as our protagonists. In fact, Thomas Covenant is one of the few non-villain characters in the Chronicles who is NOT constitutionally noble or heroic. As I say, a hard guy to love.
Was if any good? What ideas for expansion/improvement did it suggest to you, if you could do either? Did it stray at all from the source material, even though the author wrote the teleplay?
I specifically said those that hadn’t been done, but since I’m in total agreement with you here, Preach it, brother!
What else would you do differently (besides not casting Tom Cruise)?
It would have to be a very big budget miniseries (because there’s absolutely no way you could tell the story in film length), but Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver and, if it’s successful, its sequels in The Baroque Cycle. Great historical fiction, good science fiction (and it really is science fiction, not sci-fi), and with one of the great enigmatic characters from modern literature, Enoch Root (who I’d cast with Liam Neeson).
Confederacy of Dunces- though it would have to be a long film or a miniseries to capture everything from the novel. It also has to be filmed on location of course (New Orleans for those not familiar) but as a timepiece (early 1960s). I’d love to cast Dave Chappelle as Burma Jones as he’s got the intelligence and comic timing to run that character to the Oscars. Otherwise, Philip Seymour Hoffman is the only actor who comes to mind for Ignatius, though he may have to be an unknown (he’s morbidly obese and while I wouldn’t mind padding an already fat actor I’d hate to have a Nutty Professor/Hairspray latex treatment).
Others I’d cast or consider:
Angelina Jolie as strip-club owner/porn ring operator Lana
Christina Ricci as Iggy’s sorta kinda girlfriend Mona
Danny Devito as Angelo Mancuso
Rhea Perlman as (Angelo’s aunt) Santa Battaglia
