Fever Pitch starring Ruth Gemmell and Colin Firth based on the book by Nick Hornby. The book is a series of essays about being an obsessed sports fan, while at the same time functioning as a kind of emotional autobiography. Everyone gets together and turns it into a stock standard movie that is faithful to the meaning of the book while acting as a boy meets girl movie. Very bloody clever.
I just read “Kiss of the Spiderwoman.” The fact that anyone would think of turning this confusing book into such a good movie and a great musical is totally amazing.
Exactly. The movie/book that sprang to my mind when I read the thread title.
It seems to me that many books that are true stories make better movies than books, simply because the filmmakers were able to take real life events and ‘hollywoodize’ them. In other words, real life kinda meanders, while scripts tend to stick to the point. My examples are:
Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco and Papillon.
All of these are good books that are well worth reading but I prefer the movie versions.
Some true story books like ‘Catch me if you Can’ seem so Hollywoodized in book form that you can’t help but be suspicious of their veracity.
I also wanted to chime in on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but to my mind, the biggest advantage the film had was to have a final confrontation between Sandy and Miss Brodie. The book just sort of circles and circles, no resolution. The confronation scene is a classic. (On the other hand, I know a play was also made of the story, so maybe that is where the confrontation came from, and later put into the movie.)
I thought Little Big Man was as good as the book, but in a different way. The book took it all more seriously. I thought both were great, and they had essentially the same plot; all that was different was the slant, but oh, what a difference.
Strangers on a Train was better as a movie. The characters in the book were kind of icky.