The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a remarkable book for many reasons, one of which is that it is a Post-Modern novel that long predates any Modern novels. It is widely regarded as unfilmable. There is a film called Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which is more or less a film about the making of a film version of the novel. I found it to be a pretty good movie.
This. The story is about a layered interaction of different storylines, playing with text and layout, using real and fake references to make you question the reality of the book and your own experiences, hiding information, unreliable and/or insane narrators, multiple narrators, and so on. The only way I can see it being possible is to strip it down to the ‘Holloway and co. vs the House’ story, and really… you miss so much interesting stuff that way.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson, defied being made for cinema. How does one even know what was real or imagined? And the movie was poorly accepted, but I really admired the attempt. Johnny Depp and Benico del Torres should have gotten honorary Oscars for trying to figure it out.
A book I think was reasonably popular and yet contains stuff that nobody is going to film is Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
Infinite Jest would be pretty damn difficult to put on film, and would require miniseries length to even begin to do it justice. It did give us one fucking awesome music video though.
Anything by Mieville would be very exciting to see on film. but my favorite would be The City And The City
They certainly butchered the movie, but I don’t think it’s unfilmable, they would just have to weave the story of a new character through the arc of the book.
Imagine if Pitt’s character had been an agent for the CDC, or the WHO and happened to be in Afghanistan when the Canadian special forces soldier is being debriefed. Then we see him in So. Africa after the ghetto outbreak. He’s talking with Warbrunn and Knight in these scenes, and mentions he’s giving up the globe-trotting to settle into NY now that his kid’s being born. Then we have him bugging his family out ahead of the battle of Yonkers, a couple of vignettes fleeing to the western safe zone where they force him to ship out to the Radio Free Earth vessel. Some more vignettes, maybe a parallel story arc of his wife in Hawaii with the crisis government, and it ends wtih him writing the book.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it could work.
Atlas Shrugged. The two installments that actually were filmed pretty much demonstrate the futility of this endeavor. They didn’t totally suck, but still failed to get the point across.
And I can’t imagine anything by Kurt Vonnegut being properly captured on film either.
I’ve heard that Hogg is widely considered to be unfilmable.
I thought Slaughterhouse-Five was pretty good.
A Fan’s Notes would be pretty hard to film. Maybe the people behind Leaving Las Vegas could do it, but probably not.
So far, that’s been the exception to the rule. Vonnegut’s novels generally don’t fit the standard Hollywood film narrative. Someone like Guillermo Del Toro, Terry Gilliam, or Spike Jonze might make it work but certain elements in the books (along with the mostly dismal track record of Vonnegut film adaptations) have dissuaded the suits from greenlighting these projects.
So it goes.
He endorsed “Mother Night” enough to appear in it. Anyway, MN’s story format lent itself quite well to being filmed.
To anyone who actually read Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, did the Cronenberg movie at least give you a feel of the book?
As a non-Objectivist fan of Atlas Shrugged the novel, I’m taking the movies the same way I took the Bakshi LOTR & the Rankin-Bass ROTK. They’ll do until someone with major talent & major bucks gets their hands on it.
I think the Vonnegut adaptations I’ve seen haven’t been too bad - Slaughterhouse-Five, the “Who Am I This Time?” episode of American Playhouse, Mother Night, and maybe Happy Birthday, Wanda June.
Not a movie version, but it was a stage play years ago! The descriptions of it, and the other plays they staged make them sound great! (possibly NSW if you scroll down the page a bit)
Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun could be filmed, I guess, but a lot of the subtlety would be excised… The same with Little, Big by John Crowley.
S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst would be completely unfilmable. Even the audiobook completely misses the entire point of the book.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is attempting to make a movie based on an upload from Deviantart.
“The Ninja” by van Lustbader. I was thinking of the sex scenes that are part of the story."