I’ve got two of 'em.
The Postman, Brin’s novel, is about people coming to terms with society breaking down, and how an anti-technology cult can easily come to power after a disaster caused by a world war. The movie was about a post-apocalyptic slacker lucking into a good life, but he’d had to grow up a little.
Riverworld the SciFi channel ‘event’ took all the best things from Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go and left them out… THE HAD HORSES ON THE RIVERWORLD!!!
There isn’t one. I just hit reply and didn’t intend any quote. Ignorance on my part. Apologies.
Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley, about a Hell’s Angel making a mission-of-mercy run across a post-apocalyptic run across an America fillled with mutated animals and so forth, was so badly done in its movie version that Zelazny never sold movie rights to any of his other works.
Miss Lonelyhearts was one of the best short stories written in the mid-20th century, but was changed from bleakly to treacly in a terrible movie with post car-crash Montgomery Cliff, and Robert Ryan doing Shrike-lite. They gave it…a happy ending!
Finally PBS made a sincere version in 1983. Shrike was played by Aurthur Hill, who was the original George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, here with all of George’s bottled-up hatred merrily unleashed upon the world.
I didn’t know that was Zelazny. I love his work. I may have to try the book now.
Oookay. I’m not sure what this has to do with the question, inasmuch as the former does not describe the book and the latter does not describe the movie.
Cheaper By the Dozen took the book’s title… and nothing else, other than 12 children. Horrid.
I know I am in the minority on this one, but I thought Kubrick (or maybe Nicholson) did a huge disservice to The Shining by having Jack start out completely batshit insane, rather than having him slowly lose his mind over the course of the story.
Oh, and in the category of “movies no one else is likely to have seen…”
I bought the Wonderworks adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, which, overall, is a great version of the book. But advertised on the DVD is some sequel to the books in which Gilbert is off fighting in World War I and Anne’s looking for him… completely ridiculous! The first movie and its sequel were very well done, based on the small dramas and interpersonal relationships of people in a small community. And there are seven books in the series, more than enough to create a good third installment without making up ludicrous, anachronistic developments.
They reallt did a number on The League of Extraordinaty Gentlemen. can understand why – Connery himself was a producer and didn’t, I’m sure, want to have his character a drug addict. Not to mention Moore’s unfortunate use of rape, gratuitous murder, and what could easily be construed as racism. Some things I thought were pretty well done – bringing in Dorian Gray didn’t seem far off the mark. But a lot of the rest was heavy-handed and lacked the graphic novel’s immersion in late 19th century literature.
Ice Station Zebra ans The Osterman Weekend didn’t seem to have much to do with the originals. I hear the same about all the Bourne movies, based on the Ludlum thrillers, but I haven’t seen any of them myself.
Science fiction and fantasy, especially 19th century stuff, hasn’t had a good track record. Virtually none of the Poe adaptations – not just the Roger Corman ones – bear any resemblance to Poe’s original works. Disney did a fair job of adapting 20,000 Leagues and In Search of the Castaways. Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days isn’t bad (he added the balloon, though, which isn’t in the book). I’m willing to forgive A Journey to the Center of the Earth somewhat because it had style. But From the Earth to the Moon is garbage. The Light at the End of the World is disappointing, as is Robur the Conqueror. Mysterious Island was seriously changed both timex it was filmed under that title, and First Men in the Moon ain’t Wells. All versions of Food of the Gods were awful, I didn’t like most of George Pal’s the Time Machine, and the recent remake was worse.
As with The Lawnmower Man, Alan E. Nourse’s The Bladerunner contributed nothing but the title to the unrelated movie of the same name.
Other:
Nightfall was a misbegotten awful thing that seemed to have more in common with the flower children from the Star Trek (TOS) episode “Children of Eden” than Asimov’s famous short story. I’ve mercifully forgotten the details.
The Runaway Jury switched from tobacco to firearms as the industry being sued . It didn’t wreck the plot but it was a major distraction, as I kept wondering how much input the respective industries had into this decision. It certainly didn’t help — the story was better as written.
The Shining (Kubrick version) walked off at an oblique angle from King’s story. It’s been done to death on the board, so do a search for multi-page volumes of opinion. You can put me down as one of the ones who thinks the book was excellent and Kubrick’s movie sucked in comparison, although King’s made-for-TV remake drags (and he changed the ending himself anyhow).
One of my pet peeves and heartfelt desires for a remake faithful to the book (or at least its feel and spirit): Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a story about a car-lover’s vintage hi-performance car chock-full of gadgets and a tendency to think for itself. I had a 1965 Pontiac Bonneville that was fast, luxurious, and full of oddball hidden features so I can completely relate to the story as paean-to-old-fancy-car. I hate the stupid musical and the candy-striped car with the little fans on the wings that kinda floats like a balloon in midair (to paraphrase the ads for the old Superman movie, “You will NOT believe a car can fly”). That car should roar through the air at several hundred MPH and scare the hell out of people below. Oh, and there are supposed to be French burglars getting foiled, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is supposed to convert to use as a speedboat just as it transformed to aircraft.
Following Dick Van Dyke’s stupid footprints back in time from CCBB, I’ll cite Mary Poppins as another unfaithful adaption. But in this case the book was dry and almost unreadable so I can’t get too worked up about it.
Another in that vein was the book Bed-knob and Broom-stick, which of course became the movie of similar name. No bobbing up and down in the beautiful briny sea in the book, and I believe twisting the knob in one direction took you to other places and in the other direction took you to other times, and the adventures were quite different. I don’t recall any Nazis in the book, but it was a long time ago that I read it, and I recall it as less than wonderfully well-written. Like Mary Poppins, I think it was a bit on the dry and densely detailed side.
Unless this is intended to be a joke, I have to point out that the film wasn’t based on Nourse’s novel – Scott liked the sound of it, evidently, and used the title for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel. In the closing credits he thanks Nourse for the use of the title. He also thanks William SD. Burroughs for it, although I’m not familar with a Burroughs work of that title.
I like Nourse’s novel – a nice departure from his short stories and space operatic novels. It follows a very logical line of reasoning about the future of medicine and population dynamics to a scary conclusion. Maybe someday we’ll see it adapted.
One other chopped-to-death "adaptation – Harry Harrison’s “Make Room, Make Room” done as the awful Soylent Green.
And, by the way, in Pierre Boulle’s novel Planet of the Apes the astronauts don’t make a highly ludicrous mistake and land on Earth. And the apes, as in Rod Serling’s original script, have a really advanced civilization.
5 word: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I was stunned by how amazingly, mind-bogglingly, jaw-droppingly bad the adaptation was.
Burroughs took Nourse’s novel, cut it up, wrote some additional material, organized it in a vaguely-but-not-really screenplay-like format, and published it as: Bladerunner: A Film.
Given that before the movie was released they swore up down and sideways that it wasn’t based on the book, I don’t think it really counts. IMHO they should have added a baby and changed the title to “Bakers’ Dozen.”
Dang! I should’ve thought of this earlier, given my Board name —
This Island Earth. The original Raymond F. Jones novel is literate and intelligent. They jettisoned the bulk of it for a movie based, as far as I can tell, on pulp SF covers written by people with no familiarity with science fiction literature (“We’'ll put in a monster with a big exposed brain and bug claws! It’ll be great!”). Even the part of the book they retained (building the Interociter from clues found in the supply catalog) they bollixed up (In the film, they send him the prints! the whole point of the test was to demonstrate the ability to figure out how the parts go together. In the movie, it’s as if he gets an interstellar Heathkit and just has to assemble the parts.) The movie doesn’t even attempt to explain the title. And it features some of the dumbest aliens to ever hail from a supposedly advanced civilization. It also gives us a cat named Neutron “because he’s so positive!” and magnetic clamps that grab onto your hands (“That would make sense if your hands were made of metal”, to quote MST3K’s Crow). We also got a spaceship just barely missing a giant meteor (in space??!!! fer cryin’ out loud? It was even duumbed when Veerhoeven did it in Starship Troopers, but still…) and a planet turning into a sun at the end from ,apparently, H-bomb bombardment.
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumdumdumdum DUMB!
(Never breed a race of servant beings that, in a clinch, tend to send a pincer deep into your midquarters. )
Ditto for The Last of the Mohicans which I loved as a film - nothing like the book tho’ to the extent that, IIRC the other sister died in the book - so Hawkeye too was left alone, not hint of a happy ending.
I liked **Just Cause ** but the film ended up with a contrived chase/action scene that didn’t seem to fit the suspense/ickiness of the rest of it.
But The Demi Scarlett Letter takes the cake. A happy ending ???!???!
With respect to Starship Troopers, what does that have to do with this thread?
The subject is what book was most changed in terms of story when it became a movie. Both the book and movie versions of “Starship Troopers” at least concerned the story of a bunch of kids recruited to be space soldiers and going to another planet to fight hideous aliens. They even kept the character names. Same with the mention of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” - that example doesn’t fit this thread at all. The movie wasn’t great, but the story was generally true to the book. Aside from the enhancement of the romance between Arthur and Trillian, it was the same beginning, same ending, same story in between.
The level of bastardization in thos films does not even begin to compare to, say, “Moonraker,” which is 100% a different story than the source material aside from having James Bond in it, or “The Running Man,” which is 100% different aside from referencing the concept of game shows.
Who knows? Ask him, he brought it up.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen *The Shining * but I was pretty sure that he wasn’t insane in the beginning of the movie. Was it supposed to be that way and I just missed it?
Well, Stephen King himself once said about the movie version was that it was supposed to show the gradual descent of Jack Torrance into madness, and Jack Nicholson just looks batshit right away.
I think this anecdote appeared in The Stephen King Companion, though I could be wrong about the source. If I’m wrong, someone will correct me shortly.