Your timing is off.
I would make “The Runaway Jury” the way it should have been made (strictly by the book).
Or, alternately, I’d make John Grisham’s “The Testament.”
Darn, you got here first. I’d suggest another novell from Pournelle and Niven, too. ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’ would be a good one for a movie. It deals with the after affects of a comet hitting, not just the time up to that point like ‘Armaggedon’ and another similar one that came out about the same time that I can’t remember the name of at this moment.
That would be Deep Impact.
Okay, so the first hundred mil is in research for resurrecting Zombie Brando.
I’ve got a script that a friend gave me that someone needs to make at some point - it really is amazing, and I’ve got one of my own that I’d like to do, assuming I ever get a decent draft of it.
But, to keep with the spirit of the thread, I’d really like to do The Dark is Rising books by Susan Cooper. The kids would have to be unknowns, of course. Donald Sutherland as Merriman. I’d film the first two at the same time, then the next three sequentially, just to keep the kids at the proper age. Shoot on location as much as possible. It’d be fantastic.
About a year ago I wrote A Screenplay, so if I had money I’d make that one. But since we’re dreaming here anyway, the truly unsellable, unmarketable movie I’d really like to make would be a biopic about Nietzsche.
A musical biopic about Nietzsche.
Maybe it should be animated, too…
Lamia, your user name reminded me that many years ago I heard a rumor that they were planning to make a movie based on the Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. That would be kinda cool…
However, the movie that I would make would be a big screen adaptation of John Varley’s Titan. And hopefully it would make enough $$$ to finance the remaining two books of the trilogy.
I suspect if you suceeded, he’d act much like he did in the Island of Dr. Moreau.
“The Horror! The Horror!”
The Green-Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder as a series of computer animated movies. I’d release them on DVD with commentary by the author herself, as well as a copy of the original Below The Root game for the Commodore 64 with Windows and Mac emulators.
Hard to pick just one.
At risk of being immodest, some of the novels I’m working on would make kickass movies. Eyeball would require a CGI main character. The Acid would be a gritty period piece in 1890’s Pittsburgh, but so much of it is internal that it might not translate well.
I’d love to see a good movie version of Lest Darkness Fall. Or (sticking with de Camp), how about The Incomplete Enchanter?
Maybe an epic about the Fourth Crusade. (Just don’t expect a happy ending.)
Tirant lo Blanc, the 15th century Catalan novel. Tons of action, sex and violence.
A biographical movie about Betrand du Guesclin. Maybe they’ve already done this in France, but among Hollywood pictures I’ve only seen him show up as the villain in an Errol Flynn movie.
That would rock my world. I loved those books as a kid. Would you start with Over Sea, Under Stone or The Dark is Rising itself?
The problem is, people might call it a Harry Potter rip-off…
grumble, grumble, Cooper’s got more talent in her fingernails than Rowling’s got in her entire body, grumble, grumble
I’d like to do some good short SF fiction from the 1940s-1960s, and do it well. If you take a short story and expand it, you’ll fuill the time needed, and you won’t have to lop anything off. Trying to fit a whole SF novel, with all the characterization and all the background, is pretty rough.
I’d do Fredric Brown’s Arena, and I’d do it right, for once.
Or something by Sheckley or Tenn. Or a short Asimov, Clarke, or Heinlein.
I’d like to try Bester’d The Stars my DEstination, although I might have to cut a lot of things. But I think it has a killer opening, and one I’d love to film – not the explanation of jaunting, but the abandonment of Gully Foyle.
For that matter, I’d like to try The DEmolished Man. In the right hands, the telepathic sequences would be wonderful. In the wrong hands, this would be movie-of-the-week drivel.
Look at what this jackanapes, this whipper-snapper, this Enfant Terrible posted today!
The Running Man. The original version, not the cheesy Ah-nuld version of the mid-80s. (Might have to tweak the end there, though, given semi-recent events…)
Also, the Legend of Zelda. Yeah I’ve heard rumors it’s in pre-production, but so what. Matter of fact I’m composing a screenplay for it, just in case…
And I’d love to do the Wheel of Time series… but it never f’n ends… curse you, Robert Jordan!!!
Enfant Terrible, you young scamp, you’ve actually got a good idea there with “The Running Man”. And God knows Stephen King could use another couple million to shovel on top of the pile of gold doubloons he’s got in the basement.
I wouldn’t change the ending, though. If you want to be as dark and relentless as King’s story, instead of cheesy, immediately-forgettable Arnoldtainment, the original ending is one that would really shake people up.
How about the great Poul Anderson novel Brain Wave? Too bad Mr. Anderson isn’t around any more.
Wait a minute – I’m surprised this wasn’t the first thing that popped into my head. The War of the Worlds, done just like Wells’ novel, set in Britain c. 1900. The Heat Ray, the Black Smoke, the Red Weed, and Thunder Child’s sacrifice…
Or When Worlds Collide – not a remake, but a more faithful version of the novel. Maybe even set in the 1930’s, with the scientist-heroes leapfrogging reality to invent giant atomic rockets as humanity’s last hope.
Even better – Doc Savage. I know there was already a crappy movie back in the '70s, but imagine how much ass a good version would kick.
Ray Harryhausen wanted to do this, and actually shot a test reel of it (I’ve seen selections on one of his DVDs) It would have been great – he’d have done it as a period piece, and he would have used walking tripods. Stop-motion animation is perfect for mechanical things like this (just look at the AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back). The “strobing” effect gives them just the right creaky mechanical feel. Unfortunately, George Pal’s Gene Barry version came out first, with its anomalously flying ships (although, if you look, you can sometimes see the three electrical discharge legs they were trying to generate). Another moment in lost cinema history.
I’d like to see more Wells and Verne done straight. There are way too many appallingly bad adaptations of their works (From the Earth to the Moon was on this past weekend – yecchh!) and too few good ones (Disney’s **20,000 Leagues).
I’d really like to see a good, straightforward adaptation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. That hasn’t been done yet – two of the most famous movie versions were simply vehicles for the stars (Will Rogers in one case, Bing Crosby in the other), and all the others wimped out, or messed up the story so bad that it was unrecognizable. A version broadcast on PBS (!!) changed the story so that Merlin bests Hank Morgan! Of course, Twain’s comments on (and the actions he portrays as taken by) the Catholic Church would land any filmmaker who tried to do it unadulterated in trouble. Still, I think you could manage to steer clear of controversy if you did it right.
I’ll be filming the Flashman series of novels by George Macdonald Fraser. Actual locations where possible.
They’d have to be unknowns with this budget. Doesn’t the main character have 6 brothers and sisters?
An author by the name of Max Ehrlich once wrote a 1950’s end-of-cold-war idealistic science-fiction novel called The Big Eye. (He’s also the author of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, which was made into a movie in the 70s. Ehrlich is apparently still alive at 95, btw).
It’s a novel just dying to be a good movie, but of course at this point it needs to be produced as a retro movie. Which would be fun in its own way. I’d place the events of the novel in 1963, esthetically and politically, but without mentioning any specific dates or either Soviet or American politicians; I’d steal real-life buildup stuff from the Cuban missile crisis to create a valid sense of the world one hair-trigger short of nuclear war and then have the astronomers make their discovery.
It’s a “rogue” stony planetoid body accidentally intersecting the path of the solar system. More to the point, it’s going to come along tangential to Earth’s orbit at the wrong time and the two are going to smack into each other, and life on Earth is going to come to a rather abrupt halt.
Except the astronomer cheated. In collusion with astronomers worldwide sharing the same concerns about the progress of military buildup and the prospect of nuclear war, he has lied. It’s going to be a damn close call, with the intersecting planetoid becoming not only visible to the eye but bigger than the moon in the sky, but it and the Earth are going to do a loop-de-loop and then go their separate ways and the Earth will resume a close approx of its normal orbit.