Movies About Books

Cafe Society
21

Finding Forrester - equal parts Field of Dreams, Scent of a Woman and others but Rorrester is a writer.

Ball of Fire - Brackett and Wilder: A group of ivory-tower lexicographers realize they need to hear how real people talk, and end up helping a beautiful singer escape from the Mob. Very funny stuff.

Notting Hill - about a book shop owner ???

Romancing the Stone - the heroine is a novelist

As Good As It Gets - Nicholson’s character is a writer but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it.

The Accidental Tourist - Hurt’s character is a travel writer.

Bridget Jones’s Diary - a diary is a book???

Fahrenheit 451 - well, books are important to the storyline.

22

I seond Adaptation.
A brilliant movie about script-writing.
Immediately after seeing it, I wanted to start writing my own movie-script.
Haven’t done it yet.
I think I’ll watch it again tonight.

23

The Name of the Rose.

24

Out of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft

It’s a Canadian, made-for-TV film that melded Lovecraft’s real life with the mythos he created. I saw it on Space - Canada’s science fiction channel.

That said, movies in which a characters reading a book, a diary, et cetera, might not count on this list unless the physical book itself has some greater influence on the story. For example, in The Notebook, a character is simply reading someone’s diary, but in The Neverending Story, the boy reading a book has control over how the book ends. Films where a book is the main object of contention or desire would count too.

Anyhoo, I hope this thread doesn’t die…

25

The Pillow Book. Also has extended scenes of Ewan McGregor full-frontal if you like bookmarks.

26

Educating Rita - Michael Caine as an alcoholic English Lit. professor, and Julie Walters as a working-class open university student who’s trying to better herself through books.

27

Great one, Otto! And not just because of “Little Ewie”. :wink:

28

Don’t you mean Obi Wan’s wang?

Ok I’ll just let myself out :rolleyes:

29

“Little”?

30

Only in the sense that it’s smaller than “Big Ewie” - i.e. Ewan himself. :rolleyes: What-ever.

Now let’s get back to the subject at hand. Well, at least the subject not near Otto’s hand. :wink:

31

Peter Greenaway definitely has a thing about books, and he was the first director who came to mind when I saw the thread title.

In addition to the aforementioned Prospero’s Books and The Pillow Book, books also play a significant “role” in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.

32

Or has any love for the gorgeous, radiant, beautiful, sexy, and charismatic Miou-Miou (meow!).

Some others of interest not yet mentioned:

The Flower of My Secret
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
The Lost Weekend
Naked Lunch
Quills

33

In a bid to keep this thread alive and kicking, I’ve found two more films about books and/or writing. The first one is An Angel at My Table, a biopic about writer Janet Frame. The second one (which sounds great) is Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress), which is about two university students sent for “re-education” in Maoist China. They meet a seamtress who they try to court with the use of “forbidden books of classic western literature”.

Anyhoo, any more contributions? Anyone, feel free to join the party late?

34

More epistolary stories:

**Love Letters ** (Laura Linney and [?] Webber, as the lifelong correspondents)
Shadowlands (Anthony Hopkins as author/scholar C.S. Lewis and Debra Winger as writer/novelist Joy Gresham)
**The Shop Around the Corner ** (and the remake with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, You’ve Got Mail)
**The Love Letter ** (Campbell Scott and Jennifer Jason Leigh exchange love letters, even though he’s a modern and she died in the 19th century.)

[Which reminds me: someone should write a novel or make a movie about the lifelong correspondents and platonic lovers, Maxwell Perkins (the famous Scribners editor) and Elizabeth Lemmon.]
Memoirs:

**Out of Africa ** (The literary aspect is mainly a framing device, albeit with some narration and dramatization of Dinesen’s penchant for telling wonderful stories.)
The Bridges of Madison County (The storyline is instigated and narrated by the decedent’s parting letter to her grown children, and the affair resulted in a photography book.)
Journalism:

All the President’s Men (Bernstein & Woodward not discovering and investigating the huge story that was Watergate, but writing and polishing their articles and then defending them before editors and ombudsmen.)
*Blocked * screenwriters and novelists:

Sunset Boulevard (The first part is about how William Holden’s screenwriter gets severely blocked and can’t work in Hollywood anymore; he ends up as the kept man by Gloria Swanson.)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (For the subplot in which the young, temporarily blocked novelist (George Peppard) ends up the kept man of Patricia Neal.)
Literature, drama, poetry, scholarship:

Shakespeare in Love (The Bard and his muse.)
Deathtrap (Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve as the playwrights locked in a deadly collaboration.)
**Naked Lunch ** (Cronenberg’s nightmarish take on Burroughs writing Naked Lunch.)
**Tom & Viv ** (That happy couple, T.S. Eliot and Vivan, his early muse and later burden…)
Impromptu (Inspired by the tangled life of George Sand, and her relationships with other artistes.)
**Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle ** (Inspired by the equally tangled life of Dorothy Parker and the whole 'Gonk Round Table clique.)
**The Whole Wide World ** (Inspired by the brief life of Texan Robert E. Howard, who wrote pulp fiction like Conan the Barbarian during the 1930’s.)
Angels and Insects (Darwinian naturalist meshes uneasily with inbred, Victorian aristo family, resulting in a broken marriage, a couple of books on ant colonies etc., and surviving lovers of the fittest; great Byatt, if a mixed cast.)
Possession (Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhardt play modern academics studying the lover’s correspondence of two Victorian poets. Also good Byatt, if not as memorable as A&I.)
Sylvia (Gwynneth again, this time as Sylvia Plath, minus any actual poems by Plath, due to the resistance of the Plath estate. Presumably some of the Ted Hughes stuff was real?)