Movies based on multiple, unrelated books

Cafe Society
1

It’s fairly routine for individual books to get adapted into their own movies and stage plays. Somewhat less common, though still far from unusual, is for a writer to take two or more books from a certain author, or from a certain book series, and adapt them into a single (screen)play. An example would be Disney’s The Black Cauldron, which is adapted from the first two novels in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series.

What is really rare, I think, is for a writer to take several completely unrelated books (i.e., not written by the same author, not part of the same series, and not set in the same fictional universe) and spin them into a movie or play with a single, coherent narrative. The only example of this that I’m aware of and that I’ve seen is The Flight of Dragons, a 1982 Rankin–Bass film that somehow melds Gordon R. Dickson’s novel The Dragon and George with the speculative evolution book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson.

Some Googling leads me to believe that Tales from Earthsea may be another example, but I’m not sure as I haven’t seen it myself and am not familiar with the source material. According to Wikipedia, the movie “is based on a combination of plot and character elements from the first four books of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu), as well as the manga The Journey of Shuna by Hayao Miyazaki”. Can anyone verify that this is a genuine example of the sort of film I’m talking about?

Can anyone name any other non-anthological films or plays, or other dramatic works, that adapt two or more completely independent books?

2

The most obvious example is the Die Hard series. The first four films in the series each were rewritten versions of scripts that had been passing around Hollywood for years. None of those original scripts were related to any of the other scripts. The first film in the series was a rewritten version of a sequel to a film not in the Die Hard series. Only the fifth movie in the series started as a script written especially for the series.

Another example is the movie The Wind Rises. It’s based on two different things with no relationship between them. One is a novel. One is the life of someone whose life was nothing like the novel.

Combining two novels from a series into a single movie is more common, like the Lloyd Alexander example you mention or the 1951 Disney movie Alice in Wonderland which combines Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Through the Looking Glass.

3

Gladiator

officially was “inspired by”
Those About to Die by Daniel P. Mannix
and the anonymous classicAugustan History.

However, in my opinion, it owes more to the old movies
The Fall of the Roman Empire
and Spartacus,
the latter based on Howard Fast’s novel.

Its nomination for a “best original screenplay” Oscar was a travesty.

4

Alien

People have also noted similarities to the film It! The Terror From Beyond Space, and A.E. van Vogt’s stories “Black Destroyer” and “Discord in Scarlet”.

5

The obvious entry for this thread is the movie The Towering Inferno, based on Richard Martin Stern’s The Tower and Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson’s ** The Glass Inferno**. They even managed to combine both titles!

6

I’ve long held that the original Total Recall is based on *three * unrelated books – The nominal basis is Philip K. Dick’s short story (not a book, sorry) We can Remember it for you Wholesale, which is a clever little story deriving from a play on words. But they exhaust the material from that story in the first twenty minutes or so – they needed more material for the rest of the movie. I maintain that they lifted it mostly from Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization – you have the brain-wiped protagonist, the action taking place mostly on another non-earth planet, the assassins constantly chasing the protagonist, who assumes the identity of another, who hides out in the section of the city occupied by the body-distorted mutants, one of whom probes his mind to discover his secret past, and learning that the person responsible for him being there is himself. the very end, with the alien atmosphere-making machine being started up and creating air for Mars, is from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.

7

There are lots of movies based on two or more related books, especially war movies, for some reason. I don’t know if this violates your criteria.
Franklin Shaffner’s movie Patton, starring George C. Scott is based on Ladislas Farago’s Patton: Ordeal and Triumph and Omar Bradley’s a Soldier’s Story.
The 1970 movie about the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tora! Tora! Tora! is based on Gordon W. Prange’s Tora! Tora! Tora!* and The Broken Seal by Ladislas Farago (again!!)

*It’s a weird thing, but , in the wake of the movie, they put out tie-in paperback editions. I found and read Farago’s book, but I couldn’t find Prange’s book anywhere. Instead, for some reason, they issued Walter Lord’s book on the topic, Day of Infamy, but with “Tora! Tora! Tora!” printed in big letters – bigger than the actuial title – on the cover. To this day, I haven’t read Prange’s book, which I’ve never seen a copy of. Years later, Prange put out another book on the topic, at Dawn we Slept, and contributed to other books on Pearl Harbor. Amazon lists his book Tora! Tora! Tora! The Pearl Harbor Story from 1963, but doesn’t even have a picture of the cover.

8

Well, kinda sorta, yeah. “Unrelated” is, after all, given in the very title of the thread. But it’s not clear to me what sort of relationship you think the books in your post have to one another. They’re clearly by different authors, but are they part of the same series? If not—that is, if they’re just a pair of books that happen to deal with the same topic or event, or belong to the same genre—then I think they’re well within scope.

9

Good one. I saw that film for the first time only a few months ago but I must not have been paying much attention to the story credits.

10

O’Bannon strikes me as more of a movie guy than a literary guy*. I think he lifted things more from films than from books. There’s a very clear resemblance between Alien and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (Alien creature gets aboard a ship, picks off the crew one by one, navigating around the ship through the ventilation system, and is finally killed when they open the hatch to space.) Jerome Boxby, who scripted It!, must have known about and been inspired by van Vogt’s Black Destroyer or The Voyage of the Space Beagle (which it was eventually incorporated into), but the only resemblance between the two is that of the “Monster Loose on a Space Ship” plot (which, to be honest, van Vogt seems to have been the first to use). But the plots of the two stories are completely different.

Alien also seems to lift from Mario Bava’s **1965 movie Planet of Vampires, in which earth people set down on a fog-shrouded alien planet and find a derelict spaceship, with the oversized skeleton of one of the inhabitants inside. Only the ship isn’t entirely deserted.

I think that he lifted the idea of the Alien implanting larvae in people’s bodies from another movie, Night of the Blood Beast, a cheapo Roger Corman-produced movie that features an alien creature that gets aboard a space ship and implants its embryos inside one of the men. The same idea had been used by A.E. Van Vogt in his story Discord in Scarlet (which also ended up as part of The Voyage of the Space Beagle, but this was different creature than The Black Destroyer. Again, I suspect van Vogt was the first to use this idea in a science fiction story, although it’s now become commonplace. It doesn’t feature at all it Bixby’s It! The Terror from Beyond Space. Bannon could have lifted it from van Vogt, but, as I say, I think he’s more a movie kind of guy, and got it from Corman’s film.

*Bannon has been a writer, director, special effects man (he contributed to the first Star Wars movie), and actor (Dark Star, which he also co-wrote). His inspiration really does seem, to be the movies. Return of the Living Dead is definitely derived from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, right down to the title. Dark Star also features the “Alien Loose Aboard a Spaceship” plot, although played for laughs (and with O’Bannon the only one interacting with the thing). These scenes were filmed later than the rest of Dark Star, and were added to pad out the film length. When I first saw trailers for the film, I thought they were playing the akien scenes straight, and that this was going to be the main story, but it wasn’t. In any event, the scenes feel like a comic version of It! rather than adaptations from Black Destroyer.

11

According to the opening credits, Cecil B. deMille’s 1956 version of The Ten Commanments is based on

Prince of Egypt by Dorothy Clarke Wilson

Pillar of Fire by J. H. Ingraham

On Eagle’s Wings by A. E. Southon

and

“The Holy Scriptures” (The Book of Exodus, mainly, although it owes something to the Talmud and Targums (the film names the magicians who turn staffs into serpents “Jannes and Jambres”, which isn;'t in the Bible, but comes from the Targum of (pseudo) Jonathan.( Jannes and Jambres - Wikipedia )

I haven’t read any of the three named books, although I’d like to sometime.

12

The movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is based on two of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, Master and Commander and The Far Side of the World.

Hey! They managed to combine both book titles into the movie title again!

13

I’ve often complained that the Conan movies don’t really feel like Robert E. Howard’s hero. In part this is because they never base the movies on his stories. The best “Conan” movie, i’ve said (only partly tongue in cheek) was the 1982 cheap ripoff movie The Sword and the Sorceror, which combine elements from the Robert E. Howard Conan stories A Witch Shall be Born and The Hour of the Dragon (“Conan the Conqueror”). (It was rushed into theaters before the “official” John Milius “Conan” film in 1982)

14

How about a movie whose source is based on multiple sources?

The 13th Warrior is based on Michael Chrichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead. Chrichton’s novel was based on Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s memoir, and on Beowulf

15

I don’t know. Your examples come from series using the same character and by the sme author. I wouldn’t call them “unrelated” by any stretch. Some of my examples use books by different authors on the same topic, which is pretty clearly not “unrelated”, to my mind. The examples of The Towering Inferno and Total Recall, fit what I would consider “unrelated” – the source books are by different authors and aren’t addressing the same historical event, and had nothing to do with each other.

16

Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday” was a result of three or four different unrelated football scripts being developed at the time, as well as the nonfiction book “You’re OK It’s Just a Bruise” and likely the Pat Toomay novel “On Any Given Sunday”. What came out, although not everyone would agree with me, is a masterpiece examining every aspect of football.

17

Does Blade Runner count? The title of a completely unrelated novel by Alan E. Nourse was grafted onto an adaptation of Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

18

Which examples? The only one I said I was sure about was The Flight of Dragons, which is based on two books by different authors and (as far as I know) sharing no characters.

19

xxx

20

Will Smith’s I, Robot took an original screenplay, tacked on Asimov’s title, and renamed a character “Susan Calvin.”