[QUOTE=well he’s back]
I have to chime in with the folks who mentioned “The Grinch” - Talk about padding to ruin an absolutely lovely story. I have not forgiven Opie for this. It’s probably my most hated movie. I even hate more than all the misogynistic torture-porn that’s floating around these days.
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And yet, as bad as "The Grinch"was, the Mike Myers Cat in the Hat was much much much worse. (Naked pictures of the kids’ mom?) Next person to propose a live action Dr. Seuss adaptation should be shot on the spot.
[QUOTE=RealityChuck] Psycho and Vertigo. Neither are much like the original; Hitchcock in both cases used the book as a framework to go off in the direction he wanted.
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With Hitchcock’s Psycho, at least, the additions were improvements. (Eg; all the psycho-symbolic stuff with birds & women.) Even the material that he blatantly stole from Orson Welles was great.
The movie sequel Psycho II, on the other hand, completely ignored Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name. Too bad, it was a much better story.
[QUOTE=ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness]
And yet, as bad as "The Grinch"was, the Mike Myers Cat in the Hat was much much much worse. (Naked pictures of the kids’ mom?) Next person to propose a live action Dr. Seuss adaptation should be shot on the spot.
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As an adaptation of Cat in the Hat, it was atrocious. As a Mike Myers film, it was hilarious. At least IMO. :o
[QUOTE=bibliophage]
Are you sure about Vertigo? I’ve been meaning to track down a copy of the book (“Sueurs froides” a/k/a “D’entre les morts”) since the last time I saw the film. My understanding was that it was pretty similar to the film.
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IIRC, the book had the twist at the end, while the movie, it comes in the middle.
Unless it’s this one. Especially if Tim Burton and Johnny Depp were involved.
How about the various Roger Corman Edgar Allen Poe adaptations? The Raven takes a lot of liberties on the poem.
Edward G. Ullmer’s The Black Cat bears very little resemblance to the story that gives it its name.
I understand that The Body Snatcher is not much like the original RLS story.
It’s a Wonderful Life takes many liberties on the story it is based on, “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Sterne. Nearly all the scenes of George Bailey growing up are not in the story; George does not head a Savings and Loan (he’s just a clerk in one); and without George, Mary marries someone else – Capra evidently thought it was worse that she was an old maid than an abused wife as in the story.
You’re right about Corman (although there was an even earlier movie “The Raven” that took the same liberties with the poem. Both versions starred Boris Karloff.
But the following elaborate on the originasl or change it beyonf recognition:
Pit and the Pendulum
Masque of the Red Death
Tomb of Ligeia
The Raven
Tales of Terror
House of Usher
To which I can add the non-Corman The Oblong Box and the Nathaniel Hawthorne anthology Twice-Told Tales.
[QUOTE=Rucksinator]
“The Running Man” was about a futuristic gameshow, but instead of being in a studio arena, the “contestant” was running and hiding all over the country, with regular citizens/viewers expected to turn him in (or kill him? It’s been awhile since I read it.) IMHO, it was different enough that SK couldn’t sue if he wasn’t given any credit for the movie.
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I haven’t read King’s novel, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read a Scheckley story with that concept, from before when King wrote “The Running Man.”
The example which typically springs to my mind is The Quiet Man with John Wayne. They added so much they lost the theme. He wasn’t quiet anymore.
Quite right – it was Sheckley’s story “The Prize of Peril” from the 1950s, and Harlan Ellison once wrote a column about how Sheckley called him up after having read “The Ryunning Man”, and not believing that King would rip him off. They came to the conclusion that King may have read Sheckley’s story some time earlier, and not recalled where he got the idea. I’ve noticed quite a bit of borrowing of this sort in King’s work. I admire his writing, but frequently I have to stop and ask – “Hey, isn’t that ____'s story?” Sometimes I think he deliberately indicates such a borrowing – “The Ten O’Clock People” has a title too similar to “Nine O’Clock in the Morning” (the story that was the basis for the film They Live, which is itself a good candidate for this thread) to be a coincidence. King’s story is a helluva lot more detailed and a great deal longer, but the basic idea is certainly the same, as you can grasp if you read King’s story and watch “They Live”.
A lot of Sheckley stories fot this thread, too. The Tenth Victim elaborates wildly on Sheckley’s story. And Freejack changes the story of Immortality, Inc./Immortality Delivered beyond recognition. Too bad – Immortality would make a great movie. And it doesn’t need Mick Jagger in a tank.
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories come to mind. Everytime they are filmed they have to pad so much that the original story is lost in the movie. Of course, it has been quite a while since the last one was filmed as opposed to creating in total.
Speaking of science fiction, Bradbury’s Illustrated Man definitely comes to mind. If you were wise, you didn’t see it. It is a collection of short stories coming from a man’s tattoos. It is a delightful literary device but when the film was made, it was terrible.
On the other hand I rather enjoyed the concept of the handling of another collection of Bradbury’s tales. The idea they put into Martian Chronicles wasn’t bad at all. If they hadn’t cast Rock Hudson as the central character in the television mini series it would have been very good. The idea of a collection of short stories in a mini series on television is not bad at all. That’s basically what they do with PBS’s Mystery, and it works pretty well. At least it has with some.
The movie based on Ray Bradbury’s *The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms * did retain the lighthouse, but otherwise only used the title, which Bradbury would later changed to The Foghorn.
A lot of Sheckley stories fot this thread, too. The Tenth Victim elaborates wildly on Sheckley’s story.
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Called “The Seventh Victim” as a story. Sheckley novelized the movie as The Tenth Victim.
About The Day the Earth Stood Still - not only did they change it, but they twisted the most important part of the story
In the story, the robot, not the man, was the master
Parts of other Clarke stories made it into 2001, such as the one in The Other Side of the Sky about EVA without a spacesuit.
One might consider Alien to be an adaptation of van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer.” And, on the TV side, James Gunn’s “The Immortal” got made into a very bad series.
A River Runs Through It. The novella/short story is an American classic. The film is OK for what it is—it looks nice, making 1930s Missoula the kind of umber-toned celluloid locale that warms the soul for an hour and a half—but it completely loses the symbolic structure of the story through both subtraction and addition.
Well, practically none of the James Bond movies bear much resemblance to the books they were allegedly based on (just to use one example, Ian Fleming’s Moonraker was a missile, not a space ship).
But since the OP cited short stories, well, “For Your Eyes Only” and “Octopussy” were both based on short stories by Ian Fleming… but very, very, VERY loosely.
Remember the story Maud Adams told about how her father killed himself after James Bond threatened to expose him as a thief? That tiny anecdote was the ENTIRE plot of the short story “Octopussy.”
[QUOTE=ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness]
And yet, as bad as "The Grinch"was, the Mike Myers Cat in the Hat was much much much worse. (Naked pictures of the kids’ mom?) Next person to propose a live action Dr. Seuss adaptation should be shot on the spot.
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