Heinein’s The Rolling Stones was terribly adapted as Gerrold’s The Trouble witrh Tribbles.
That’s not a short story, and Blade Runner is actually a good movie.
My understanding is that it was more a case of never existing in the first place rather than being lost. I’ve read that the script had been written and completed and then somebody suggested buying the rights to Asimov’s book. The rights were purchased and the movie’s title and a few character names were changed but the script was otherwise unchanged.
Although Gerrold swears up and down that he didn’t consciously swipe the flatcats. Besides, the whole flatcat sequence was a fairly small portion of that book.
Yeah, and that The Man Who Folded Himself wasn’t By His Bootstraps.
It’s been a while since I read PKDs short story “Paycheck”, but I don’t remember the big action sequence that was at the end of the movie.
Oh–and that When Harlie Was One wasn’t The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Oh–and those critters that stick onto your back and control you (in another Star Trek episode he contributed to) have nothing to do with The Puppet Masters.
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One might, but I don’t. Aliem owes a helluva lot more to Jerome Bixby’s script for It! The Terror from Beyond Space, with a bit of Planet of Vampires and Night of the Blood Beast thrown in. Bixby can’t have been unaware of Van Vogt’s Story, which AFAIK was the first :“monster loose aboard a spaceship” yarn, but there’s nothing otherwise similar between the van Vogt story and either It or Alien. Actually, a better match for Alien would be van Vogt’s less well-know short story “Discord in Scarlet”, which features a monster loose on a spaceship that lays its eggs to hatch inside the bodies of some of the crew. Both “Destroyer” and “Scarlet” were put together with other stories to make the novel “The Voyage of the Space Beagle”.
And I believe Gerrold. He says (in his book “The Trouble with Tribbles”) that Heinlein wrote to thank him for the compliment, at which point he realized what he’d done. He claims he thought he was retelling the story of the rabbits in Australia, but probably subconsciously remembered the flatcats from The Rolling Stones.
Saying Gerrold stole The Man Who Folded Himself from “By His Bootstraps” is a harder sell – the idea of time loops and time paradoxes of that sort had been worked over and over pretty thoroughly by the time Gerrold wrote his book. He claims he was trying to cram every time-travel cliche into a single story.
I just have trouble with the similarity between Gerrold’s early ouvre and Heinlein, Heinlein, Heinlein. It’s more about the accretion of similarities than point-for-point comparisons across each work.
Shoshana, FWIW, Gerrold had nothing to do with the first season episode “Operation: Annihilate!,” which is the episode you mention which bears some resemblance to “The Puppet Masters.” Other than “Tribbles,” Gerrold contributed a line or two to “I, Mudd” (think he received a credit, can’t remember), and received co-story credit on “The Cloudminders.”
With all respect to Cal, I don’t believe Gerrold. But, that’s just my opinion, and fairly worthless as far as the matter is concerned.
Sir Rhosis
Oh, Cal, you mentioned the Bixby story. A few years ago, I bought a script on eBay from Emerson Bixby, Jerome’s son, and a friendly email correspondence ensued. Mostly me asking questions about his dad. I brought up the “Alien”/“It!..” similarities. His response was something like, “Yeah, dad was a bit pissed, but knew that if he sued, he’d probably be tied up in court battles for the rest of his life, so he just let it go.”
Thought you might like to know.
Sir Rhosis
I’m sure I’ve read Gerrold stating that he gave input on *Operation: Annihilate! *but I doubt I have the source anymore. If I ever come across it, I’ll dredge up this thread and post it.
I just leafed through Gerrold’s book on this The Trouble with Tribbles, and he doesn’t mention it. He does mention the story ideas he submitted, which got turned down, and that he was working on a story similar to The Doomsday Machine, so I think he would have mentioned it if it had happened.
Speaking of that episode, I’ve seen some people claim it was borrowed from the Berserker series, but I don’t buy it. The Berserkers were intelligent robots, the Doomsday Machine was a relatively dumb machine.
It’s amusing that the city in The Cloud Minders got ripped off for Lando’s city in Empire Strikes Back.
Then there is Arena, which seemed to have been unintentionally borrowed from Frederic Brown or independently reinvented by Gene Coon.
Well, the movie of William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic kept the bit about a guy who rents out space in his head to store mob data in, but I don’t remember Dolph Lundgren, Beat Takeshi, Henry Rollins or Ice-T in the original, let alone Keanu’s childhood memories - and they both renamed Molly, the coolest character in the original story {who made it into Neuromancer} and cut her part to almost nothing: I wanted to see retractable claws cutting up zaibatsu ninja clones, dammit!
I have a book called Reel Futures, which is a collection of science fiction short stories and novellas turned into movies. A lot of the ones mentioned so far are in it…
The Sentinel, We’ll Remember it For You Wholesale, The Seventh Victim, Who Goes There, and Farewell to the Master.
It also includes The Driver - which had a whole lot of stuff added, and a little bit taken away, to become Death Race 2000. In fact, almost all of the plot and the characters of DR2k, other than the existence of the Race (which is expanded upon) and anti-Race people was created for the movie.
Also, Enemy Mine, which, oddly enough, actually had a lot REMOVED when it was turned into a movie - the entire final third was cut, and replaced with a shortish action sequence.
(And a number of other stories, most of which were changed more significantly other than additions and subtractions, so they’re out of the scope of the thread, or that I’ve just never seen the movie - Empire of the Ants, Herbert West: Re-Animator, Armageddon 2419 (which became Buck Rogers), This Island Earth, The Fly, Eight O’Clock in the Morning (They Live!), Damnation Alley, and Air Raid (Millennium).)
Seriously? I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know. But are we talking about a key party like the one in The Ice Storm where all the married couples put their car keys in a bowl and whoever’s keys they pick out they go home and sleep with? That would be… bizarre.
Which reminds me- I originally misread the thread title as “Movies based on Short stories where the source is completely overwhelmed by addictions”, so of course, I thought, “Anything based on the works of Philip K. Dick.”
I’d heard somewhere that Coon started writing a screenplay with the same basic idea, then learned or was reminded of the Brown story, and he attributed the inspiration to Brown, to avoid hassles. That might explain the considerable differences between Brown’s Arena and Coon’s. But I could as easily put the differences to the difficulties of translating the story to the limited budget of a TV show and the needs of a TV production – a T. Rex-like Gorn is more impressive and more doable than a rollibng furry orange ball. And I see The Hand Of Roddenberry in that happy ending, wherever it came from.
The Outer Limits had already done an “Arena” like story called “Fun and Games”, and the idea’s been used by others since. One day I’d love to see Arena done straight – I think you could make a good movie out of it, and even do it without the curse of voice-overs, if you do it right.
Tengu, I’ve mentioned “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” upthread, and I’ve brought up This Island Earth many times (with my name, I have to!) I think I’ve seen the book you refer to, and it only has the first short story Raymond F. Jones wrote (The Alien Macine) that later became the book This Island Earth. Happily, the book is back in print. It’s very different friomm the movie, which seems to have discarded the book after the events of that first story (which it dumbed down) , and substituted a plot made up by looking at SF covers and choosing the most lurid and nonsensical elements from them.
Sir Rhosis – I think you’ve told that story on the Board before,m but I’m always fascinated by it. (And impressed that you’ve got so few degrees of separation between you and Bixby). Bixby is another underappreciated writer, who was actually able to wrangle three of his screenplays into being filmed in the 1950s, rewrote Fantastic Voyage into filmable form, and got a story of his turned into one of the classic Twilight Zone episodes (“It’s a Good Life!”)
I challenge you on MASQUE- yes, it greatly expands on the story and also adds in HOP-TOAD, but it’s about the most perfect movie-length adaptation of that story imaginable. USHER is also not too far from the source. TALES OF TERROR mixed and played with both THE BLACK CAT and CASK OF AMONTILLADO, granted, but IIRC- VALDEMAR was reasonably faithful to the story.
While we’re on AIP films- THE DUNWICH HORROR, which I do enjoy but also recognize as taking a lengthy detour from the story, and THE HAUNTED PALACE, remade as THE RESURRECTED, which was based on THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD. And as long as I’m on Lovecraft- FROM BEYOND.
Yes, a key party like in THE ICE STORM. I had actually forgotten about it (it’s not a big plot point and could easily be skipped over) till a friend mentioned how horrified she was by it being in a Dr Seuss film.