[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
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.
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The version in the book (the edition I have, in any case), is 119 pages long, and listed under the title This Island Earth. Is that the original retitled, or the expanded version (it’s long to be a short story, but if it was expanded I can see calling a novella a short story, in comparison to a full novel)?
Sorry I missed your mention of Eight O’Clock in the Morning - it was even in the same post you mentioned The Tenth Victim. >_o (It’s one of my favourite stories in the book.)
Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone both did dramatic readings of Poe stories. It’s weird to listen to those, then to watch them perform the parts in those Corman flicks – especially so in the case of Rathbone, whose reading of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is absolutely perfect, then to watch him in the version as it appears in “Tales of Terror”. If you think it’s faithful, please watch the mpovie and read the story (or, better yet, listen to Rathbone perform it). The movie adaptation adds n adulterous subplot, criminal motivations to the character who is the narrator of the Poe story, and a walking corpse. (I have to admit to disappointment when I finally saw the film a couple of years ago – Vincent Price’s makeup looked much ickier and oozy in the publicity tills I’d seen. In the movie, it looks as if someone emptied a jar of peanut butter on his head).
Masque od the Red Death I finally saw this year, after wanting to see it for a long time. I was disappointed – I’d heard about the adaptation of Hop-Toad being in there. It could’ve been done better, but felt thrown in there because they weren’t sure what else to do. The whole film felt like that – some excellent moments, but an awful lot of it felt like filler (what’s with the bird killing the woman?) And they didn’t even give you all seven colored chambers, fer cryin’ out loud!
Aas for Usher, the Corman version is unbelievably padded! (And those weird modern paintings of the Usher household jar incredibly with the period furnishings). I saw the Corman film many years ago at an art house that showed several adaptations of the Poe story, one after the other. The Corman film was more comprehensible than most, but not more faithful.
That said, I can see the limitations Corman was working with – he was trying to adapt Poe, keep a modern audience interested, and not violate the 1960s view of allowable horror in that pre-ratings era. Not trivial. I saw Dagon recently, and, while there’s much that was well done,. one of the things that wasn’t was the director’s feeling that there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be made better by throwing more blood at it. It was more restrained than his adaptation of re-Animator, but not much. And, like the Corman films, you had the feeling that he was casting about for more stuff to pad it with.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
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.
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King did not rip off Sheckley. It was Richard Bachman.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
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.
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I’ve never read anything to make me think that Coon knowingly copied - though he might have seen it. I suspect giving Brown credit was more than was necessary, though it was nice - I assume he got paid also. I’m sure Coon being producer made it easier to give up the writing credit.
I agree the Gorn is more interesting than the ball - but the force field seperating the combatants would have been easy to do, and might have been more suspenseful than the rather feeble Kirk-Gorn fisticuffs.
