“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a 1976 folk rock song by Gordon Lightfoot, based largely on the 1975 Newsweek article “Great Lakes: The cruelest month” by James R. Gaines and Jon Lowell.
Are there any other fictional or artistic works (songs, films, TV episodes, etc.) that were adapted from non-fiction newspaper or magazine articles? To be clear, I mean to exclude the following:
Adaptations of articles into straight-up documentaries. (Fully dramatized biopics and history films are fine.)
Adaptations of fictional short stories, newspaper comic strips, etc.
Law & Order–style “ripped from the headlines” works, unless that work’s origin can be traced to a specific article in a newspaper or magazine.
I immediately thought of the movies A Perfect Storm and The Insider, both conceived from news articles, though the former was conceived as a book before becoming a film.
It’s true that a few lines were inspired by specific newspaper stories, though perhaps not the entire song itself. Still, it’s a good one to mention here. The line about the holes in Blackburn was taken from a 17 January 1967 Daily Mail article, “The holes in our roads”, and the line about the guy crashing his car are from another Daily Mail article, in the same issue, about Tara Browne.
As you might guess, there is a Wikipedia list of movies based on newspaper and magazine articles, including Saturday Night Fever and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The very amusing song “Lovelines” (1983) by the Replacements takes its lyrics straight from the lonely-hearts classified ads in a Minneapolis newspaper. It ends with a citation (“Wednesday, October 13, 1982, volume 4, number 79.”).
Not a perfect match to the OP, but based in part on magazine content:
The last section of the Traveling Wilburys’ song “Dirty World” consists of a repeated series of the lyric “He loves your…” followed by a seemingly nonsensical phrase. While recording the song, the group had a bunch of magazines in the room with them, including copies of the magazine Auto Sport (George Harrison was a big fan of auto racing), and the group would take turns plucking random phrases from articles in the magazines. Thus, it wound up with lines like, “He loves your five-speed gearbox” and “He loves your big refrigerator.”
The Genesis song “The Battle of Epping Forest” was based on a newspaper article Peter Gabriel had read about rival gangs in London’s East End fighting each other in a territorial dispute.
Here’s one I forgot to mention in my OP: The 21-minute “Right On (Hippie Dream)” by The Bevis Frond is based on various editorials and letters to the editor from Gandalf’s Garden, a late 1960s psychedelic culture magazine. The song quotes liberally from these pieces. Some choice bits:
The inner world of the Now Generation is a glowing stone dropped into a vast pool of greyness, and the warmth of its ripples is spreading in ever-widening circles. The more self-knowing a person can become, the more beautiful he or she will become from the deep roots. We influence others by what we are ourselves. It’s not even necessary to ‘do’, but merely to ‘become’. In this way what we become will benefit the next person, you, me, humanity at large. Good vibrations are catching. And there is an undercurrent of something beautiful and mystical sweeping the spirits of the Now Generation. The seeds of understanding sown in seasons past are growing greenly underground towards the sun. The Overground Movement is imminent and overdue. Draw closer, stranger, and welcome. Can you not feel your world growing between your toes, and bursting from between your brows like the fabulous beanstalk? […]
Look deep into the chalices of flowers, study them, observe the natural world. Find your way to woods and fields whenever possible. Lie amid the grasses. Live again the smells and sights and sounds of childhood when the world was truly beautiful and you were nearer knowing what it was all about. Your perceptions were closer to the core of all ‘being’ then, unclouded by mis-education and the intellect. Right on, your hippie dream. Right on, your hippie dream. […]
I saw my first flower girl the other day, and I was dismayed to think that she could go about town with an escort of long-haired youths. Her dress was adorned with bells and beads, and her jeans had flowers painted on them, as well as on her jacket. And to think that budgies are being deprived of bells for their cages because there is a run on pet shops for the little bells that give our feathered friends such endless joy. […]
One girl came up to me and stroked my cheek with a fox-fur mitten. Somebody gave me a tinkerbell, somebody else a silver star to stick on my forehead, and one old man hugged me while the tears poured down his cheeks and his wife stood by holding his shoes. “He has always dreamed people could be like this. Now he can die,” she said. Everyone got a chocolate Easter egg. A middle-aged woman stood with a record player balanced on her head playing “The Messiah”. Elsewhere, tribal rhythms floated in and out of my ears.
