I was encouraged to read Make Room! Make Room! The book that ‘inspired’ Soylent Green. I have to say, I liked it -because- I’d watched the movie. It was almost like reading a ‘What if the basis of the film were the same, but the plot-twist was completely different?’. Interresting stuff, if a thoroughly depressing book.
A Clockwork Orange. This is the only example I can come up with; I read a lot and rarely see movies.
When I heard that the LORD OF THE RINGS movie was coming out, I brought the books to read the story before seeing the movie.
Anyone ever met long time fans of the book who disliked the newer fans? Usually they act like they own the story and no one is allowed to read it a few months before or after the movie.
Oops, came up with one more: The Exorcist. Both of them very good books, too.
To BluePitBull: I’m a LOTR fan from way back & sorry you must have had bad experiences with other fans. I’m thrilled that the movies have brought new readers to the books. And I’m always fascinated to hear what they think! (but that’s fodder for other threads, obviously).
Back to the OP, there are so many examples in my head that apparently it exploded and I can’t think of any (this also happens when I’m asked for recommendations at the library or bookstore).
Can’t say that I’ve met anyone like that. I’d read LOTR more times than I can count well before even Bakshi’s version came out. I never resented any “newbies”
Pepper Mil, who is a big SF/fantasy fan and was a big Role-Playing Gamer when I met her, had never read LOTR when the Jackson movies started coming out, so I got to see it sort of through her eyes anew when we saw it in the theater. Her reactions as an RPGer (“Run, stupid”, she said when the Orcs retreated in Moria at the approch of the Balrog) were very good. She read the trilogy before the last film came out, but I certainly didn’t feel slighted about it.
Me too.
Caprese with Bleak House, me too again.
Also Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Hillary and Jackie, King’s Row, The Missing, probably others I’m forgetting.
There are no movies yet but I was inspired to take Provinces of Night off the TBR and read it when I heard that some folks involved with Deadwood are trying to get a movie made, and now I’m reading something by Kem Nunn, to get a jump on David Milch’s new project.
That’s true, actually. However, they DID make one starring Casper Van Dien (Incidentally, it’s fun to watch his other movies. You only THINK StarShip Troopers is a campy film until you’ve seen him play Captain Van Helsing in Dracula 3000).
You might want to check out Roughnecks: the StarShip Trooper Chronicles. It’s a computer-animated cartoon based loosely on the book and movie (borrows elements and characters from both). Good music, cool battles (Battle armor and mauraders, yay!), and some reasonably cool characters (Gossert is just cool, and I can relate to Paperboy).
That said, the SST movie got me to read the book, and I do like the book a lot more than the movie, but the movie is fun to watch if you think of it as a wartime propaganda film, which is what the director claimed to have been doing to begin with (I dunno if that’s true or if he was backpedaling). In any case, they probably should have picked a director who was at least willing to read the book all the way through, unlike Verhooeven.
Other books I read because of the movies:
Lord of the Rings: Although I had read The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring already, I had forgotten most of FotR by the time I saw the movie, and I began to dig into the book after that, finishing it not long before RotK came out (What? I was in school! And I was also reading the Horatio Hornblower and Honor Harrington books in between…)
Oh, that reminds me… Horatio Hornblower. I read these books because of the TV movies starring Ioan Grufford on A&E. Such freaking awesome movies, I hope they make more (part of me wants them to skip the Atropos book so they can get to Hornblower fighting against El Supremo in the Pacific, but the other part of me realizes that would make for an awesome movie, what with the sunken treasure and the battle with the Spanish frigate…
Flight of the Intruder - great movie, amazing book. The movie simplifies the plot somewhat and trims or merges most of the secondary and tertiary characters (and also sadly lacks the amusing scene of Jake cussing at a North Vietnamese AA gunner over Hanoi), but does a suprisingly good job of hitting all the important points of the book. I just wish someone in Hollywood would think of making a movie based on one of the other 10 or so Jake Grafton books Stephen Coonts wrote.
The Postman - I didn’t see the movie until years after I read the book, but I read the book because of the cool trailers for the movie that i saw. The book is much deeper and more complex, but the plot never would have worked for the movie (amusingly enough, David Brin, the author of the book, felt the same way and gave the movie his stamp of approval after the fact).
Star Wars: As much as I love the first movie, the book just had a better title: Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker is just a cooler name than “Star Wars: A New Hope”. Was less impressed with the novelization of Empire Strikes Back, but loved the space battle from RotJ as described in the novel (mostly just a disjointed series of radio chatter amongst the pilots and squadron leaders as the battle progressed with occasional steps back to describe what was happening to the capital ships.)
Dunno if movie novelizations count, but I read the novelization to the Wing Commander movie after watching the movie (notably, the book had a sequel even though the movie didn’t, but they never published the third part in what would have been a trilogy).
I don’;tb think novel;izations ought to count in this thread. There have been some good ones (Orson Scott Card’s The Abyss, Clarke’s 2001, Bryant’s/George’s Dr. Strangelove, (from what I’ve heard) Ellery Queen’s A Study in Terror). But more are awful drivel. Or at best too slavish to the original.
I read Jurassic Park after seeing the movie, but I had been a fan of Michael Chrichton’s for a while and just hadn’t gotten around to reading it.
The Harry Potter books, however… I didn’t ready any of them until after the second movie came out. Then, on pressure of everybody I knew, I read the first three. The first two books didn’t add anything huge to my enjoyment of the movies, and the third book seriously spoiled the third movie for me, so I stopped reading them.
Is 2001 a novelization? I thought it was made first… shrug
In the case of the Wing Commander novelization, the book was MUCH better than the movie, seeing as how it still had the central plot (about a traitor aboard the TCS Tiger Claw and a conspiracy of humans working alongside the Kilrathi). The second book followed that plot along and the third would have concluded it.
Yes. Sadly. One of my good friends is of that camp. He was a serious reader / ‘student’ of the books, and simply had to deride anyone who had just picked it up when the movie craze hit. :rolleyes:
The movie Master and Commander led me to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series.
The **Sharpe **mini-series led me to Bernard Cornwell’s books
A Beautiful Mind
Remains of the Day
The Cider House Rules
The movie is based on a treatment by Clarke and Kurick that’s based on Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” (which you can find in his collection “Expedition to Earth”, and “The Sentinel”). Clarke wrote a novel based on the screenplay that changed as the screenplay itself evolved. That’s pretty much what a novelization is. You can see some of the deleted early versions in Clarke’s book The Lost Worlds of 2001, which is probably impossible to find nowadays.*
(* this is why SF fans are such rabid book collectors. Stuff goes out of print and never gets reprinted. And mundane libraries rarely have them.)
Forrest Gump.
One of the very few times where the movie was significantly better than the book it was based on.
Interview with the Vampire, because I figured the book had to be better than the movie. Boy, was I wrong.
I am another Harry Potter fan who did not read the books until after seeing several of the movies. Once I started I managed to read the whole series, up to and including Half-Blood Prince, in about two weeks.
The Count of Monte Cristo is another. After watching, and quite enjoying, the 2001 movie I picked up the book and didn’t put it back down for weeks. I think it may be the order of encounter that makes me one of the few fans of the book that I know who also loves the movie (though the whole Edmond getting back together with Mercedes was such a cop out).
The Haunting
L.A. Confidential
The Devil Wears Prada
And I re-read TLOR because of the movies, but I’d read the books before.
The Princess Bride
I had never even heard of the book Fight Club until I saw the film of the same name. I bought the book after having enjoyed the movie, and it’s a dandy.