Aren’t there a number of stories that borrow heavily from The Bridge at San Luis Rey - a disaster kills or affects a number of people, and the author then walks back their stories to show how they ended up at that place in time?
I saw the “Star Trek” ep “The Immunity Syndrome” recently, and noted how similar it was to “The Doomsday Machine,” which had aired earlier that same season. Yeah, yeah, I know, a lot of the ST eps had a template plot of ‘the previously unknown energy source that poses a threat to the galaxy,’ but the similarities between these two seemed a little more extreme than usual. But maybe there are more, and I just never noticed it back in the day.
The film The Thirteenth Warrior, based on Michael Chrichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead, is based on a mix of Beowulf and Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s account of his encounter with an Eastern European offshoot of the Norse culture. There are a couple of passages where Chrichton’s book practically plagiarizes from the standard English translation of ibn Fadlan’s book.
When the Russell Crowe film Gladiator came out, some people compared it to Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. I thought the parallels with the 1964 film The Fall of the Roman Empire were far more striking. Gladiator and Fall both use Emperor Commodus as the villain, and both commit many of the same historical errors.
The film Young Guns is about Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War. The final cut takes a lot of liberties with the historical facts, but some early draft of the script got a lot of information from a book titled Violence in Lincoln County.
David Drake does it in his Northworld series retelling Norse Eddas. In Cross the Stars he retells Homer’s Odyssey set in the universe of his Hammer’s Slammers series.
Bolding mine .
IIRC the first chapter or two were directly taken from the memoirs and was acknowledged as such. It set the style for the rest of the book.