Not my absolute favorite, but John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War would work really well as a movie. They’d have to ditch the green skin on the soldiers and the movie would have to be at least 2.5 hours long to properly include all the great action scenes, but it’s certainly doable.
I don’t think Amber would translate to the screen at all. It would require too much exposition to be interesting to the average movie-goer, and large hunks of it would be downright boring. How do you explain walking through Shadows to someone cinematically?
I would, however, like to see Doorways In The Sand made into a movie. Funny, lots of action, aliens, a Snark…
The period where the protagonist is reversed would be great. You could reverse his features - maybe give him a scar or something - and reverse the world from his point of view.
Show it first (after all, Corwin has no memory, right?), then explain afterwards. You’d have the awesome visuals of makes of automobiles or styles of road signs or construction styles shifting as Corwin/Random drives down the street, and then you could drop in some exposition that at least wouldn’t be worse than the first Matrix movie.
He drives down a modern city street. It gets a bit misty, and the landmarks and autos alter slightly, just a bit. It gets misty again, and there one or two really different things, just barely glimpsed - like a car spouting steam, or a couple of guys walking in business suits and sheathed swords - and then it jerks back again.
I’d be half excited, half filled with dread if I found out that they were making a movie/mini-series by adapting:
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
If they could do it properly, it’d make for the best mini-series ever made. But what are the odds of them getting everything right?
Here On Earth by Alice Hoffman
This could be an extremely powerful look into a poisonous relationship…or something like a Nicholas Sparks flick.
The Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling
Or the whole trilogy, actually. It suffers the same could they do it justice problem as The Talisman.
But to go completely the other way, I bet they could make a really good movie out of Dragonfly by Frederic S. Durbin. The plot was a really neat idea, but the writing was pretty stiff. Or it could suck like Inkheart did…hmmm.
The same way Zelazny did in the later books. When Corwyn went on a hellride, Zelazny just described a series of visual images.
I think Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones would make a good movie. The actors would have to spend a lot of time in flying harnesses for the zero-G scenes, but the sfx would be no harder than an episode of Star Trek. And, with all due respect to the The Moon is a Harsh Mistress fans, the grandma Hazel is a much more interesting character than the child Hazel.
Moorcock’s Elric stories would have visual appeal. Twenty years ago, David Bowie would have been perfect for the role. Today, who knows?
Now that CGI has come of age, I would love to see some Edgar Rice Burroughs movies. Mars, Venus, Pellucidar.
It’s already been disparaged upthread, but I think A Confederacy of Dunces would make a fantastic movie. I’ve heard that someone’s working on it, and I’d definitely see it. I could see David Anthony Higgins (you might remember Craig Feldspar from Malcolm in the Middle) would be a wonderful Ignatius J. Reilly. I could see Sally Field as his mother, and maybe Christina Ricci as Myrna Minkoff.
Confederacy is an epic story about a thirty-year-old boy whose mother tells him to head out into the world and finally get a job. It’s set against the backdrop of New Orleans, circa 1960, and the civil rights movement which was starting to bubble up to the surface. The book is a scream, and it’s got a lot of jokes that work wonderfully in visual context. I could see Ignatius writing on his Big Chief tablets, scratching away with a pencil, while Higgins does voice-overs. I won’t spoil it, but the book has a climax (or, rather, a set of climaxes) that are perfectly cinematic. If this were made into a movie, I’d not only see it, but I’d be first in line. I support any efforts to film it.
They’ve been trying for years; Stephen Fry was working on a screenplay. Many of the people previously mentioned for Ignatius are too old now (or dead – John Belushi? Chris Farley?). Will Ferrell wanted it; Oliver Platt.
I think Philip Seymour Hoffman could handle it. This article reports Mos Def as Jones; I think that’s great casting. Lily Tomlin as Mrs. Reilly, not so much.
I think English Passengers would make an awesome HBO mini-series. Don’t think it could translate well to theatre film but with some extra time to build the characters, it could be awesome. I’d cast James Purefoy (Marc Anthony in HBO’s* Rome* as Captian Kewley and the actor who plays Ben from Lost as the preacher/pseudo-geologist. We could have all sorts of fun casting the rest of the characters, especially the doctor. The eugenics/racist angle and the creationism would have to be handled delicately though.
Heinlein’s Mars isn’t exactly the Mars our scientists have shown us. But Heinlein’s early solar system & the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs bring me to suggest S M Stirling’s Lords of Creation series. Consisting of only two books so far, set in an Alternate Solar System where we Earthians are exploring the jungles of Venus, stocked with dinosaurs, sabre tooth cats, ape men & at least one beautiful warrior princess. Mars boasts an ancient, bizarre civilization–with another warrior princess! (Oh, and there are airships on both planets.)
Excellent reading, both books could make fine films (or miniseries). Plots are not overly subtle & swashbuckling adventures abound. In amazing settings, of course.
David Drake’s Ranks of Bronze would make a great movie. Basic plot is that a galactic trading guild buys a captured Roman legion from the Parthians to fight for them - they’ve got a Prime Directive-like law that you can make war on primitives to get resource rights, but you can’t use advanced technology to do so. It’s got everything - Roman soldiers, aliens, huge battle scenes, hot naked chicks, and ends with a scene of justice/revenge just as satisfying as “The Shawshank Redemption”.
I think Christopher Moores, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff Christ’s Childhood Pal would make a great movie. It would really only work as a cartoon though.
Or A Dirty Job. That one could possibly be live action. I would love to see the sewer harpies. Really any Christopher Moore book would be good.
I’d actually prefer The Forever War, which Old Man’s War borrows from heavily. Both would be fun movies - but I think The Forever War has a poignancy to it that makes for a richer story.
What Mr. Excellent said.
Elric appeared to be on the fast track to being filmed, but sometime in the last year it got put back on the back burner again (by Universal)…
That should be animated. And done by Ralph Bakshi.
That’s the problem. Poignancy is dated. They’ve stopped making 'Nam movies. Even if you stretch the definition, Tropic Thunder was probably the last one ever.
Does the bolded sentence mean “The poignancy of The Forever War is dated, it is based on the similarity of the book’s storyline to the tragic events of the war in Vietnam” or “The idea that a story should be deeply emotionally affecting is passe?”
I agree with animated, but not by Mr. Bakshi. Any attempt at a live action Elric, if it were going to include the dragons, demons and other fantastical elements, would end up being such a huge cgi-fest that itwould be damn near animated anyway.