Unfilmable Books

I’ve seen this phrase a lot since “Cloud Atlas” came out. Haven’t seen it yet, so can’t comment there. Since the advent of CGI, al lot of unfilmable books have been filmed (Lord of the Rings) but in the Cloud Atlas case it’s the structure as much as the shifting content that was seen as a problem.

Now, I see previews for “Life of Pi”. I really, really liked that book & to me it is unfilmable. The reasons would be spoilers for the book, but we could go into that if anyone’s interested. I’m just so disheartened by that preview - & not just because the lead character sounds like Raj on Big Bang Theory.

Any thoughts on this book as unfilmable, or other books you think are unfilmable?

Naked Lun– shit, no.

Atlas Shru– no.

A Scanner Dar– no.

Johnny Mnemo– no.

Granted, none of those are good movies…

But seriously, House of Leaves is a book that is unfilmable.

A Fan’s Notes Takes place mostly as a running internal monologue.

Finnegan’s Wake?

There are plenty of non-fiction books that are unfilmable (except in a “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask” sense). Like the Oxford English Dictionary (“the zebra did it!”).

The first book that came to mind was Codex Seraphinianus, but you probably could make an animated movie about it that would be similar in spirit, if not exactly in content.

Someone has the film rights to Inifinite Jest, and I’m hard-pressed to figure out how that would be filmed in a reasonable or compelling way.

Perdido Street Station (and its sequel, whose name I forget), by China Mieville.

*The Illuminati Trilogy. *

An unfilmable book because it’s basically an unreadable book. You don’t read it; you experience it.

How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?

I think a Life of Pi movie could work, but the trailer I’ve seen looks terrible. I’m hoping it’s misleading.

I too hope the Pi preview* is misleading (after all, the “Lincoln” previews look deadly dull to me & it’s getting great reviews; same with “The Master”). I may just stick with the book.
Some interesting ‘unfilmable’ ones have been named.

*when did ‘previews’ start to be called ‘trailers’ , anyway?

I keep trying to imagine how one could make a film out of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and have it come out anything like as good as the book.

The Fermata on the other hand…

Gravity’s Rainbow would be a challenge.
The Silmarillion would be a bigger one.

Got your winner right there.

Other contenders:

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (but then, I haven’t seen the play)

How about this,

I think James Joyce’ Ulysses would also be as unfilmable as it is unreadable.

Dune. I know it has been tried. It has not been done successfully.

I still hold that Dune and Watchmen are unfilmable, even though movies have been made based on them.

Other examples would be The Fan by Bob Randall or The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders. Both had relatively ordinary plots (The Fan was about a stalker and The Anderson Tapes was about an apartment building burglary). What was interesting about them were how they were told - The Fan was written completely as a series of letters and The Anderson Tapes was written as a series of transcripts of hidden surveillance recordings. Both methods created an interesting means of limiting the narrative.

But when they were turned into movies, these methods were abandoned and the plots were told as regular movies. Which lost the point that made the books interesting. The movies were reduced down to their fairly pedestrian stories.

Years later, Adam Rifkin made a movie Look (later expanded into a television series) which was composed of supposed footage from surveillance cameras. It would have been interesting if Sidney Lumet had tried this in his adaptation of The Anderson Tapes.

Who has the rights?

I think it would be impossible to do it justice as a movie, but I could see a TV miniseries taking a crack at it. (That’s an artistic opinion; don’t know if anyone is doing TV miniserieses anymore, or if a television production would be daring enough to tackle the book’s structural issues.)

Gfactor speaks.

Short version: they were called trailers first, because they used to come after the movie.

Michael Schur … the co-creator of “Parks and Recreation.”

I’ve never been satisfied with attempts to film fantasy stories which included a lot of psychic/mental trances/extraplanar visions, so I had assumed it would be a while if ever before we saw any serious, quality treatment for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels.

I would love to be proven wrong, particularly since they nudged up against the boundaries of this with LOTR and the X-Men movies, but I don’t think we’re really there yet.