Thomas Tryon’s LADY would be a perfect vehicle for Cybil Shepard, Morgan Freeman and Whoopi Goldberg.
Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with well-done powered body armor. Maybe Zac Efron as the lead?
Martin’s Tuf Voyaging, a terrific sf envonmental satire. With maybe, as Martin has himself mused, the actor who plays Varys on Game of Thrones, as the lead.
Jennings’s historical epic Aztec with a cast of Mexican unknowns (although the book is big enough, it might be better as an HBO miniseries or the like).
There could be several great movies drawn from Tolkien’s Silmarillion, esp. the tragic romance of Beren and Luthien, and the downfall of Numenor. Jude Law would make a great early Sauron, I think.
Suits me - but if not unknowns, Keira Knightley or Natalie Portman would be naturals for the Audrey Hepburn role. And no Mr. Yunioshi, please!
As I mentioned in a different thread, Holly Golightly was 18:
[QUOTE=Truman Capote]
She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.
[/QUOTE]
So Keira Knightley or Natalie Portman may be naturals to play Audrey Hepborn in a remake of the Breakfast at Tiffany’s movie, but they would not be suitable for an actual accurate portrayal of the novella. For actresses currently somewhere around the right age to play Holly Golightly, a possible good choice would be Hailee Steinfeld, who played the correct-aged Maddie Ross in the 2010 True Grit. I could also see Chloe Grace Moretz or Annasophia Robb in the role (with properly died hair.)
For years I’ve wanted an adaptation of Richard Bachman(Stephen King)'s The Running Man that actually follows the book. The Arnie version from the 80s uses the title and a few character names and that’s it.
Some of the technology would need to be updated. No more mailing physical videotapes to the producers; replace it with uploading videos. You can still work in the cheating by tracking bit.
And you could even get in some current social commentary, considering Ben Richard’s reason for volunteering to go on the show was to pay for his daughter’s medical treatment. The recent reality game show Hunted had a premise fairly similar to the book’s version of the game, minus the kill-or-be-killed angle, so play up The Running Man as an extreme version of today’s reality competitions. I could see the finale being a little too reminiscent of 9/11 so that may need to change.
Ben is an average guy getting by on his wits, not a muscle-bound action star. Someone not known for action, but could be convincing that he can rise to the occasion despite being in over his head, sort of like Matt Damon in the first Bourne film. Can’t think of who right now.
You can sometimes see where King lifted his ideas from, and Robert Sheckley was convinced that King got the inspiration for The Running Man from his 1958 story The Prize of Peril. He never went to court over it, but he did call up other SF writers like Harlan Ellison to get their opinions about it, and was in a moral quandary about whether he’d been consciously or unconsciously ripped off.
In any case, Sheckley’s story has twice been filmed, only not in the US. It was adaped as *Der Millionenspiel * for German TV in 1970 and as Le Prix du Danger in France in 1983
Both of these feature more of an Everyman trying to survive on a sadistic high-stakes TV “reality” game with his life on the line, just as you request.
Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones. I think you could do this on a relatively modest budget. I have no idea who to cast for the big roles, but I want Maggie Smith to play Grandma Hazel.
Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories. 30 years ago, David Bowie would have been perfect for the role. Today, . . . Benedict Cumberbatch, perhaps?
The Lost World (Arthur Conan Doyle’s, not Michael Crichton’s)
I liked the recent John Carter movie, and I wish Disney would do more. How about some of Burrough’s other works, like Venus or Pellucidar?
Doc Savage.
Poul Anderson’s Fire Time.
There actually have been several adaptations of The Lost World made for TV in the past two decades. None of them are completely accurate, but they get parts of it very well.
Incidentally, the original 1925 silent version of The Lost World is actually pretty good, and had Doyle’s approval. The problem is that the original film was badly butchered so that only about half of it survived. Since 2000,however, there have been TWO restorations of the film to better than 95% of its original content, using material taken from film archives all over the world. One is by Eastman House (and, for no good reason that I can see, is an extra on the DVD of the awful 1960 version). The other is made by disgruntled fans when Eastman House wouldn’t release its restored version. Critics seem to prefer the Eastman House version. I much prefer the other. The movie is best appreciated while reading The Annotated Lost World (written before either restored version was released), with annotations by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin
A new Doc Savage film has been in the works for years. Here’s a 2013 piece on it:
http://screenrant.com/doc-savage-character-plot-details-shade-black/
Yes! Makenzie Davis was so awesome in Halt and Catch Fire
You know, most books I read as screenplays however I was never able to visualize the Hyperion on the screen, this is probably more to do with my lack of vision than the adapt-worthiness of the text.
Good call!
There is of course a plot element in the first two books where two characters in two tales turn out to be the same person that works because you don’t actually see them in the book and I have no idea how they would manage to preserve that plot twist on a series.
My own. Because then I’d be rich. 
I’d love to see Daniel O’Malley’s The Rook with Emily Blunt as Myfanwy Thomas.
I couldn’t think of an actor who looked like Louis Wu, but Daniel Craig can certainly act like him.
The role needs someone who can do adventurous, wry, shrewd, and smart, and he can’t be too young.
Would love to see “Repairman Jack” made into a movie. (“The Tomb” was the opening title in the series.) Over the years I’ve pictured John Cusak or Ed Norton in the lead, but they’re both too old now. Hard to cast a character who has as a big part of his schtick the cultivation of “anti-presence”. He wants to be the guy you can’t describe five minutes after he’s left.
With you here…
…aaand you lost me. Maybe it’s the permanent pout, but Craig never projects “smart” to me (one reason I found him miscast as Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass and Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo)
Perfect! I’ve always imagined him played by a “that guy!” character actor. M Emmit Walsh is probably too old and John Polito a bit too Italian. Oooh, oooh-- how 'bout Stephen Tobolowski?
Nah, Conleth Hill does seem perfect.
As long as they ignore the “Puppeteers talk like Marylin Monroe” thing. That may work in a book, where you can forget it, but having them talk like that for a whole movie would be way too distracting.
Heck, make the Kzinti talk like that. Would be quite the contrast. Eight foot orange cats that sound like femme fatales. Kathleen Turner IS Speaker to Animals!
I’d love to see Nalini Singhs Guild Hunter series on the screen, but I doubt that it could be done properly with real people. So I would think an anime would be best way doing it…
Isn’t Myfanwy of Indian heritage (though her name is Welsh)?
I’ve scanned through and searched my copy, and I can’t find any reference to her being either Indian or Pakistani. Her physical description goes like this:
And there’s a bit in Chapter 18, from a letter to herself, that says, “You’re part Welsh, did you know that? I mean, our family moved out of Wales a few generations ago, and though we probably have relatives scattered around somewhere, I don’t recall ever meeting them.”