Yes, I know, someone is going to tell me this belongs in Cafe Society, but in the end it’s a factual question.
What was the first case where a novel length narrative-style exposition of a plot was published and marketed in book form AFTER (perhaps even having been inspired by) a film with the same title and basic story, rather than the other way around?
The earliest one I can think of is “Fantastic Voyage” in the mid-fifties, where I understand that Isaac Asimov’s novel was inspired by the film (or perhaps commissioned by the filmmakers?)
Aaaaaaaaaand of course I should have checked my facts before posting…
Mid-sixties, is what I should have said. Film 1966. Novel the same year, but I recall Asimov stating in the intro that it was based on the movie.
It predates the co-development of “2001” as a film and novel by a couple of years, so it’s still the earliest one I know of.
Maybe we can call it quits here. The German silent films The Girl In the Moon and Metropolis were novelized. As was King Kong. Robert Weinberg has copies.
According to The Guinness Book of Movie Facts & Feats by Patrick Robertson, the first novel based on a movie was Harold MacGrath’s The Adventures of Kathlyn, published in Indianapolis with stills from the film in 1914. It was derived from the Selig Polyscope 27-part serial starring Kathlyn Williams, of which the first episode was released on 29 December 1913.
Thank you, Walloon. “Photo-Play Editions” go well back to the 1910s, as he noted, and were very popular through the silent era. I might note (in fact, I darned well will note) that novelizations of popular plays were published through the 19th century.
I think it’s funny (sad) when they publish novelizations of movies based on novels. They did this with “Little Women” and some other modern “literary” movies. I guess the modern moviegoer is too stupid to read the actual original book.
Goddam. I was sure aaslatten was mistaken, or having us on, but a search turns up Little Women by Laurie Lawlor, “Based on the motion picture screenplay starring Winona Ryder. Photos from the movie.”
There are several pointless “adaptations” out there. They wrote one on The Island of Doctor Moreau when the Michael York/Burt Lancaster version came out. You’sd think that H.G. Wells’ original novel would’ve been sufficient.
Then there was the Alan Dean Foster novelization of The Thing, when they could’ve republished John Campobell’s anthology Who Goes There?, which contains the short story. Heck, they did it with Arthur C. Clarke’s “The SEntinel” after 2001 came out.
There have been some pretty good novelizations. Orson Scott Card’s version of The Abyss goes far beyond the movie, with excellent characterization. W.J. Stuart’s Forbidden Planet does some inyeresting things with the story. (It was published in the 1950’s, when the film was released, and later republished in the 1960s.)
Isaac Asimov’s novelization of Fantastic Voyage was pretty good, too, since the good doctor disagreed with the science of the movie. By the way, both the film and the novelization came out in the mid-1960s, not the 1950s, as the OP has it.
Asimov also wrote a sequel in which he does the story his way. As I recall, there’s a foreword in which he bitches about the restrictions under which he had to write the original. At the pace he was turning out the prose in those days, I’m sure it was a thoroughly unpleasant Tuesday.
Charles and Mary Lamb put out a rather famous volume called Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare in which they adapted several of the Bard’s plays into prose form. To their credit, they retain the dialogue as spoken by the characters (which is, of course, all the plays originally are), but to their undying shame and the amusement of us Shakespearean fans, they hugely simplify the storylines, the themes, and the characterizations. In their defense, they intended the stories for children, but the end result can be boiled down to, “Hamlet was sad because his uncle took his father’s throne. Hamlet got revenge but it didn’t go very well. The end.”
