I think you need to understand what he means by “original screenplay”. He DOESN’T mean “a screenplay about an original (as in new) idea.”. He means “a screenplay written from the ground up for that movie.” So sequels, films “based on” TV shows (which, you’ll notice, never have the same plot as the the TV show, just the same characters) and video games (Most video game movies have nothing to do with the actual game) actually PROVE his point.
I guess I AM missing the point. What’s the difference between a “screenplay written from the ground up” for a movie based on a book vs. a “screenplay written from the ground up” based on a TV show, comic book or video game? Why are books any different from the other kinds of properties?
Because in general, movies based on games throw away the entire plot of the game and have an original story that MIGHT feature the same characters. Movies based on TV shows are basically “Let’s write an extra long episode” - generally, once again, connected only to the TV show by the characters and maybe the premise. Even movies based on comic books keep only the basic sketch of who the characters are. Do you think that the screenplay of Iron Man 3 had anything to do with any Iron Man comic ever, beyond perhaps the characters?
Whereas, when someone says “adapt a book for the screen” there is, for whatever reason, intent to actually adapt the STORY of the book in some way. There is, essentially, ALREADY a plot, written down, that now has to be “adapted” into a screenplay. An adapted screenplay is not an original one.
Even though the screenplay for… whatever, Lord of the Rings, differs substantially from the book, it is still clearly an adaptation of those events. People who had read the books could go in thinking “I wonder how they chose to do Moria.” Compare to, say, any of the Star Trek movies. None of these were adapted from any existing plot. If you had seen every episode of Star Trek, you’re still not going into a new Star Trek movie wondering “I wonder how they’re going to portray <The Captain>'s struggle with <The Cosmic Entity>” or anything like that. People who have read a book expect to have a vague sense of what’s going to happen in a movie based on that book. TV and game consumers have no such expectations.
Comics, TV shows and games have characters and premises; books also have plots. Hollywood likes to appropriate the first two, but prefers to come up with the last itself.
Back in the 1950s a surprising number of movies were made from novels.
Most people have never heard of Charles Eric Maine, but he had three movies from his books, *The Atomic Man *(1955), The Electronic Monster (1958), and The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970).
Yeah, who? what? and which?
I’m not sure how feasible it would be to adapt classic SF today. Their wonders are no longer our wonders, and their characters and plots for the most part need to be revised from the ground up.* I, Robot* has a title and concept in common with Asimov and nothing more (so I’ve read: I never saw it) and that’s an author and title with a bit of power.
I don’t understand why the OP thinks the *lack *of CGI is a selling point these days. If you can’t have a faceless army of millions of aliens being beaten by two or three earthlings, why bother getting up in the morning?
I agree with you, but I can see christian fundamentalists screaming about bestiality.
the process by which SF stories and books are selected for filming is a strange and mysterious one. It’s a matter of who got interested, which can get financial backing, who can thread the tortuous paths of development and Hollywood ego, and which can be “sold” to the public. And all of those factors change with time. There is no simple answer to it.
I have noticed (and pointed out here) that several stories (or relatives of stories) from the classic Healey and MacComas Adventures in Time and Space were filmed in the 1950s. I suspect they wouldn’t be today.
The Twonky – from a story by “Lewis Padgett” (Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore). Any time they do anything from this team, they give it an unwanted happy twist or ending. In this case, they used a darkly humorous story about an alioen taking over a TV to turn it into a movie that slapped the TV competition. Starring Hans Conreid, and written by Arch Oboler
Farewell to the Master by Harry Bates. I wouldn’t have thought that this story would be worth filming – it seemed too slight to be worth it. But The Day the Earth Stood Still turned into a classic, and one of my favorites. Who woulda thunk it? They made a (miserable) remake, but if the first version hadn’t been made in the 1950s, I doubt if anyone would have filmed it today.
Correspondence Course by Raymond F. Jones wasn’t filmed, but it bears more than passing resemblance to his The Alien Machine, which became the opening chapters of This Island Earth, which was famously filmed. I suspect it wouldn’t be filmed today, especially with such a little-known author (although I’d dearly like to remake it, properly).
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov wasn’t filmed in the 1950s, but was (badly, and twice) after the 1970s.
I agree that The Stars my Destination would be an excellent choice. The opening is compelling and incredibly cinematic. I’d love to se it done right. The fact that the film [Event Horizon has scenes with a “burning man” make me wonder if they originally wanted to adapt TSMD and got sidetracked.
I’d love to see *The Proud Robot[/I[ filmed. You could do it, although it would take work. But, as I sauy, stuff based on Kuttner and/or Moore tends to get worked over. The Last Mimzy and Timescape were based on Moore’s stuff, but they had to slap happy endings on.
I’d like to se Asimov – I, Robot* done straight, or Cave of Steel Maybe even the Foundation series, if done right. There’s lot of Heinlein or Clarke that lends itself well to a dramatic and cinematic treatment.
I’d love to see more Fredric Brown, especially his Arena, which has been ripped off many times, but never faithfully done. With CGI, you could finally do it, if someone with the right touch did it.
Robert Sheckley has to be one of the most ripped-off authors out there, and one with the least faithful adaptations. The Tenth Victim, Freejack, and Condorman are based on his books, but don’t resemble them closely. I’ve argued that Total Recall (the original version) owes a helluva lot more to his The Status Civilization than to Philip[ K. Dick. Others have noticed the significant similarity of The Running Masn to Sheckley’s Prize of Peril, and of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles (right down to the company that built the Earth)
If you read what I said, I was referring to new movies made from SF books. You’ve brought up a bunch of examples that have nothing to do with what I was discussing, but let’s consider.
As for sequels, very few of them are based upon books – they’re usually based upon the previous movie. So pointing them out is irrelevant to the question.
Comic book movies and movies based on video games are nearly always *original screenplays *based upon the property. No one has done a movie of The Dark Knight Returns or "The Killing Joke. The Avengers was not an adaptation of any particular Avengers story line. There are a few exceptions (Watchmen, Scott Pilgrim), but the vast majority are original screenplays, Hollywood clearly leans toward that.
Guardians of the Galaxy is not based upon any particular story in the comic book. It, too, had an original screenplay.
The same is true about movie based upon TV shows. They are all original screenplays, not an adaptation of any particular story on the show. Much like fan fiction writers, they take existing characters and make a new story about them.
You didn’t include science fiction film as part of your post. That’s what I was talking about, not comic book superhero films. They are different genres. I was talking about science fiction and the reason why Hollywood doesn’t adapt SF books.
It’s not that Hollywood never does book adaptations these days (though they seem to do fewer than they used to), but rather that the books the do adapt have to be much more popular than any SF novel. The number of people who know The Stars My Destination is far too small (and seems to get smaller each year).
As I said, Hollywood prefers original screenplays (especially with pre-sold properties) and nothing you mentioned in the post negates that assertion.
The couple is oddly one of the more covered authors. IMDb lists three recent movies.
“Vintage Season” is usually attributed to Moore solo. Some disagree, but I’m not sure why. It was originally published under their Lawrence O’Donnell pseudonym, though.
Ironically, the page on Wikipedia complains that the story was changed to give the movie a happy ending. I couldn’t say. Never saw it.
I’d love to know how you’re defining “rarely” here - look at all the PKDick movies alone.
So what? It’s a non sequitur; The number of people who have read, say, the 3 Musketeers vs those who would watch a 3 Musketeers movie is likely the same. Or any novel-to-movie you’d care to name, really, that isn’t Harry Potter or 50 Shades.
Because it’s a good story in-and-of itself?
Financial reasons are not the be-all and end-all of moviemaking, especially when the rights to a movie are a relatively small part of the cost, in these days of $100-million+ movies.
I’m not just asking about today - how did Dick or Bester get a “track record at the box office” over Bester or Vance, is the essence of my question?
I think you don’t know enough about comics - IM3 takes large parts from the Extremis story arc in the comics.
I bring it up because stories with lots of aliens or other weird stuff always used to be called “unfilmable” (or worse, “expensive”.) But the two stories I mentioned aren’t particularly heavy on that sort of thing - at the core.
Lots of good recent SF doesn’t have that (although CGI is so routine nowadays, even a “human drama” piece can have scads of it).
There’s a great story connected to the film of Lord of Light that was never made. You might recall that in the 2012 Oscar-winning movie Argo there was a fake movie also called Argo that served as a cover for getting the American diplomats hiding in the Canadian embassy in Tehran in 1979 back to the U.S. A lot of the real movie Argo was a distortion of the true story of the events back in 1979, but the movie script that served as a cover story for getting the diplomats out was real, and it was an adaptation of Lord of Light that had almost gotten made but got cancelled after a lot of planning. The method that was used to get the diplomats out was to claim that it was going to be made by a Canadian production company and that the diplomats were people working on that film:
My view is extremely jaundiced, but IMO movies go light years out of their way to announce that they are *not *SF or sci-fi. Even makers of superhero movies scream that they aren’t. And if you have an actual SF movie, you know, one about ideas, they will take out a contract on anyone who dare uses the word.
All today’s shoot 'em ups alien-style movies are stories about “people” not science fiction. That’s a death word. Why advertise they’re from a poisoned source?
The recent thread about Iconic characters in literary SF (or the dearth thereof) may be at least a little bit relevant here. It’s hard to sell a movie franchise or TV series without some compelling characters at its heart; and creating compelling characters wasn’t necessarily the strong point of many “Golden Age” SF authors.
For a one-off movie, iconic characters aren’t quite as important, but having an intriguing “concept” that can be stated in a sentence or blurb may well be.
These theories seem reasonable to me, but I’m not sure how well they hold up to actual examination of the kind of works/authors that have gotten filmed vs. those which have not.
It’s interesting to compare the great Golden Age masters to their contemporary in the much-derided field of pulp fantasy, Robert E. Howard. He may have not have had as many ideas as they did, but what he did have was memorable characters - which is why he got the movie deals and the comics, and they didn’t.
Conan, King Kull and Solomon Kane have been filmed; that is all I know of.
That’s three more than Asimov got.
And for the love of God, Montressor, Please don’t let Stuart Gillard any where near the director’s chair, and Robert Hewitt Wolf near a typewriter!
All decent books.
One of my favorite Age of Purple Prose pulp writers is Abe Merritt - who had several of his books turned into films, just screwed with plot wise. 
You can get a lot of his stuff free off feedbooks.com or Project Gutenberg. You can also get a lot of great pulp stuff [Fu Manchu!, Cleek! The Man in the Corner! Most of the Scarlet Pimpernel books!]
Oddly enough, there was some amazing pulp fantasy and SF with varying degrees of thrillerness to the stories that would make fantastic movies, IF they would stopp fucking updating everything to NOW. There is absolutely nothing wrong with filming something set in 1910 as happening in 1910. Everything doesn’t need to be 2014, cell phones, computers and sex. I swear, if I had the money I would start doing great period pieces - 1 season to a book [ a good solid old school 40 week series at that] or half a season to a book … give it time to actually do some of the books properly. Heck, some of the books that aren’t part of a series could be nicely done in 4 to 6 hours, 2 or 3 miniseries movie-episodes. Could you not see Fu Manchu done properly, like the older Agatha Christie series of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot - just fantasy or vaguely SFional …sigh
And you can go back and read a lot of the old pulp stuff off Feedbooks or Project Gutenberg. I have something on the order of 200+ old pulps on my phone for popcorn reading. Currently working on The Metal Monster.
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A number of Asimov’s novels and short stories have been filmed:
And here are those from Howard’s works: