You might have more respect for The Running Man if you had seen The Prize of Peril (1983 - The Prize of Peril (1983) - IMDb), which was based on Robert Sheckley’s short story written in 1958 (and first adapted as a German TV movie in 1970). Note that the movie came out the same year as Stephen King’s novel The Running Man.
Imagine The Running Man without Arn, Jesse Ventura, Jim Brown, Prof. Tanaka, jokes and whatever budget it had. Now replace Richard Dawson with Michel Piccoli at his most smarmy and humor-free (while talking way too much). Did I mention the leading man has as much charisma as most blocks of wood?
When Sheckley first saw The Running Man he was reportedly very upset. He thought he had been ripped off, but didn’t like to accuse Stephen King of doing the ripping. It took a long discussion with Harlan Ellison to calm him down. (think about that for a bit).
I suspect, as Sheckley eventually decided, that King might have read his tory but forgot about it, and later wrote The Running Man using vague recollections that he didn’t realize came from someone else’s story. King has a history of latching onto other people’s ideas and recycling them in his own books. Lately he’s begun acknowledging this with nods to his sources placed in the stories themselves.
Pretty much everyone has that- for example- the LotR trilogy were such masterpieces that everyone expected The Hobbit trilogy to be as good- but they were merely fun, not great. Which is why they are hated to much here, and the same with The Phantom Menace.
There was a cartoon adaptation of The Dragon and the George that was actually an adaptation of a completely different book. (An illustrated guide to dragons I can’t remember the name of)
Miss Lonelyhearts was a Depression-era black comedy novella with a strong sting in its tail. When Hollywood got through with it, despite employing Montgomery Cliff, Robert Ryan and Myrna Loy, was akin to the viewer being force fed treacle similar to how Italian fascists poured castor oil down their victims’ throats.
Later, in the early 1980s, PBS Great Performances ran a slew of dramatizations of American literature: Bernice Bobs her Hair, The House of Mirth, Richard Wright’s story about the young man who shoots the family mule by mistake, John Cheever’s story about the little girl who waters her WASP suburban dad’s (Edward Harriman, of course) booze. And a more faithful adaptation of Miss Lonelyhearts.
Battlefield Earth is by no means a great book - it’s an utter doorstop, its characters are one-dimensional and are either Boy Scouts or cartoonishly evil, it’s full of L. Ron Hubbard’s weird hangups about psychiatry, and there’s some pretty dated racial caricatures and barely disguised antisemitism - but if you can look past all of that, it’s an entertaining space opera for those who like that kind of thing.
The movie, though, somehow manages to fail at adapting a book that wasn’t even that good in the first place, and it only even bothers adapting the first third or so of the novel, as if they actually thought it was going to be successful enough that they’d get to make a trilogy out of.it.
I read that screenplay in Asimov’s magazine (serialized). It changed things, but in a sensible way, to make an episodic story with Susan Calvin as the central character, with a reporter trying to understand her (very deliberately like “Citizen Kane”). Could have been a great movie, I think.
I loved the novel “City Boy” by Herman Wouk – the story of a Jewish kid from NYC just before the Great Depression (with most of the plot (but not quite all) taking place at a summer camp. The movie is about a Gentile girl and her little brother at a summer camp (in the book, Herbie does have an older sister who goes to camp, but honestly!)
Not a bad adaptation - but a weird one is the 1980s adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here (about a fascist takeover of the USA). The only change was a minor one. In the TV adaptation, there were aliens, and instead of being called “It Can’t Happen Here” it was called “V”
Here’s one that was truly awful, but nobody will care. Hardly anyone knows about it.
In 1967 the British production company put out a movie called The Terrornauts. It had a great-looking poster. As usual, the movie wasn’t up to the poster:
The film was based on the virtually unknown 1960 novel The Wailing Asteroid by noted (but still too obscure) science fiction author Murray Leinster (Will F. Jenkins). The only reason I know this and read the novel was because I was curious about the movie. John Brunner, of all people, wrote the screenplay. You’d never guess this was the case. This is by the guy who wrote Stand on Zanzibar??
That scene from the poster? You can see it in this full-on review:
I had a revelation half way through when I noticed the Visitors’ logo was almost a swastika, and it became obvious the plucky people fighting back were the French Resistance. Ahh!
And I wasn’t kidding about the fact that it started as an adaptation of “It Can’t Happen Here”
V was inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s antifascist novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935). Director–producer Kenneth Johnson wrote an adaptation titled Storm Warnings in 1982.[5] The script was presented to NBC for production as a television miniseries, but NBC executives rejected it as too “cerebral” for the average American viewer. To make the script more marketable, they were recast as man-eating extraterrestrials to capitalize on the popularity of franchises such as Star Wars. The production cost US$13 million (equivalent to $39.8 million in 2023).[6]
I remember watching V as a kid. I vaguely remember being amused that one of the human characters commented on their resemblance to humans. (Later we found out that they were wearing skin suits to pass as humanoids.) And then there was a child born of an alien father and a human mother.
This reminds me of the Stephen King short story “The 10 O’Clock People” which might be the most blatant rip-off of “They Live” I have ever seen, which is only tempered by the fact the original short story They Live was based on was called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” which means it HAS to be a knowing rip-off because even the title is a close copy.
::ahem:: A few years ago, I watched every adaptation of Wonderland/Looking Glass I could get my eyes on. (This was when Netflix still mailed out disks.) Then I wrote a compare/contrast paper. I wasn’t rating them, just commenting on the different styles, tones, visuals and so forth. But if anyone wants to know how many Alices there have been, and what to expect from each, message me with your email and I’ll send you the link.
Absolutely. As I say, King seems to be signalling his source of inspiration these days by planting Easter Eggs like that similarity of title.
He did the same thing more recently with his novelette Elevation. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that it’s about a guy who mysteriously begins losing weight. His name is Scott Carey. That’s the same name as the hero of Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, later filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man. My Geek Senses noticed this immediately, and I figured that this story would be about a guy who shrinks, but it turns out that he stays the same size, he just literally loses weight. But the choice of the protagonist’s name was clearly not a coincidence.
Fever Pitch by Nick Hormby. The book is about an English guy’s lifelong obsession with Arsenal. It is autobiographical.
The movie is about some guy named Ben and the Red Sox.
FYI, the first film adaptation of the novel Fever Pitch is about football (soccer), with the screenplay written by the book’s author. The American remake was, as you said about a Boston Red Sox fan played by Jimmy Fallon. FYI, I liked the American movie, partly because I thought Fallon and Drew Barrymore (as the love interest) worked well together.
