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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 12, 2023 22:10:07 GMT
What books (or short stories, or plays, or even video games) would you like to adapt from one medium to another?
Back at the old board, I mentioned that I wanted to adapt the 1944 film The Uninvited (based on Dorothy Macardle’s book Uneasy Freehold, which I haven’t read) into a play. I still do.
Lots of other thoughts:
• Peter Straub’s book Ghost Story into a miniseries
• Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader’s movie Obsession into an opera
• Helen McCloy’s book The Slayer and the Slain into a (Hitchcockian thriller) movie
• Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s stage musical Road Show into a movie musical, directed by Tim Burton
• The video game The Last Express into a movie (reportedly Paul Verhoeven is working on this?)
What got me thinking about this topic again is that I was thinking of adapting a Sherlock Holmes story for the community theater group I’m in, and for the life of me I couldn’t decide which one. “The Blue Carbuncle” is a good post-Christmas one, which would make it a good fit for when the group would mount it, but it’s not a particularly exciting tale (a good tale, yes, but no one-legged avengers or speckled bands). I’m still not sure!
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Post by Captain Spencer on Dec 15, 2023 20:58:01 GMT
Needful Things being remade as a miniseries. The 1993 movie sucked.
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Post by theravenking on Dec 16, 2023 14:47:28 GMT
I know I've mentioned this before, but The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester would make for a great science-fiction mystery flick. It was Brian De Palma's dream project, but he couldn't get the funding.
While I wasn't particularly taken with Theodore Roszak's Flicker (great concept, but somewhat plodding execution with a weak ending) I still believe it could make a great mini-series.
I would also like to see a new adaptation of Patrick Quentin's Puzzle series. I know some of the books have already been filmed, but I haven't seen any of those and I find the novels to be really underrated.
The authors also wrote a great novella, Exit Before Midnight, an excellent closed circle mystery, which could be turned into a fun contained thriller.
There's a great Edgar-winning short story by David Ely (he also wrote the book Seconds adapted into the Rock Hudson movie), The Club about a very exclusive club the protagonist desperately wants to be admitted to. Nobody knows what the club is exactly about, we only find out at the very end. It's a bit like Stanley Ellin's The Speciality Of The House, only that unlike the Ellin story the twist can not be predicted early on.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 16, 2023 15:39:56 GMT
Needful Things being remade as a miniseries. The 1993 movie sucked. Heh, I think I’m the only person who liked the movie—mostly for Max von Sydow’s performance, but still.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 16, 2023 15:42:57 GMT
I know I've mentioned this before, but The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester would make for a great science-fiction mystery flick. It was Brian De Palma's dream project, but he couldn't get the funding. While I wasn't particularly taken with Theodore Roszak's Flicker (great concept, but somewhat plodding execution with a weak ending) I still believe it could make a great mini-series. I would also like to see a new adaptation of Patrick Quentin's Puzzle series. I know some of the books have already been filmed, but I haven't seen any of those and I find the novels to be really underrated. The authors also wrote a great novella, Exit Before Midnight, an excellent closed circle mystery, which could be turned into a fun contained thriller. There's a great Edgar-winning short story by David Ely (he also wrote the book Seconds adapted into the Rock Hudson movie), The Club about a very exclusive club the protagonist desperately wants to be admitted to. Nobody knows what the club is exactly about, we only find out at the very end. It's a bit like Stanley Ellin's The Speciality Of The House, only that unlike the Ellin story the twist can not be predicted early on. I haven’t read any of these, but looking them up, they seem like great choices. Flicker sounds a lot like The Ninth Gate, which I loved. I just ordered an anthology from the library that contains “Exit Before Midnight,” and I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the others.
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Post by Captain Spencer on Dec 16, 2023 16:04:22 GMT
Needful Things being remade as a miniseries. The 1993 movie sucked. Heh, I think I’m the only person who liked the movie—mostly for Max von Sydow’s performance, but still. I agree that von Sydow put on a great performance as Leland Gaunt, but, as a fan of the novel, I didn't like the drastic changes made to the movie. Needful Things needs a proper adaptation, and because there's so much ground to cover a miniseries would be ideal.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 23, 2023 3:25:49 GMT
theravenking, I read “Exit Before Midnight.” Mixed feelings: I thought the writing was rather poor (with lousy dialogue—a surprise, as Hugh Wheeler, one half of the Q. Patrick team, was a playwright), but the story is nicely plotted. The authors fooled me with a red herring. I could absolutely see it being adapted for the screen; in fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t already an Alfred Hitchcock Hour or something similar. Adapter should borrow the setup (murders as the minutes tick down to midnight on New Year’s Eve—can’t get better than that) and the mystery plotting, and write better dialogue. I may be making tenuous connections, but Wheeler wrote the books for two Stephen Sondheim musicals, and the story reminded me a lot of Sondheim’s second and last published mystery, the play Getting Away with Murder. Wheeler had nothing to do with that play, which Sondheim cowrote with George Furth (Wheeler had died years before, in fact), but the setups are curiously close, both have no detective character and instead have the suspects playing detective themselves, both have similar plot points and even similar murderers. Probably a coincidence (I’d always assumed that mystery buff Sondheim borrowed the suspects-accuse-each-other gambit, which also pops up in his and Anthony Perkins’s The Last of Sheila, from Christianna Brand), but interesting.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 26, 2023 4:52:49 GMT
This is another idea that I probably mentioned back at the old board, but someone should make at least a miniseries of adaptations of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Plenty of Holmes movies are pastiches, but few (in fact, I don’t know of any except The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and that Ian McKellen one that came out a few years ago) are adaptations of literary pastiches.
That may be because most Holmes pastiches, even by authors who should know better, are pretty lousy, but there are enough good ones to fill up a season of television. Denis O. Smith’s are extremely faithful to Doyle; Smith’s “The Adventure of the Yellow Glove,” for example, could be dropped into the canon without anyone batting an eye. And many of them are good, to boot, just as fiction; “The Adventure of the Willow Pool,” notably, is rather moving.
Some of the celebrity-written ones (which could persuade a production company to make the miniseries) aren’t so bad. Stephen King’s “The Doctor’s Case” has a decent mystery plot, but King strains to make his prose style seem Doylean—so the story would probably benefit from a TV adaptation. Neil Gaiman’s two, “A Study in Emerald” and “The Case of Death and Honey,” are really excellent, using the pastiche form to comment on the originals (positively, I should note!). I’ve long wanted to see an adaptation of “Emerald.”
The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, by Doyle’s son Adrian and mystery writer John Dickson Carr, has a few good stories that could work, particularly “The Seven Clocks,” “The Gold Hunter,” “The Black Baronet” (which was adapted for TV, with Basil Rathbone in the ’50s… and is lost), “The Sealed Room,” and “The Deptford Horror.”
The story that reminded me of this idea is the late Tanith Lee’s “The Human Mystery,” which is not only an excellent Holmes pastiche but also one of the best Christmas-set mystery stories I know. Like Gaiman, Lee is commenting as well as imitating, but she hides her commentary well, makes it work within what initially seems a standard Sherlock Holmes story format. It also has a bunch of scenes that would likely work well onscreen, notably a tense countdown to Christmas, when a curse will strike the heroine.
This is the kind of concept that’ll probably never happen, but I think it could be fun.
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Post by theravenking on Dec 26, 2023 21:37:20 GMT
This is another idea that I probably mentioned back at the old board, but someone should make at least a miniseries of adaptations of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Plenty of Holmes movies are pastiches, but few (in fact, I don’t know of any except The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and that Ian McKellen one that came out a few years ago) are adaptations of literary pastiches. That may be because most Holmes pastiches, even by authors who should know better, are pretty lousy, but there are enough good ones to fill up a season of television. Denis O. Smith’s are extremely faithful to Doyle; Smith’s “The Adventure of the Yellow Glove,” for example, could be dropped into the canon without anyone batting an eye. And they’re rather good, to boot, just as fiction; “The Adventure of the Willow Pool,” notably, is rather moving. Some of the celebrity-written ones (which could persuade a production company to make the miniseries) aren’t so bad. Stephen King’s “The Doctor’s Case” has a decent mystery plot, but King strains to make his prose style seem Doylean—so the story would probably benefit from a TV adaptation. Neil Gaiman’s two, “A Study in Emerald” and “The Case of Death and Honey,” are really excellent, using the pastiche form to comment on the originals (positively, I should note!). I’ve long wanted to see an adaptation of “Emerald.” The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, by Doyle’s son Adrian and mystery writer John Dickson Carr, has a few good stories that could work, particularly “The Seven Clocks,” “The Gold Hunter,” “The Black Baronet” (which was adapted for TV, with Basil Rathbone in the ’50s… and is lost), “The Sealed Room,” and “The Deptford Horror.” The story that reminded me of this idea is the late Tanith Lee’s “The Human Mystery,” which is not only an excellent Holmes pastiche but also one of the best Christmas-set mystery stories I know. Like Gaiman, Lee is commenting as well as imitating, but she hides her commentary well, makes it work within what initially seems a standard Sherlock Holmes story format. It also has a bunch of scenes that would likely work well onscreen, notably a tense countdown to Christmas, when a curse will strike the heroine. This is the kind of concept that’ll probably never happen, but I think it could be fun. I love this idea. It's something the BBC could've succesfully accomplished perhaps as far as 15-20 years ago.
The Human Mystery actually happens to be one of my favorite pastiches, although I had completely forgotten, that it was set at Christmas.
I have just recently read The Riddle Of Foxwood Grange by Denis O. Smith, one of his few (perhaps only?) novel-length pastiches. It was decent, I don't think Smith has ever written a bad one, although I find that with the pastiches, just like with Doyle's originals, the ones in shorter form work the best with the novels often too bloated, they sometimes appear just like short-story plots stretched to novel-length.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 26, 2023 23:11:30 GMT
theravenking: A BBC show 15-20 years ago would have been perfect. Too bad they probably wouldn’t do one now. Huh, I didn’t even know Smith wrote a novel-length pastiche. Yes, I can imagine he’s better in the short form: Many of his short stories are too long as is, almost novella-length. Yes, “Human Mystery” is Christmas-set. It would have been great source material for Jeremy Brett (to whom Lee dedicated it), given him a chance to stretch his acting muscles beyond his usual Holmes characterization. If only…
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Post by jervistetch on Dec 30, 2023 2:39:47 GMT
WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? by Budd Schulberg. A great novel about how ugly and back-stabbing Hollywood can be. Written by the man who wrote the Oscar winning screenplay for ON THE WATERFRONT. It had a TV adaptation in the 50’s but it was never made into a feature film. I hope it will be someday.
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 29, 2024 17:10:03 GMT
This obviously can’t be done now, but it just popped into my mind: a ’70s or ’80s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Endless Night, directed by Brian De Palma, score by Bernard Herrmann. Even at the very least it would have been better than the real 1972 adaptation!
EDIT: I completely forgot that Herrmann scored the ’72 adaptation. Ha. I guess it was so bad that even Herrmann’s music didn’t make me like it!
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Post by theravenking on Mar 1, 2024 16:08:21 GMT
This obviously can’t be done now, but it just popped into my mind: a ’70s or ’80s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Endless Night, directed by Brian De Palma, score by Bernard Herrmann. Even at the very least it would have been better than the real 1972 adaptation! There's also the one with Miss Marple from 2014. It had an appealing cast and handsome production values, but didn't really work (and not only because they included Marple).
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 1, 2024 16:51:59 GMT
This obviously can’t be done now, but it just popped into my mind: a ’70s or ’80s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Endless Night, directed by Brian De Palma, score by Bernard Herrmann. Even at the very least it would have been better than the real 1972 adaptation! There's also the one with Miss Marple from 2014. It had an appealing cast and handsome production values, but didn't really work (and not only because they included Marple). I haven’t seen that one, though I want(ed?) to because the writer, Kevin Elyot, did some of the better Geraldine McEwan episodes (though he didn’t do the best, the Murder at the Vicarage adaptation) and the superb David Suchet adaptations of Death on the Nile and Five Little Pigs. Too bad to hear it didn’t work.
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Post by bomtombadil on Mar 1, 2024 18:32:10 GMT
At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft is a movie I've always wanted made
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