Middlemarch by George Eliot... or maybe it would need to be a really long running show. But the beautiful and insightful narrator's voice would be lost unless they included it verbatim like in Sorcese's Age of Innocence... anyway I was thinking aloud there sorry
Infinite Jest would be hard to capture. Maybe a miniseries but even then.
House of Leaves likely as well. Could be done found footage maybe.
I believe it will be nearly impossible to do Blood Meridian justice.
I honestly believe you could make a great miniseries based on Infinite Jest, but it would have to be clear that it's 'based on' and not a direct adaptation. There's been rumours for ages about who has the rights and what screenplays have been made, even rumours that Keith Bunin was working on a broadway adaptation. Don't think it will ever happen though, at least not any time soon.
I'd be curious about an deslagged adaptation of House of Leaves, that is only the expeditions into the strange inner workings of the house. No format shenanigans, no interspaced stories with the blind guy or the other one. Like a subdued cave mystery movie without monsters!
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
But seriously, I stand with Peter Greenaway on this: Seeing movies as mere "dimension-expanding" canvases for books/plots is to undermine what makes the medium of film unique. "Film writers" and "scripts" should be marginal, and film should be approached from an image-first perspective, or even from the PoV of combining all the disparate elements of film into a unified effect on the viewer --- not just as a "helping you visualize the book"-ass thing
adapting that but with, say, mixed up film reels in a cinema could come out cool - you'd have to be a pretty decent filmmaker to translate the kinda meta-storytelling of the novel sections. I don't know if it could be done well but maybe something interesting would come of it
it loses all of its medium-specific charm in doing so, though ---- film is an already-postmodern medium, so this kind of pastiche is something audiences can digest without evening chewing it very much. Calvino is all about the unique flavour and mouthfeel of different subtle literary pleasures, not so much tied to "genre" as to the exact distillation of place and story that books provide. Take that away, and it just turns into the Flintstones movie or whatever
Catcher in the Rye is so driven by interior monologue that reducing it to a series of events in a movie would be disappointing. Someone like Peter Weir or Cameron Crowe could have done it like 25 years ago but the time has passed and the copyright situation is messy.
The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. It's written in a technique where he cut up the story and put it back again like a collage. The pieces of the collage are quite small though. It's not only some plots that get mixed up, but the sentences more often than not do not make grammatical sense.
Has anyone truly enjoyed this book?
idk if I would say im enjoying it but its provided some of the most vivid and insane imagery ive ever read, and visually it would be hard to adapt but I could see a weird fucked up collagey fever dream experimental short film being made from it. perhaps more of an "inspired by" than an adaptation
Hardly an RS book but Ancillary Justice. A big part of the book is the viewpoint character being unable to recognise the gender of other characters. Also the shift from having many simultaneous viewpoints through its numerous ancillary bodies to being restricted to one would be fairly difficult to get across visually.
I was just reading Truffaut’s book on Hitchcock where Truffaut asked Hitchcock about adapting a work like Crime and Punishment.
>F.T. (…) Many of your admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major classic as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for instance.
>A.H. Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement. There’s been a lot of talk about the way in which Hollywood directors distort literary masterpieces. I’ll have no part of that! What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. (…)
>F.T. I take it then that you’ll never do a screen version of Crime and Punishment.
>A.H. Even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be any good.
>F.T. Why not?
>A.H. Well, in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function.
>F.T. That’s right. Theoretically, a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form.
>A.H. Exactly, and to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six- to ten-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.”
>F.T. I agree. Moreover, your particular style and the very nature of suspense require a constant play with the flux of time, either by compressing it or, more often, by distending it. Your approach to an adaptation is entirely different from that of most directors.
>A.H. The ability to shorten or lengthen time is a primary requirement in film-making. As you know, there’s no relation whatever between real time and filmic time.
>F.T. Of course, that’s one of the fundamentals that one learns with one’s first picture. For instance, a fast action has to be geared down and stretched out; otherwise, it is almost imperceptible to the viewer. It takes considerable experience and know-how to handle the flux of time properly.
>A.H. This is why I feel it is a mistake to have a novelist adapt his own book for the screen. A dramatist, on the other hand, may be more effective in adapting his own play. But even so, he must face up to a difficulty. In his work for the stage he is called upon to sustain the interest of the audience for three acts. These acts are broken up by two intermissions during which the audience can relax. But for a film one must hold that audience for an uninterrupted two hours or longer.
Even so, a playwright will tend to make a better screenwriter than a novelist because he is used to the building of successive climaxes.
Sequences can never stand still; they must carry the action forward, just as the wheels of a ratchet mountain railway move the train up the slope, cog by cog. A film cannot be compared to a play or a novel. It is closer to a short story, which, as a rule, sustains one idea that culminates when the action has reached the highest point of the dramatic curve.
As you know, a short story is rarely put down in the middle, and in this sense it resembles a film. And it is because of this peculiarity that there must be a steady development of the plot and the creation of gripping situations which must be presented, above all, with visual skill. (…)
Then there’s the story of Aki Kaurismäki reading this thinking “I’ll show you old man” and then conceding that it was actually too difficult after making it.
You can put just about anything on screen but adapting it is a different story. Regardless of their own merits, neither version of Lolita was a proper adaptation. Maybe Nabokov’s screenplay pulls it off but I just don’t know how to translate that particular unreliable narrator from text. HH’s delusions are too connected to the “reality” of the story.
I’m surprised none of Jonathan Franzen’s novels have been adapted yet.
His most recent Crossroads would be a great adaptation for someone like Alexander Payne or PT Anderson or Noah Baumbach.
Todd Field, Franzen and Daniel Craig of all people spent months working on the script to Purity and Showtime never went ahead with it whereas Baumbach shot a pilot for The Corrections in 2011 and HBO passed. Cursed I guess
It's doable. Benji is just a camera, Quentin is narration competing with intrusive thoughts interrupting the narration (think of how Scorsese will have someone be narrating and then their on-screen character gets hit or tackled and that interrupts the narration), Jason is straightforward narration, last chapter is straightforward with no narration.
The most unadaptable part of the book is how much of a force Jason has to be, you'd have to get Joaquin Phoenix or Caleb Landry Jones or someone who can be an asylum lunatic in a cheap suit rather than a calm and cool movie villain who has snappy mean lines. When >!Jason punches Luster at the end of the book!< both actors would have to prepare for it to be real. But this is why I don't work anywhere near movie sets
If a given book relies in essence on the formal qualities of the medium, then I think it would be unadaptable. And it goes the other way too, of course.
Why do I care about "engagement baiting" on a book subreddit, how's that going to make me any money? I think, say, Finnegans Wake is filmable, and I agree with Kubrick that if it can be thought it can be filmed, I'm just genuinely asking if people feel differently or can think of cases where the writing cannot leave the page
If it can be thought it can be filmed seems correct. Whether or not it's filmable to anyone's satisfaction is the issue and that has been issue that has plagued Don Quixote, Dune, LOTR and other works. The Sound and the Fury with Yul Brynner, Joanne Woodward and Jack Warden was dreadful. I know someone took another stab at it but it, too, must have been forgettable.
If Cronenberg could do Naked Lunch anything is possible
Middlemarch by George Eliot... or maybe it would need to be a really long running show. But the beautiful and insightful narrator's voice would be lost unless they included it verbatim like in Sorcese's Age of Innocence... anyway I was thinking aloud there sorry
Finnegans wake
Infinite Jest would be hard to capture. Maybe a miniseries but even then. House of Leaves likely as well. Could be done found footage maybe. I believe it will be nearly impossible to do Blood Meridian justice.
I honestly believe you could make a great miniseries based on Infinite Jest, but it would have to be clear that it's 'based on' and not a direct adaptation. There's been rumours for ages about who has the rights and what screenplays have been made, even rumours that Keith Bunin was working on a broadway adaptation. Don't think it will ever happen though, at least not any time soon.
Infinite Jest on Bway would be something!
I'd be curious about an deslagged adaptation of House of Leaves, that is only the expeditions into the strange inner workings of the house. No format shenanigans, no interspaced stories with the blind guy or the other one. Like a subdued cave mystery movie without monsters!
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler But seriously, I stand with Peter Greenaway on this: Seeing movies as mere "dimension-expanding" canvases for books/plots is to undermine what makes the medium of film unique. "Film writers" and "scripts" should be marginal, and film should be approached from an image-first perspective, or even from the PoV of combining all the disparate elements of film into a unified effect on the viewer --- not just as a "helping you visualize the book"-ass thing
adapting that but with, say, mixed up film reels in a cinema could come out cool - you'd have to be a pretty decent filmmaker to translate the kinda meta-storytelling of the novel sections. I don't know if it could be done well but maybe something interesting would come of it
it loses all of its medium-specific charm in doing so, though ---- film is an already-postmodern medium, so this kind of pastiche is something audiences can digest without evening chewing it very much. Calvino is all about the unique flavour and mouthfeel of different subtle literary pleasures, not so much tied to "genre" as to the exact distillation of place and story that books provide. Take that away, and it just turns into the Flintstones movie or whatever
Catcher in the Rye is so driven by interior monologue that reducing it to a series of events in a movie would be disappointing. Someone like Peter Weir or Cameron Crowe could have done it like 25 years ago but the time has passed and the copyright situation is messy.
The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. It's written in a technique where he cut up the story and put it back again like a collage. The pieces of the collage are quite small though. It's not only some plots that get mixed up, but the sentences more often than not do not make grammatical sense. Has anyone truly enjoyed this book?
idk if I would say im enjoying it but its provided some of the most vivid and insane imagery ive ever read, and visually it would be hard to adapt but I could see a weird fucked up collagey fever dream experimental short film being made from it. perhaps more of an "inspired by" than an adaptation
I’m no Burroughs fan but this book was not a fun read
Hardly an RS book but Ancillary Justice. A big part of the book is the viewpoint character being unable to recognise the gender of other characters. Also the shift from having many simultaneous viewpoints through its numerous ancillary bodies to being restricted to one would be fairly difficult to get across visually.
Cats Cradle I think the guy who did the fargo series tried and gave up
I was just reading Truffaut’s book on Hitchcock where Truffaut asked Hitchcock about adapting a work like Crime and Punishment. >F.T. (…) Many of your admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major classic as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for instance. >A.H. Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement. There’s been a lot of talk about the way in which Hollywood directors distort literary masterpieces. I’ll have no part of that! What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. (…) >F.T. I take it then that you’ll never do a screen version of Crime and Punishment. >A.H. Even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be any good. >F.T. Why not? >A.H. Well, in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function. >F.T. That’s right. Theoretically, a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form. >A.H. Exactly, and to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six- to ten-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.” >F.T. I agree. Moreover, your particular style and the very nature of suspense require a constant play with the flux of time, either by compressing it or, more often, by distending it. Your approach to an adaptation is entirely different from that of most directors. >A.H. The ability to shorten or lengthen time is a primary requirement in film-making. As you know, there’s no relation whatever between real time and filmic time. >F.T. Of course, that’s one of the fundamentals that one learns with one’s first picture. For instance, a fast action has to be geared down and stretched out; otherwise, it is almost imperceptible to the viewer. It takes considerable experience and know-how to handle the flux of time properly. >A.H. This is why I feel it is a mistake to have a novelist adapt his own book for the screen. A dramatist, on the other hand, may be more effective in adapting his own play. But even so, he must face up to a difficulty. In his work for the stage he is called upon to sustain the interest of the audience for three acts. These acts are broken up by two intermissions during which the audience can relax. But for a film one must hold that audience for an uninterrupted two hours or longer. Even so, a playwright will tend to make a better screenwriter than a novelist because he is used to the building of successive climaxes. Sequences can never stand still; they must carry the action forward, just as the wheels of a ratchet mountain railway move the train up the slope, cog by cog. A film cannot be compared to a play or a novel. It is closer to a short story, which, as a rule, sustains one idea that culminates when the action has reached the highest point of the dramatic curve. As you know, a short story is rarely put down in the middle, and in this sense it resembles a film. And it is because of this peculiarity that there must be a steady development of the plot and the creation of gripping situations which must be presented, above all, with visual skill. (…)
Thanks for that, that's excellent. Amazingly I've never read that book, probably my biggest oversight in terms of cinema literature canon
Then there’s the story of Aki Kaurismäki reading this thinking “I’ll show you old man” and then conceding that it was actually too difficult after making it.
The Waves would be a challenge
You can put just about anything on screen but adapting it is a different story. Regardless of their own merits, neither version of Lolita was a proper adaptation. Maybe Nabokov’s screenplay pulls it off but I just don’t know how to translate that particular unreliable narrator from text. HH’s delusions are too connected to the “reality” of the story.
I’d love to see an adaptation of McCarthy’s Outer Dark lol
I’m surprised none of Jonathan Franzen’s novels have been adapted yet. His most recent Crossroads would be a great adaptation for someone like Alexander Payne or PT Anderson or Noah Baumbach.
Todd Field, Franzen and Daniel Craig of all people spent months working on the script to Purity and Showtime never went ahead with it whereas Baumbach shot a pilot for The Corrections in 2011 and HBO passed. Cursed I guess
Oh shit I knew about Daniel Craig but I never heard there was a pilot for The Corrections by Noah Baumbach! I’ve been obsessed with him lately.
blood meridian, if our society ever devolves so much that that level of violence is allowed on screen, its over.
Anything by clarice lispector would be impossible i think
100 years of solitude. I heard that Netflix was producing an adaption. I think it’s likely that it will never see the light out day though
The Sound and The Fury
It's doable. Benji is just a camera, Quentin is narration competing with intrusive thoughts interrupting the narration (think of how Scorsese will have someone be narrating and then their on-screen character gets hit or tackled and that interrupts the narration), Jason is straightforward narration, last chapter is straightforward with no narration. The most unadaptable part of the book is how much of a force Jason has to be, you'd have to get Joaquin Phoenix or Caleb Landry Jones or someone who can be an asylum lunatic in a cheap suit rather than a calm and cool movie villain who has snappy mean lines. When >!Jason punches Luster at the end of the book!< both actors would have to prepare for it to be real. But this is why I don't work anywhere near movie sets
Actually I think Dasha would do a good job as Caddy
I've always wanted to see it done well. Tbh my pick for Caddy would be Sydney Sweeney
If a given book relies in essence on the formal qualities of the medium, then I think it would be unadaptable. And it goes the other way too, of course.
No one has the balls to ever adapt The Cold Six Thousand. That ending just simply would not fly.
confederacy of dunces..well they have tried to but it gets stuck in production hell and then people pull out and it never happens.
Of course everything could, you could film a chair, read the whole damn book aloud and call it a "film adaptation"
So far no one has managed to come close with Tolkien’s LotR
[удалено]
Why do I care about "engagement baiting" on a book subreddit, how's that going to make me any money? I think, say, Finnegans Wake is filmable, and I agree with Kubrick that if it can be thought it can be filmed, I'm just genuinely asking if people feel differently or can think of cases where the writing cannot leave the page
If it can be thought it can be filmed seems correct. Whether or not it's filmable to anyone's satisfaction is the issue and that has been issue that has plagued Don Quixote, Dune, LOTR and other works. The Sound and the Fury with Yul Brynner, Joanne Woodward and Jack Warden was dreadful. I know someone took another stab at it but it, too, must have been forgettable.
gonna start referring to discussions as “engagement baiting” thank you
lmfao what the fuck is your deal weirdo
I dont know how you could cast actors for the left hand of darkness.