@Mike Spence: I mentioned The Catcher in the Rye in an earlier post, with some additional information:
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Someone tried to get young Bob Dylan to star in this one, but Salinger consistently denied movie rights after Hollywood screwed up Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. Terrence Malick might be a good choice as director, given his films about alienated youth.
I’m listening to the intriguing unabridged audio book “The Strain”, the first book of a trilogy by auteur Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. I’m pretty sure filming will start before the last book is out.
“Mi alma se la dejo al diablo/ I leave my soul to the devil” by Germán Castro Caycedo
I’d like to see everything by Hubert Selby Jr. made into films. The Room, please!
flesh and blood- Michael Cunningham
case histories-Kate Atkinson
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (give it a bauhaus look)
Still Life with Woodpecker – Tom Robbins
The Perks of Being a Wallflower- Stephen Chbosky
It’s Kind of a Funny Story- Ned Vizzini
A Million Little Pieces- Stephen Frey (yeah I know he lied to Oprah, but its still a damn good story)
the Europeans- Henry James
American Pastoral- Philip Roth (I thinkt this is in pre-production)
Maus- Art Spiegelman (would make a wonderful animation film)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle- Haruki Murakami
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius- Dave Eggers
Birds of America-Lorrie Moore
Sandman-Neil Gaiman
The Corrections,-Jonathan Franzen
Drop City- TC Boyle
harold and the purple crayon- Crockett Johnson (where the wild things are happend, why cant this)
Mark Romanek is adapting “never let me go” which I heard is supose to be good, or at least thats what spike Jonze says
I just read “The Double” by Dostoevsky for my Russian Lit. class and I just kept thinking how great a film that could be if the director followed Dostoevsky’s imagery as close as possible. That book is such a confusing whirlwind of events that I think it could actually make for an enjoyable movie. I don’t know if a Russian filmmaker has ever attempted that, but I think it would be cool to see.
@Daniel Seth Levine: Bernardo Bertolucci’s third feature, PARTNER (1968), is loosely based on Doestoevsky’s THE DOUBLE, although it is not credited as such. The theme/motif of the double or doppleganger pops up frequently in Bertolicci’s movies.
The Man Who Was Thursday, because i am never going to get around to reading it.
Ralph Ellisons’ Invisible Man I might have already mentioned it here but I’ve been surprised that what is considered by many to be the greatest American novel of the 20th century has never been made into a theatrically released feature film.
This is a song rather than a book so I apologize if I’m pushing the limits of the question, but I’ve always thought that Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” would make for a fantastic Western.
@Fredo: Ralph Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN was never filmed because he would not permit it. (a bit like J. D. Salinger in that regard.)
Some portions of the novel WERE shot on video by Avon Kirkland, who had established a rapport with Ellison’s widow but the family wanted to respect Ralph Ellison’s wishes. Kirkland made a documentary about the author for the PBS series, American Masters. Here’s a short segment from an interview with that filmmaker about the movie rights to INVISIBLE MAN:
Q: You and your staff were the first ever to adapt scenes from INVISIBLE MAN to film and excerpts are included in the documentary. Why wasn’t the entire book ever made into a movie?
AK: After seeing his friend Richard Wright’s great novel, NATIVE SON, so poorly adapted in an early 1950s foreign production, Ellison apparently wanted to protect the integrity of his great work. He certainly received dozens of offers for the movie rights to the book. The celebrated director Sidney Lumet (THE PAWNBROKER, many others) was especially interested in optioning the book as early as the 1960s, as was media mogul Quincy Jones around 1990. And even the well-known cinéma vérité documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman inquired about the rights in the 1970s while he was still a practicing attorney in Boston.
Q: So how did you get approval to adapt the scenes that are in the documentary?
AK: It took two years of rather delicate negotiations. Although she is ninety years old and is not in the best of health, Mrs. Ellison remembers clearly that Mr. Ellison did not permit the book made into a movie, stage play, opera, or anything else. And there the matter stood for awhile despite my argument that a documentary on one of America’s most important authors was overdue. I added that we wouldn’t be trying to do the show if Ellison hadn’t written INVISIBLE MAN and that it would be a boring program indeed if we talked about a book that, as it turns out, these days most people haven’t read. We needed to give the viewer at least at a taste of Ellison’s artistry and vision to make the case for his achievement.
Q: So that changed her mind?
AK: No, it didn’t. I began to make progress only after I remembered that I had tried in the late 1980s to option the book myself and was told that although an option was available, Mr. Ellison would require script approval. Well, that was the turning point. I reminded Mr. Ellison’s agent, Owen Laster, of our conversation in the 80s and stated that I would be delighted to give the Estate script approval for the few scenes (and the scenes only, mind you) that we wanted to adapt. Mr. Laster, as well as Ellison’s literary executor, John Callahan, strongly supported the idea and Mrs. Ellison gave her approval.
Q: Working within a documentary budget, you made some highly produced (i.e., expensive looking) dramatic scenes from INVISIBLE MAN that actually look like scenes from a big budget movie!
AK: Much of the credit for that goes to Elise Robertson who did a terrific job directing those scenes and working with Co-Producer Yanna Kroyt Brandt, Director of Photography Barry Stone, and Production Designer Don Day to achieve outstanding results on a minuscule budget. They deserve a lot of credit for making the scenes look like film even though they were shot on digi-Beta.
Q: Right…. Do you think that Ralph Ellison, had he lived to see it, would have approved of your rendering of his life in the documentary?
AK: I doubt it. He was very careful about what went out to the public as representing his life, ideas, beliefs, and so on. So much so that when interviewed for print publications he would not infrequently ask to edit or polish transcripts of his responses to the questions asked.
LAURIOS: There does exist a momo movie.
If you search for “momo” and “michael ende” on youtube, you will find clips of it.
The History of Sexuality – Foucault
(a bump for Glemaud)
catcher in the rye and on the road directed by the director of wendy and lucy and old joy
wetlands directed by larry clark
“Mysteries” by Knut Hamsun (I’m working on it).
Also considering Dostoyevsyi’s “The Double” or something by Celine (which I see were also mentioned above).
Percy’s The Moviegoer.
Plunket’s My Search For Warren Harding.
Kingsley Amis’s Stanley and the Women.
Berger’s Regiment of Women.
De Vries’s The Blood of the Lamb.
Carr’s The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey.
Barth’s The Floating Opera.
Fowles’s The Magus — it really needs to be done as a TV movie series.
Ted Williams’s My Turn At Bat.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I hope one day this happens.
Stephen Donaldson’s brilliant Gap series – has this ever been considered I wonder?!?
People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
Ender’s Game – by M Scott Card, definitely. Can’t understand why no one’s snapped it up yet, what with the current interest in scifi. And the subsequent novels, esp Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, are equally screenworthy. Given the subject matter, if the films were intelligently and creatively handled, they could really add a whole new dimension to the story. Perhaps someone like Fincher… or Nolan….
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
I would like to see (masterpiece) adaptations of Zola’s The Flood, Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward, Raspail’s Blue Island, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (not by someone with a name like Jon Vomit), Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Ossendowski’s Beast, Men, and Gods and Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel.
John Cowper Powys’s amazing masterpiece A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE. In the early sixties John Boorman had the guts to give it a try. After many struggles he produced a screenplay and let it read to the producers. This was their response:
’It’s too, it’ too…’
‘Yes, Nat, it is a little too long.’ David offered hopefully.
‘No. No. No. It’s too…’
‘Short?’
‘No. Too…too…’
‘Intelligent?’
’That’s it. Not enough…’
‘Sex?’
’That’s it. And needs more…’
‘Action?’
‘Yes. And more…’
‘Violence?’
‘Now you’re talking.’
John Boorman writes: “I was impressed by David’s ability to decipher what Nat wanted to say.
’It’s not that difficult,’ he said. Nat’s fairly predictable.”
Comment je suis devenu stupide by Martin Page
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Open Veins of Latin America. They’re not fictional books, but both would be wonderful to watch. I’d be interested in anything adapted from Eduardo Galeano though.
I wouldn’t mind seeing someone take another stab at Breakfast at Tiffany’s. This time closer to the original. Holly was such a slut in the book.
My Dark Places by James Ellroy.
Two fantastic Russian novels come to mind: Lermontov’s shape-shifting picaresque, “A Hero of Our Time” and Pelevin’s dark comedy about cosmonauts, “Omon Ra.”
And, of course, DeLillo’s “White Noise.”
f*ck this sh*t
Journey to the End of the Night by Celine