Novel Impossibilities

What, your favorite novel hasn’t been adapted into film form? Maybe it’s impossible.

“With the release and critical success of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, an adaptation of a novel once considered impossible to film, what better time to look into the process of adaptation. Most movies these days are based on literary sources. Which is ironic, considering the increasing lack of interest in books these days as opposed to the spoon-fed thoughts offered by Hollywood.

While many novels can be almost directly translated to screen, especially pre-20th century novels such as Jane Austen’s gossip columns, more recent novels can prove difficult. There have been bad novels turned into good films (pretty much everything Hitchcock Made, The Godfather), and plenty of dull adaptations of good books (Dune, The Unbearable Bore of Being in a Cinema to Watch This). There’s also a few oddities, such as Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre self-referential adaptation of ‘The Orchid Thief’. But despite the film industry’s frenzy in snapping up adaptation rights, there remains a few novels many fear.”

All those impossible novels are here.

6 responses to “Novel Impossibilities”

  1. “Jane Austen’s gossip columns”? My eyes hurt. My lungs: in pain. My brain: cramped.

  2. PS: Not because they’re lame but because they’re so tricky and deceptive.

  3. Those all sound pretty hard to film, yeah.Some books are hard to film because the story is lame or cliched, but it’s the author’s writing that makes it entertaining.They’d have trouble filming Gene Wolfe’s Peace or The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

  4. Someone get Imani a Georgian Era emergency services team, stat! Alert the Jane Austen Society of North America! JASNA Assemble!

  5. I’m a real dork when it comes to movie adaptations. I either think to myself how I would adapt the book I’m reading, even if it’s unfilmable, sometimes going so far as paging through Syd Field’s Screenplay and making a short note to myself, or I go out and rent an existing movie adaptation.Did you know The Brothers Karamazov adaptation stars Yul Brynner and Bill Shatner? And that Shatner is good in it?

  6. LOL! JASNA assemble!Melissa and I couldn’t get through the whole adaptation, I don’t think… But Shatner wasn’t the problem.

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