Today I close out IFC.com’s List Month with ten works of fiction I’d like to see adapted for film.
The list leans toward the contemporary and is by no means comprehensive; among other things, I intended to mention James Hynes’ “Queen of the Jungle” (from Publish and Perish), but forgot. Here’s the intro:
Adapting fiction for the screen has always been a tricky endeavor. For every “Apocalypse Now,” “The Big Sleep” or “Rebecca,” there are scores of butchered classics and box office duds, and in recent years, Hollywood has only continued to perfect its reverse-alchemy process, transforming narrative gold into the dullest, heaviest lead, topped off with a giant packet of saccharine.
For details, see Roland Joffe’s “The Scarlet Letter,” featuring a pearl-bedecked, shiny-bodiced, utterly vacuous Hester Prynne, or the soul-sucking “Love in the Time of Cholera,” which drove the Guardian’s John Patterson to call for a ban on the making of all movies based on books. It’s easy to sympathize. We’re talking, after all, about the machine that reduced Zoë Heller’s brilliantly satirical “Notes on a Scandal” — a teacher’s obsessive chronicle of her female colleague’s affair with a young male student — to a cautionary tale with all the subtlety of “Fatal Attraction.”
Still, the best fiction can offer what most industry vehicles don’t: a compelling narrative, vivid characters, surprising but realistic plot twists — and sometimes all three. It’s hard not to imagine how “The Secret History” and “A Confederacy of Dunces” would play out on screen, had they escaped getting sucked into the black hole of pre-production. Some books — like Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” so stripped-down novelistically, it tended to read like stage directions — actually work better as films.
Tomorrow Julian Jarrold takes his own cinematic run at Evelyn Waugh’s magnum opus “Brideshead Revisited,” contending with not only the daunting original text but the beloved 1981 miniseries. Amid all the early reviews and speculation, I’ve been thinking about novels and short stories I’d like to see adapted.
Click over for my suggestions. And since Hollywood clearly needs all the help it can get, please feel free to add your own in the comments.