MORE Literary Source Info

After reading this post, you may question my sanity, but I just really like finding out the source of things, in this case, the literary inspirations for many of the films on the QHS top 100 movies list. So, here are A LOT of interesting tidbits about the films and the literary sources from whence they came.
Enjoy!

*The Manchurian Candidate (1962)- based on the book by Richard Condon, written in 1959. It was adapted for the screen by George Axelrod and re-made in 2004 by Jonathan Demme though the re-make credits Axelrod’s screenplay for the 1962 film as its source, as opposed to Condon’s novel.

*Full Metal Jacket (1987)is based on Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short Timers, written in 1979. The book was written over a period of seven years (Hasford started collecting notes while he still was a Marine in Vietnam, as combat correspondent for the First Division).

*The Sound of Music (1965)was first produced on Broadway, with music written by Rodgers & Hammerstein; Robert Wise then adapted the play into the movie. But the original story came from the book Story of the Trapp Family Singers co-authored by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay in 1949, with the material coming from the Baroness Maria VonTrapp herself.

*His Girl Friday (1940) is a complicated one. HGF is based on the play The Front Page written in 1928 by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and made into a move called The Front Page in 1931, directed by Lewis Milestone. The first movie followed the play pretty closely and was adapted for film by Charles Lederer and Bartlett Cormak. Then in 1941, Hawkes directed a re-make, also adapted by Charles Lederer, but he changed the title and the gender of Hildy Johnson. The film was again re-made in 1974 by Billy Wilder who restored the original title and the gender of Johnson, casting Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau as the leads (also starred Carol Burnett and Susan Sarandon). The fourth and final adaptation of The Front Page was in 1988: Switching Channels, directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Kathleen Turner as the lead, which morphed into that of a cable television network news anchor; Christopher Reeve and Burt Reynolds also star and this movie was adapted from the original material in His Girl Friday by writer Jonathan Reynolds.

*Forrest Gump is based on the book of the same title, written by Winston Groom in 1986, which surprised me since I figured that the movie kind of inspired the book. Groom was responsible for adapting his book for the big screen, along with Charlie Peters, Eric Roth and Ernest Thompson. The book was only 250 pages, which is pretty short considering the movie was almost 2 and a half hours (Gone with the Wind is an hour and 20 minutes longer and was adapted from a book over 4 times as long). In the print version, Groom has Gump experiencing even more fantastical and ridiculous things than in the movie: the idiot hero (or should I say ‘tard?) beats international chess champions, masters physics, gets a record contract, is captured for years by cannibals, and becomes an astronaut.

*A Place in the Sun (1951) is based on the book An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, written in 1948. The book inspired a 1931 film directed by Josef von Sternberg using the original title. Then George Stevens remade the movie in 1951 with its new title and met with much more critical success.

*Vertigo (1958) is based on a French novel D’Entre Les Morts written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac in 1954. François Roland Truffaut. one of the founders of the French New Wave in filmmaking, suggested that the novel was specifically written for Hitchcock by Boileau and Narcejac after Hitchcock was unable to buy the rights to their previous novel, Celle Qui N'était Plus, which was made into the movie Les Diaboliques. However, Narcejac has subsequently denied that this was their intention. The final script was written by Samuel Taylor from notes by Hitchcock; however, a number of elements survive from an earlier script by Alec Coppel, including the opening rooftop sequence, the Cypress Point kiss, the two visits to San Juan Bautista, and the famous nightmare sequence. When Taylor attempted to take sole credit for the screenplay, Coppel protested to the Writers Guild, who determined that both writers were entitled to credit. It is believed by many that Hitchcock himself was primarily responsible for the character, structure, tone, and thematic richness of this film. In the original novel, the main character wasn't a former cop, but a lawyer.

*For the adaptation of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to the silver screen, screenwriter Robert Bolt used T.E. Lawrence’s own self-published memoir The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written in 1938, as his principal source, although some of the characters are composites, and many of the "historical" incidents are of unconfirmed origin.

*Jaws (1975) is based on the best-selling book of the same name by Peter Benchley, published in 1973. Although never publicly acknowledged by Benchley, it is generally known that the character of Quint, the shark hunter in the book, was based on the real life shark hunter, Frank Mundus. In 1964, Mundus landed the largest Great White ever caught on line: 17 feet in length and around 4,500 pounds.

*The Searchers (1956) is based on the book of the same title written in 1954 by Alan LeMay. The book was adapted for the screen by Winton Hoch and Frank S. Nugent, the director’s (John Ford) son-in-law. LeMays' novel provides a much more even-handed account of the White/Indian conflict of that period. For instance, in the novel, Chief Scar, far from the stereotypical embodiment of savage evil, is an innovative general who consistently outwits his White counterparts. Ford's movie deals at times in buffoonery and caricature (most notably the episode with Pauly's Indian wife), and also departs significantly from the book's ending, which is bittersweet and serves as a fitting metaphor of the frontier experience. LeMay's novel captures the vastness and loneliness of the Texas plains as well as the often bitter price paid by those with the incredible courage to settle there.

*To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning autobiographical novel written by Harper Lee in 1960. Horton Foote’s Academy Award-winning screenplay is a model of book-to-movie adaptation, as he retains all of the Southern character and charm of the novel without sacrificing Lee's key themes of social injustice and race relations. Lee actually favorably reviewed the Foote adaptation, saying that, "If the integrity of a film adaptation can be measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, Mr. Foote's screenplay should be studied as a classic." With the exception of a few short essays, Lee has published no further writings.

*Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) is based on the play by Joseph Kesselring written in 1939. The first Broadway production of the play was at the Fulton Theater in New York City and opened on January 10, 1941. It closed on June 17, 1944 having played 1,444 performances. It has since been performed by high schools and community theaters throughout the U.S.

*Psycho (1960) based on the book by Robert Bloch, written in 1959. Robert Bloch lived in Weyauwega, Wisconsin, close to Ed Gein’s stalking grounds, in 1957 when the Gein murders were discovered. The idea that "the man next door may be a monster unsuspected” took root in Bloch's subconscious at the time. In an interview, Bloch states that he did not realize "how closely the imaginary character I'd created resembled the real Ed Gein both in overt act and apparent motivation" until years later. Mary Crane from Dallas was Bloch’s doomed heroine, but since a real Mary Crane existed in Dallas, Hitchcock changed her identity to Marion Crane from Phoenix. I couldn’t find how he knew about Mary.
-It should be noted that in 1998, Gus Van Sant attempted a shot-by-shot remake of the film with little success - he actually won a Razzie for his effort.

*The Seven Year Itch (1955) based on a play written by George Axelrod in 1952. Axelrod was also the author of the screenplay in collaboration with the director Billy Wilder. Due to the tough movie censors, the film had to be toned down from the original bawdier play, but Wilder and Axelrod managed to keep a few of the naughty puns and innuendo. Seven year itch is used to describe a husband's or wife's urge to stray from his or her mate after seven years of marriage; this expression appears to have been invented by Axelrod in his play and further popularized by the film version. A side note, the occupation of the main character, Richard Sherman, is a ‘book reader’ for a publishing company – I like the sound of that job.

*2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was first inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke short story The Sentinel, written in 1948 for a BBC competition (in which it failed to place) and was first published in the magazine 10 Story Fantasy in 1951, under the title Sentinel of Eternity. Kubrick and Clarke met in 1964 to discuss the possibility of a collaborative film project. It was decided that the story for the film was to be loosely based on Clarke's short story, but Kubrick and Clarke decided it would be best to write a novel first and then adapt it for the film upon its completion. However, as Clarke was finishing the book, the screenplay was also being written simultaneously. The movie was released in the spring of 1968, before the book was completed. For this reason, the details of the story differ slightly from the book to the movie. The main working title for the film was Journey Beyond the Stars. Kubrick came up with the present title 8 months into production.
--Interesting side note, it has been frequently noted that "HAL" is "IBM", shifted one letter back. Clarke insists that this is a coincidence; HAL is an amalgam of "heuristic" and "algorithmic," the two main processes of learning. However, the light blue color around the word resembles IBM's own blue color.

*Schindler's List (1992) is based on the biography Schindler’s Ark written by Thomas Keneally in 1982 (37 years after the war and 8 years after Oskar Schindler passed away). Many ‘Schindler Jews’ mourned him at his funeral in Jerusalem in 1974. Unlike the movie, the book includes information about the world before and after World War II and the Holocaust.

*All the President's Men (1976) based on the best-selling book about the Watergate investigation by Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, published in 1972. Woodward and Bernstein offer the political detective story of the century, winning a Pulitzer Prize for their investigative tome that smashed the Watergate scandal wide open.

*Wait Until Dark (1967) was adapted for the screen from the play written by Frederick Knott. The play ran for 374 performances on Broadway in 1966 and earned actress Lee Remick a Tony Award nomination for her portrayal of a blind woman terrorized by thugs. Knott also wrote the play Dial M for Murder, which was turned into a Hitchcock movie.

*Midnight Cowboy (1969) is based on the book by James Leo Herlihy, written in 1965. The film was given an X rating due to sexual content and it is the only film so rated to win the Academy Award for best picture.

*Raging Bull (1980) is based on the memoir of boxer Jake LaMotta titled Raging Bull: My Story, and written in 1970 with assistance from Joseph Carter and Peter Savage. LaMotta’s story is filled with anger--at his father for beating him, at the neighborhood he grew up in, at the petty criminal he became, at the Mob that tried to keep him from the title because he wouldn't take a dive. While most of LaMotta's anger was self-directed, he harnessed enough of it to power him to 83 victories in 106 fights, and a two-year hold on a middleweight championship belt.

*Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is based on the true story of a bank robbery on a hot summer afternoon in New York City in 1972. The account of the robbery was written as a news piece by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore. The story involves John Wojtowicz and Sal Naturile, who held up the Chase Manhattan bank in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn on August 22, 1972. Naturile was killed and Wojtowicz served seven years of a 20 year sentence.
--And in a bit of "Where Are They Now?" Time Magazine reported in its 10-12-87 issue: Elizabeth Debbie Eden, 41, formerly Ernest Aron, the transsexual whose wish for a sex-change operation resulted in the 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery that inspired the movie, died of AIDS-related pneumonia in Rochester, NY.

*From Here to Eternity (1953) was adapted from James Jones best-selling novel published in 1951. The book is an account of the months leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor – Jones was a veteran of the attack himself. And though the film added a new level of violence and frankness to popular dramatic films never before acceptable, it couldn’t even hint at the homosexual advances that Pruett parried from his former sergeant, resulting in his transfer to a rifle company. The book also addresses prostitution, suicide, torture, masturbation, marital infidelity, and the government's abuse of power, none of which could be used in the film.

*The Shawshank Redemption (1994) is based on the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption which appears in Stephen King’s book Different Seasons, published in 1982, under the “spring season” (the book also includes The Body, which was made into the film Stand by Me, and Apt Pupil, which was made into a film of the same name). Frank Darabont both directed (his first film) and adapted the screenplay, which was nominated for the 1994 Golden Globe and Academy Award.

*Touch of Evil (1958) is based on the book Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson written in 1956; adapted for the screen by Orson Welles, who also directed the film. In the book, the main character is a district attorney in San Diego, not a narcotics officer from Mexico. And while Charlton Heston plays the Mexican officer in the film who's married to an American, in the book the DA is married to a Mexican woman. Also, the film takes place in a Texas town near the US-Mexico border while the book takes place (although not actually named) in San Diego. While the film is a masterpiece because of Wells' direction, the book remains a more believable story.

*High Noon (1952) was released during a politically-oppressive atmosphere in the early 1950s when McCarthyism and political persecution were rampant. The film was loosely adapted from a Collier's Magazine story The Tin Star by John W. Cunningham, published in December 1947. In fact, the film's story has often been interpreted as a metaphor for the threatened Hollywood blacklisted artists (one of whom was screenwriter Foreman) who faced political persecution from the HUAC during the McCarthy era due to actual or imagined connections to the Communist Party. Foreman’s blacklisting was temporarily prevented by star Cooper, one of Hollywood's most virulent anti-Communists. John Wayne, another notable showbiz right-winger and Western hero, was so appalled at the notion that a Western marshal would beg for help in a showdown that he and director Howard Hawks "answered" with the film Rio Bravo (1959).

*Paths of Glory (1957) was adapted from Humphrey Cobb’s novel by the same name, published in 1935, which in turn was based on accounts in newspapers about compensation paid by the French government after the war for unjust executions of soldiers.

*On the Waterfront (1954) - Kazan had wanted to make a film about corruption on the waterfront for many years. Originally, he collaborated with playwright Arthur Miller on a project called "The Hook," about life on the Brooklyn waterfront. But Miller and Kazan had a falling out, and Kazan learned that Budd Schulberg had been working on a similar project, loosely based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of newspaper articles by Malcolm Johnson published in 1953 (Schulberg also wrote a novel, Waterfront, to tell the story about the compromises he made to complete Kazan’s screenplay).

*Rear Window (1954) - Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich wrote under the pseudonyms George Hopley and William Irish. He wrote the story "It Had to be Murder" in 1942 under the Irish name. It was re-titled Rear Window in 1944 and made into the film in 1954 by Hitchcock.

*Rosemary's Baby (1968)- director Roman Polansky took the traditional gothic horror story and moved it to New York in the 20th century in his adaptation of Ira Levin's best-selling novel of the same name and published in 1967.

*The Best Years of our Lives (1946) tells the intertwined homecoming stories of an ex-sergeant, a former bomber pilot, and a regular GI. In 1934, MacKinlay Kantor published Long Remember which became his first best seller. Hollywood bought the novel and Kantor moved to California to work as a screenwriter, but World War II cut short his screenwriting career. As a war correspondent, he covered the air battles in Europe. In 1945, Kantor published Glory for Me, which inspired this film.

*It Happened One Night (1934) this screenplay was based on an August 1933 Cosmopolitan magazine story titled "Night Bus" by Samuel Hopkins Adams. [Another of Adams' short stories about a woman traveling on a bus, "Last Trip" in the March edition of Collier's magazine, may also be considered a source for the film.] In both 1945 and 1956, it was remade as musicals: Eve Knew Her Apples starring Ann Miller, and You Can't Run Away From It with Jack Lemmon and June Allyson.

*The Shining (1980) is based on another book by Stephen King, with the same title and published in 1977. The movie eliminates most of the supernatural episodes from the novel. Making the most of the then-new Steadicam technology for intricate camera movements, Kubrick renders the hotel and maze palpable as Danny moves through them, while turning the Overlook itself into an eerily threatening entity, punctuated by Danny's vividly disturbing shinings (which I don’t think are explained that well in the movie version). King vocally objected to Kubrick's alterations of his novel and while both are great, the book is really terrifying.

*Wizard of Oz (1939) is based on the children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz published in 1900 by L. Frank Baum. Over the following years it sold millions of copies, and Baum wrote thirteen more Oz books before his death in 1919. In January 1938, MGM bought the rights to the book. The movie's script was adapted by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, but 13 other writers assisted without receiving official credit. It was directed by Victor Fleming, Richard Thorpe (uncredited), George Cukor (uncredited), and King Vidor (uncredited). In spite of the publicity, the movie was only moderately successful in its initial theatrical run. It achieved its iconic status after decades of television showings, beginning on November 3, 1956. In the movie, Glinda is the name of the Good Witch of the North who returns to show Dorothy how to use the Ruby Slippers to go home. In the book, however, the Witch of the North's name is not given; the slippers are silver (MGM changed them to highlight their techniques with color); and Dorothy must journey to visit Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, to learn how to use these silver shoes. The main point of contention with Baum's fans is the ending, which they feel strongly goes against the nature of the original. In Baum's novel, there is no hint that Oz is anything but a real place, to which Dorothy returns repeatedly (she eventually moved to Oz permanently and was joined by her aunt and uncle) in the numerous sequels. In the movie, it was all a dream.

*Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) was adapted by Roald Dahl, the author of the original book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, published in 1964. But there was an uncredited rewrite by David Seltzer and Dahl disliked the film so much that he refused to sell the director legal rights to make the sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. This year, director Tim Burton will release Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which will not be a remake of Willy Wonka, but a new adaptation.

*Casablanca (1942) was based on the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's written in 1938 by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Samuel Marx of MGM wanted to offer the authors $5,000 for it, but MGM boss Louis B. Mayer refused; Irene Lee of the Warner Brothers story department praised it to Jack L. Warner, who agreed to buy it for $20,000, the most that anyone had ever paid for an unproduced work. The inspiration for the play came when Burnett, a high school teacher, saw the Broadway show Everybody’s Welcome and heard the song “As Time Goes By” – seven years later, Burnett visited Vienna just after the Nazis had entered. Later, after visiting a cafe in south France where a black pianist had entertained a mixed crowd of Nazis, French and refugees, he was inspired to write the drama.

*The Godfather and The Godfather II (1972, 1974) were both based on the book by Mario Puzo, written in 1969. The movie was initially planned as a low budget adaptation of Puzo’s Mafia family bestseller, and a young Coppola was hired because Paramount thought he would be easy to control. Instead, he fought the studio to cast little-known Pacino as Michael Corleone and foundering Brando as Don Vito, and he turned The Godfather into an operatic period epic about family, honor, and American economic success (the word "Mafia" is never used). In the novel, this Corleone name recalls the town in Sicily. In the movie, it is revealed that the Godfather’s real name was Vito Andolini and he was given the surname Corleone as a result of a mistake during his registration at Ellis Island, but in the book, this fact is made explicit, with the 12-year-old Vito adopting the Corleone name by choice, instead of having it given to him in error.

If you got this far, congratulations!
This concludes the literary stats portion of the evening. I'll be back next year, same bat channel, same (or similar) bat(ty) stats.