Stats of a Literary Flavor

Well, I've finally gone through the QHS top 100 movie list for 2005 and compiled some stats relating to the sources of many of our "best" and "favorites".

Of these 100 movies, 50 were adapted for the screen from one literary source or another; a few were plays, some short stories, and some inspired by 'real-life' accounts of an event or person. The majority of the most compelling films were conceived in the writer's mind and then set to paper as a work of fiction. This makes sense as fiction is the telling of a story - the making up of a world and characters who grab our attention and inspire our imaginations. Many of the movies are adapted from well-known sources; our number 1 movie, Gone with the Wind is a good example as it was inspired by the best-selling novel of the same name written by Margaret Mitchell in 1936. The book broke sales records, selling 1,383,000 copies within the first year of publication and over 21,000,000 copies to date. The book inspired the movie, but I would guess that the movie has also inspired quite a few people to pick up this 1,000+ page tome and become immersed in the drama of the Civil War and Reconstruction through the eyes of Katie Scarlett.

A few of the other well-known novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Wizard of Oz, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to name a few, are recognizable as book-turned-movie, but there were some that surprised me and some that have inspired me to go find the print version from my local library and find out what sparked a director or writer to turn the words on a page into a visual story.

The stats:

Types of sources
*3 from magazine or newspaper stories: Dog Day Afternoon, On the Waterfront, and It Happened One Night

*5 from biographies/memoirs: Schindler's List, The Sound of Music, Lawrence of Arabia, All the President's Men, and Raging Bull

*6 from plays: A Streetcar Named Desire, His Girl Friday, Arsenic and Old Lace, The Seven Year Itch, Wait Until Dark, and Casablanca

*4 from short stories: The Third Man, The Shawshank Redemption, High Noon, Rear Window

*2 from novellas: Apocalypse Now, Breakfast at Tiffany's

*The remaining 30 are adapted from novels

*I wanted to give a quick nod to Star Wars because it spawned an entire series of books about the rebellion and helped transform science fiction from a fringe market into one of Hollywood's dominant genres.

*29 of the 50 films that were adapted from literary works retained their original title. 21 have a slightly or completely different title.

*17 of the 50 won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. 13 of the remaining 33 were nominated for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay but did not win.

*When compiling these stats, I noticed that many books were adapted into a film within about 5 years of publication and I wondered what the average age of a literary work before it was ‘discovered’ by a director or producer and transformed into a movie.
The mean of all 50 literary works is 8.3 years, but the median is only 4 years. As Bryan explained the median is probably more accurate since for every book or play that is adapted to film more than 4 years after publication, there is one book or play that is adapted in fewer than 4 years.
*The biggest gap between literary work and film adaptation is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1899; the book didn’t inspire an adaptation until Coppola used it to explore war as a descent into primal madness.
*The film with the least amount of time between publication and film release is The Third Man by Graham Greene. Greene's novella was written as a sort of preliminary draft for the screenplay and was not actually intended to stand alone as a written work. . He worked out the atmosphere, characterization and mood of the story by writing it down and this novella was written purely to be used as a source text for the screenplay; it was never intended to be read by the general public (Penguin Books did later publish it). The motion picture, stated Greene, is better than the story because it is the story in its finished state.

Directors
*Stanley Kubrick has directed 6 movies in our top 100; all 6 have been adapted from a literary work. Kubrick is the most literary-influenced director. In addition to directing these films, he also has a writing credit on each film, often adapting the work to the screen with the author. The only book that he has the solo credit for is A Clockwork Orange. Paths of Glory and The Shining were not co-adapted with the original authors Humphrey Cobb and Stephen King, respectively.

*Alfred Hitchcock has directed 5 movies in our top 100, but only 3 are adapted from literary works. North by Northwest and Notorious were both original screenplays (Notorious was an original screenplay written by Ben Hecht, who is the author of The Front Page, the play from which the movie His Girl Friday was adapted – got that? – and North by Northwest was an original screenplay written by Ernest Lehman, who co-adapted the memoir of the Baroness VonTrapp into The Sound of Music along with Richard Rodgers). As to the adapted Hitchcock films, they are Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho.

*Frances Ford Coppola also has three movies under his directorial belt that were adapted from literary works, though this is a bit hazy since The Godfather and The Godfather II were both adapted with the author Mario Puzo from his 1969 novel titled The Godfather. Coppola also directed Apocalypse Now, which is based loosely on the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness.

*Frank Capra, Victor Fleming, Elia Kazan, Steven Spielberg, and Fred Zinneman all directed 2 films based upon literary works.

Writers
*13 of the screenplay adaptation were written for the film by the author of the original work (sometimes with a co-writer). The writers and the movie titles that they helped to create:
Peter Benchley (Jaws); Mario Puzo (Godfather I & II); Roald Dahl (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory); George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch); William Goldman (The Princess Bride); Graham Greene(The Third Man); Winston Groom (Forrest Gump); Jerzy Kozinsky (Being There); Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey); Peter George (Dr. Strangelove); Gustav Hasford (Full Metal Jacket); Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire)

*George Axelrod is the screenwriter is the most prolific of those films on our list adapted from a literary work. Axelrod worked with 3 different directors, Blake Edwards on Breakfast at Tiffany’s, John Frankenheimer on The Manchurian Candidate, and Billy Wilder on the adaptation of Axelrod’s own play, The Seven Year Itch.

*Julius and Philip Epstein each have 2 book to screen adaptations on our list, and have worked with two different directors Arsenic and Old Lace with Frank Capra directing, and Casablanca with Michael Curtiz.

*Calder Willingham also has 2 adaptations to his credit, with 2 different directors and 2 different co-writers. He co-wrote the screenplay for The Graduate from the Charles Webb book with Buck Henry; Mike Nichols directed. And, he co-wrote the screenplay for Paths of Glory from the Humphrey Cobb book with director Kubrick and Jim Thompson.

*William Goldman adapted his own novel The Princess Bride for director Rob Reiner and All The President’s Men, written by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, for director Alan Pakula.

I will be back tomorrow with more interesting facts about the sources of these films and with some stories about the winding paths taken to bring the words to life.
Enjoy!