Some of my favourite films – Once Upon a Time in America, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Goodfellas – started life as novels or non-fiction biographies. I’ve gone out and found a good number of these books and read them, and have read many other books by the same authors or in the same genre.
After decades of voracious reading I’ve found myself thinking that certain books deserve to be adapted. Some novels are crying out to be immortalised on either the big or small screen. Here are my recommendations:
Glamorama
After the success of American Psycho, author Bret Easton Ellis turned his satirical focus to the 90s, and devised a lengthy story about terror factions using models as cover for their activities.
This time sending up the fashion and media industry, as opposed to 80s yuppie greed culture, Glamorama brings back Victor Johnson, a minor character in Rules of Attraction. He’s now older, out of college and working as a model in New York, cheating on his two girlfriends and embarrassing his politician father. It isn’t long before he’s asked to track down an old girlfriend (that he can barely remember) believed to be in Europe. Somehow, he ends up involved in a bombing campaign.
The book has a much more cinematic structure. Ellis himself once told me at a book signing that this decision – as opposed to characters floating through lives learning nothing from their indulgences – was a nod to the media industry that it parodies, not an encouragement for Hollywood to adapt him again.
Movie execs should still consider it though. It’s crying out to be immortalised on screen.
Blood Meridian
2007’s No Country for Old Men adaptation thrust Cormac McCarthy into Millennial public consciousness. The Coen Brothers successfully conjured up 1970s Rio Grande for their adaptation, featuring hunter Llewellyn Moss stumbling across the remnants of a cartel dispute – dead bodies and a bag of money. Taking the $1.2 million, it isn’t long before the cartel – and a very weird, iconic hitman – are on his tail.
After winning a staggering 76 awards, it’s absurd that the only other McCarthy adaptation is The Road, a solid but insubstantial film. In the novel, there was too much exposition in the character’s thoughts to be able to convey it effectively on the screen.
Blood Meridian, published before either of these in 1985, tells the story of The Kid, a teenager who, some time in the 1850s, falls into The Glanton Gang, a bunch of hired thugs paid to protect the local settlers from rampaging Native Americans. It quickly becomes apparent that Native scalps come with a hefty price tag, and protection rackets soon turn into hunting trips, and to insane murder escapades – becoming an addiction to the gang, causing their own downfall.
There was no way a book like this – as violent, lengthy and with such a bare-faced portrayal of American evil – could have been adapted from the cinema around the time of its publication. But now? After A Serbian Film, and numerous other ultra-violent movies?
Film fans have a taste for Westerns that perhaps they hadn’t in previous decades. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (another Coen Brothers production) had success. Hostiles, True Grit, The Power of The Dog and A Million Ways to Die in the West have all been high on Netflix’s front pages in recent weeks.
Now is the time for this. Barry Koehgan for The Kid? He’s a bit old now. Cameron Britton, who played Ed Kemper in Mindhunter for Judge Holden? He’s got the imposing presence. He was so good that on the trailer I assumed it was a documentary. You’d need a seasoned, extreme director like Irreversible’s Gaspar Noe to effectively commit this kind of carnage to celluloid.
Blood Meridian is a brilliant story but Goddamn it is violent.
Haunted
I find it bizarre that after the success of David Fincher’s Fight Club – based on Chuck Palahniuk’s debut novel – only one of his other 18 novels, Choke, published in 2001, made it to the big screen.
It’s possibly his weakest and most improbable book, in which a sex addict finds he can make himself choke in restaurants, encouraging unwitting patrons to perform the Heimlich on him. After this, he finds his rescuers treat him with compassion – they want him not just to survive, but thrive. So, he asks for money. And they hand it over.
It’s an odd novel that doesn’t really hit home, but Clark Gregg (Iron Man / Thor) wanted to give it a shot. The result: a lacklustre, plain adaptation, none of the style or iconography of Fight Club, with Sam Rockwell as protagonist and Angelica Houston as his Alzheimer’s-ridden mum. Same plot, same problems.
Out of all of Palahniuk’s books, his 2005 hit Haunted would make the best screen adaptation, but this time serialised for a streaming platform like Netflix. Haunted is a short fiction anthology supported by an over-arching narrative. Think Canterbury Tales for millennials. A mash of misfit fiction writers attend a retreat on the outskirts of a city, with the intention of writing some great short fiction. They quickly decide that trauma is the best inspiration, and begin masochistically torturing themselves with the intention of blaming one of the attendees. As the main narrative develops, we pause intermittently for the short stories that the characters (read: Palahniuk) have written.
A series of episodes featuring a story each would sell well. Each one could be bookended by a progression with the attendee’s ‘true’ story. It’s made for an adaptation.
Fight Club 2
Forgive me for being a fan and including 2 from the same author. It took Palahniuk 19 years to return to his most famous novel. Fight Club 2 was created as a graphic novel, with Cameron Stewart (Catwoman / Scooby Doo comics) illustrating.
The narrator’s alter-ego Tyler Durden, banished thanks to medical intervention, makes a return after he somehow manifests to bribe a doctor. Set loose a decade after the end of the first novel, Durden returns to Marla and causes further mayhem.
It isn’t a patch on the original, but as the movie was such a massive success – and as Fight Club movie director David Fincher is still wielding megaphones – it would be well-worth the original director returning to.
USA Underworld Trilogy
JFK’s assassination has been reimagined to death in popular culture – everyone from Steven King to Red Dwarf to The X-Files have their theories. Libra is a great Don DeLillo novel, although one I don’t think would have enough exposition to be televised.
James Ellroy’s USA Underworld Trilogy is a rich, broad-stroking account, starting exactly 5 years prior to JFK’s assassination and ending with Hoover’s death in 1972. This is an alternate history, though, in which bag men and shady FBI officers shape American history, killing and pinning blame with impunity.
American Tabloid ends seconds before the gunman – not Oswald, spoiler – pulls the trigger. The Cold Six Thousand, starting seconds after the assassination, introduces a host of new characters mixed in with those that didn’t die in the first book (although more of them do). This time the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King are skewed with an alternate backstory.
Blood’s a Rover finds a young private dick stumbling across the conspiracy, while politicians and vicious heavies attempt to keep it under wraps.
The more you know about 50s-70s American history, the more you’ll appreciate it. I presumed a lot of characters were Ellroy’s creations, but looking through Wikipedia I found links to the real people thought to be involved in the (supposed) conspiracy. It’s heavy, dense, surreal in places and terrifyingly believable.
Ellroy’s books have sold dramatically well, but only LA Confidential has had any screen success (huge critical acclaim, decent box office results). The Black Dahlia adaptation crashed and burned, but the LA Underworld novel trilogy is ripe with visuals, twists, solid characters, and shocking bursts of violence.
Ozark’s Charlie Tahan would make a great Don Crutchfield: young, tenacious, vulnerable. Breaking Bad’s Jonathan Banks for PI Pete Bondurant? He’s maybe a little old now but has the grizzled toughness.
Hard boiled crime dramas like Breaking Bad, The Wire and Ozark have been well-celebrated, plus crime docs like The Ted Bundy / Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes have graced Netflix’s top 10. A JFK conspiracy, especially a lengthy one as the USA Underworld Trilogy would be, would hit classic status quickly.
The Dice Man
I’d never heard of this 1971 novel until a friend donated it. George Cockroft, writing as Luke Rhinehart, narrates a tale of devising The Dice Game – a game in which the player decides on an action based on the roll of a dice. If it lands on 6, I’ll do this. If it’s 5, I’ll do that. Shall I answer yes or no to this question? It depends whether the dice lads on odd or even. Think of Rhinehart as a multifaceted Anton Sagure from No Country for Old Men.
Very quickly Rhinehart – a hospital psychiatrist working with the town’s most dangerous patients – begins to make terrifying choices, descending quickly into madness, introducing his colleagues and family to the game one at a time, leaving others in the dark as to his sudden changes in behaviour. The game spreads like a virus across America, causing societal upheaval in just a few years.
For the early 70s, The Dice Man is a massively violent, darkly funny book, rich in ideology and sharp wit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bret Easton Ellis read it before writing American Psycho. There are stylistic similarities – a sharp, bitter narrating voice loaded with sarcasm. It’s also quite a big book, deserving of Netflix serialisation.
Skagboys
After the success of Danny Boyle movie Trainspotting in 1996, source author Irvine Welsh wrote Porno, set 10 years after Mark ‘Rent Boy’ Renton’s betrayal and flight to Amsterdam. In an attempt to reconcile with – and compensate - the mates he ripped off, Renton resurfaces in Edinburgh, tracking down his old junkie friends. But the psychotic Begbie, fresh out of prison, is gunning for revenge. The 2002 sequel – in which the gang plan to film a porn movie and take it to a film festival – is perhaps not the kind of thing you’d read in public. The book’s cover features a sex doll, for a start. But it’s still fascinating and characteristically brutal.
It would be 21 years before Boyle would return to Welsh’s work, moving the period of the novel on a further 10 years to match the ages of the returning actors – Ewan McGregor’s Renton, Johnny Lee Miller’s Sick boy and Robert Carlyle, still menacing as the unhinged Begbie headline the cast. It worked as a movie, albeit with the smut stripped out and a few new additions thrown in. It just wasn’t as ground-breaking.
By this time, Welsh had returned to his trainspotting characters and, back in 2012, released the gargantuan Skagboys, showing the gang’s young adult origins, their falling in with heroin, Renton’s disastrous crashing out of university and further childhood traumas via flashbacks. It’s a sprawling, lengthy novel, again told from numerous viewpoints, with characteristically horrendous scenarios befalling the protagonists and side characters.
The first 2 adaptations were films, so it’d seem fitting for Skagboys to follow suit. A choice would have to be made about which scenes make the cut – which parts would be right for the screen. There’s waaay too much content for one film, coming in at over 500 large pages. But then, LA Confidential is a similar length. It can be done if the screenwriter is selective. And highly skilled.
Batman Vs Predator
After the release of Predator in 1987, it wsan’t long before spin-off novels, games and comics followed suit. Back in 1993, a team at DC Comics conjured the idea of landing a Predator in Gotham and pitting him against The Dark Knight himself. A full trilogy of stories followed, as comics and eventually graphic novels. If Batman seems a little over-matched when facing an intergalactic, 3m-tall trophy hunter, you’re right. Spoiler: he gets his arse handed to him. But the setback only leads to a comeback, and gothic meets tribal in a riveting showdown.
Batman has been immortalised in film 18 times, with 3 more movies on the way. Dan Trachenberg’s Prey, released on Hulu last year, was the 7th movie to include the Predator creatures. They’re both hot franchises, and the crossover graphic novel itself is asking to be crossed over to the screen. If Batman can take on Superman…
Superman vs Aliens
In my late teens I went on a spree of buying crossover graphic novels. This was another inventive mashing of franchises, in which the remnants of a planet – previously destroyed by Superman – finds itself overran with Aliens. Out of guilt, the Man of Steel returns to said outpost to save the colony of humans. The aliens seem unduly lenient this time, something you’d think the writers wouldn’t need to allow if their opponent is possibly the toughest superhero ever made. It’s a little corny, but a great fun crossover.
Given Hollywood still pumps out Alien franchise movies (one is due that connects Alien: Covenant to the original 1979 movie, and a standalone film is also in pre-production), and so is the Superman franchise (Zack Snyder’s Justice League had success 2 years ago, and Superman: Legacy is due for release in 2025), these 2 sci-fi giants would be great facing off, and good box office material too.
Tarzan Vs Predator
Finally, one last crossover. Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson first conjured this crossover some time in the 90s, and in ‘97 Lee Weeks and Walter Simonson brought it to the page: Lord Basingstoke – Tarzan of the Apes – finds himself at the mercy of a trophy-hunting Predator. I’m not too familiar with the Tarzan franchise, nor its genre limitations, but in this graphic novel he seems to encounter neolithic cave men and dinosaurs, as well as aristocratic 19th-century (human) hunters. His jungle knowledge and smarts give him the edge over the visiting, giant high-tech warriors. Absurdist, culture-clashing and just a little bit Tory, Tarzan vs Predator might strike a chord with audiences.
There are millions of celebrated books out there and many films being pumped out that are at least based on an existing text. What books would you like to see adapted?
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