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Post by Nalkarj on May 25, 2020 3:29:17 GMT
Support Your Local Gunfighter would make for a superb musical comedy. I’m genuinely surprised no one’s ever adapted it as a musical: some moments seem practically tailor-made for songs.
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Post by WullieFort on May 27, 2020 14:31:01 GMT
Lee Child's series of Jack Reacher stories, with a lead who comes close to the 6'5" height of out hero.
Maybe Gerard Butler, Joel Kinnaman or a reconstructed Clint
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Post by Nalkarj on Jun 5, 2020 15:28:05 GMT
Someone should adapt Helen McCloy’s The Slayer and the Slain for the movies. It’s a thriller about a man who returns to his hometown to recover from partial amnesia—and finds things just a little off (or is he misremembering them?). Beautifully written, quietly sinister, tense for seemingly no reason. Viewers nowadays may be able to guess the main twist—but what a twist! As with many McCloy books, would have been great for Hitchcock (they shared many of the same themes).
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Post by yougotastewgoinbaby on Jun 6, 2020 22:00:07 GMT
'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester could make for a good movie.
I could also see a Studio Ghibli-esque adaptation of 'The Master and Margarita'.
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Post by Nalkarj on Sept 4, 2020 17:28:15 GMT
Gah, I’m kind of shocked I haven’t mentioned this one before, but I want to do an opera out of Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader’s Obsession (1976).
The movie’s so overwrought that it basically feels like the characters are going to break into song at any moment, it’s nearly through-composed with Bernard Herrmann’s score blaring more frequently than the script has dialogue, and it’s set in two of the most melodramatically romantic cities on Earth, Florence and New Orleans. Come on, this stuff practically screams opera—paging Donizetti?
In order to differentiate it from the movie, I’d restore screenwriter Schrader’s original ending, which De Palma jettisoned on Herrmann’s suggestion but which would provide a third act for the opera and surprise audience-members who’d seen the film.
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Post by theravenking on Sept 4, 2020 21:27:30 GMT
Brian De Palma has once expressed interest in adapting The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. I seem to recall he had acquired the rights and was planning for years to make it, but I guess he couldn't get financing for the project. It's a shame, because it would've been right up his alley.
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Post by Feologild Oakes on Sept 5, 2020 23:28:56 GMT
I would like to see an adaption of Spartan Gold by Clive Cussler & Grant Blackwood
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Post by Nalkarj on Sept 13, 2020 14:08:19 GMT
I’m rereading John Dickson Carr’s The Burning Court and constantly imagining how to do it as a film. (Even down to casting ideas: Mélanie Laurent or Emily VanCamp as Marie D’Aubray, Johnny Depp as Gaudan Cross.) It’s just so cinematic, full of directorial and acting possibilities, with a sense of the fantastical breaking into the everyday. There is a French film adaptation, La chambre ardente (1962), which I haven’t seen. Mike Grost says it’s “not a clearly told detective story of the kind [to which] British TV has accustomed us with excellent TV series like Poirot” but rather a surrealistic, “poetic meditation on themes from Carr's novel,” in fitting with director Julien Duvivier’s work. I’d really like to see it. Either way, someone needs to get on readapting the book. It’s great.
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Post by Nalkarj on Sept 20, 2020 16:07:02 GMT
Here’s an out-of-nowhere choice: “A Study in Emerald,” a Sherlock Holmes pastiche by Neil Gaiman.
It’s Holmes, Watson, et al., in a world ruled by Cthulhu (who could ask for anything more?). The twist would almost certainly viewers by surprise. My ideal adaptation would bring back Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman for the roles and add an additional twist that reverses what Sherlock writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss did in “The Abominable Bride.” (My vagueness is intentional.)
Another one I’m surprised someone hasn’t done yet—though apparently Gaiman and Moffat had a falling-out over Dr. Who, which may put a crick in my plans.
Oh, and I’m not sure if this should be adapted to anything, but when/if Broadway reopens (God willing!) some enterprising producer should get on reviving Maxwell Anderson’s play High Tor. I’m reading it now and it’s really good.
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Post by Feologild Oakes on Sept 27, 2020 19:07:32 GMT
I think the Plantagenet Series by Sharon Pennman which are 5 books if done right could be made into 5 good mini series.
the books in the series are When Christ and His Saints Slept (1994) Time and Chance (2002) Devil's Brood (2008) Lionheart (2011) A King's Ransom (2014)
The books are set during the life and times of the first English Plantagenet kings during the turbulent years of war.
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Post by Nalkarj on Sept 30, 2020 21:21:16 GMT
Someone should really adapt more Daphne du Maurier stories. I don’t really have anything specific in mind (though the Aickmanesque “Not After Midnight” would be great for an anthology show), but movie audiences should know there’s more to this marvelous author than Don’t Look Now and Rebecca!
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Post by Nalkarj on Oct 9, 2020 16:00:30 GMT
I’d say someone should adapt Ellery Queen’s Calamity Town (1942) into a play, especially as it’s based on Our Town, but someone already has! Question is, when will we non-Calgarians get to see/read it? It’s funny, I feel like I always want to adapt Ellery Queen... The premises are always so good, the executions not so much.
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Post by Nalkarj on May 7, 2021 19:14:02 GMT
I just read a blog post arguing that the Dick Tracy comic strip should be adapted into an animated TV show. That’s a pretty great idea, I think.
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Post by theravenking on May 8, 2021 9:28:45 GMT
Someone should really adapt more Daphne du Maurier stories. I don’t really have anything specific in mind (though the Aickmanesque “Not After Midnight” would be great for an anthology show), but movie-audiences should know there’s more to this marvelous author than Don’t Look Now and Rebecca! Not After Midnight scared the hell out of me when I read it as a kid.
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Post by Nalkarj on Sept 10, 2021 17:22:52 GMT
I wish some French film company would adapt Paul Halter’s books either for movies or TV. Halter is a terrible writer but a terrific ideas man: His Le cercle invisible (1996), for example, is about a lunatic who invites friends and family to his crumbling Cornish castle to reenact Arthurian mythology. Then he gets murdered in the castle’s locked tower on a dark and stormy night. I just love that kind of goofy stuff, but Halter has such trouble constructing a sentence or building any kind of atmosphere. That may actually be a benefit for a film adaptation, though, because viewers wouldn’t have to read Halter’s writing and the filmmakers could supply atmosphere while getting to use Halter’s plot concepts. Come on, French filmmakers!
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Post by politicidal on Oct 2, 2021 23:30:05 GMT
I would like to see an adaption of Spartan Gold by Clive Cussler & Grant Blackwood I’d like if someone took a crack at his Dirk Pitt novels again.
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Post by amyghost on Oct 4, 2021 12:31:05 GMT
Brian De Palma has once expressed interest in adapting The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. I seem to recall he had acquired the rights and was planning for years to make it, but I guess he couldn't get financing for the project. It's a shame, because it would've been right up his alley. Years ago, after my first reading of the novel, I pictured it as a perfect film for Jack Nicholson. In all likelihood the special effects of the era would have aged poorly today, but I think it would have made for a great character movie nonetheless.
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Post by Nalkarj on Nov 3, 2021 14:51:10 GMT
Just had a possibly crazy idea for a Tim Burton adaptation of Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane’s musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. It has an infamously (in musical-buff circles) flawed book married to a magnificent score, so any movie adaptation would have to fix severe script problems, but I don’t think those problems are insurmountable. There is a film adaptation, with Barbra Streisand—I haven’t seen it, but I’ve never seen a positive review of it.
But—the premise for the show is great and, in some ways, Burtonian, with its fantastical star-crossed-lover romance and time traveling.
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 11, 2022 20:02:28 GMT
I watched Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel the other day and thought Anderson’s style would be perfect for an adaptation of a Steven Millhauser story. I’m not even sure what about it so suggested Millhauser to me, but I can easily imagine a Millhauser adaptation with symmetrical visual compositions, strong colors, miniatures, etc. Problem is, what to adapt? Most of Millhauser’s tales are short; he wrote a few novels, but most of his works are short stories that I don’t think have enough plotwise for the movies… The one Millhauser adaptation, The Illusionist (2006), borrowed mostly only the premise and some character names, and the screenwriter came up with romance and mystery plot lines. (Great movie, though.) I can see a Millhauser anthology film: “The Slap” and “The Next Thing” seem easier to adapt to film than some others, with maybe “The Knife Thrower” or “August Eschenburg” (or even a faithful “Eisenheim the Illusionist”) as the third story.
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Post by yougotastewgoinbaby on Jan 15, 2022 21:28:52 GMT
I think an HBO limited series adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow would be amazing.
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