5 Great Movies Based on Books You’ve Never Heard Of
The Body (1982) by Stephen King
The story begins with the local intrigue surrounding the disappearance of a little boy in the neighborhood. Twelve-year-old Gordie and some friends overhear a couple of older boys saying that they found the child’s dead body. The older boys would have reported it, except for one snag: they discovered the remains while on a joyride in a stolen car. They plan on returning to the scene later—in a non-stolen car—so that they can gain recognition and notoriety for alerting the authorities and solving the mystery of the missing child. Gordie and his friends embark on a quest to find the body before the older boys do, so that they can get credit for the discovery. Then, maybe—just maybe—the adults in their lives will notice that they actually exist and that they are worth paying attention to.
Sound familiar?
This story became the 1986 hit movie Stand by Me, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Jerry O’Connell, and Corey Feldman as Gordie and his friends, and Kiefer Sutherland as the leader of the older boys. Richard Dreyfuss has a small role, as adult Gordon, the narrator of the story.
The Body originally appeared in a collection of novellas entitled Different Seasons. The other stories in the collection are Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Breathing Method, and Apt Pupil.
Nothing Lasts Forever (1979) by Roderick Thorp
What? Who?
No, really—you’ve seen this movie. You’ve at least heard of it: Die Hard, that heart-warming Christmas classic of family togetherness, camaraderie, and massive explosions. Is my family wrong to have made this one of our most beloved annual yuletide traditions?
Q & A (2005) by Vikas Swarup
Became the movie Slumdog Millionaire (2008). It’s the “rags to raja” story of a young man who becomes a big winner in a popular quiz show, but when he is accused of cheating, all that prize money is dangerously close to slipping away. The film is really good, well-deserving of its many award nominations and wins, including eight Oscars. End credits play over a rousing Bollywood-style musical number featuring members of the cast!
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick
Science fiction nerds have heard of this book, but movie-goers en masse probably haven’t. They’ve definitely seen the movie, though. The motion picture based on PKD’s novella is none other than Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford. It wasn’t a huge box office success, but it has stood the test of time and is now widely regarded as a legendary film.
I read Do Androids Dream… in my college science fiction class during the spring semester of 1985. The book wrestles with the question, “What does it mean to be human?” As we read the book, we ask, “How is Man distinct from the Machine he has created?”
Blade Runner was released in 1982, and my 1985 course instructors referred to it as frequently as they did to PKD’s source material. I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the film in one of the big university lecture halls that year, and I remember experiencing a sense of vastness and futuristic splendor, but also squalor, claustrophobia, and dysfunction. The film adaptation admirably conveyed something I jotted down in my lecture notes for the class: “PKD was an observer of the ‘not wellness’ of the human world.”
D’entre les morts (1954) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
This French duo of crime and mystery writers published their novels under the collaborative pen name “Boileau-Narcejac.” The English title of D’entre les morts is The Living and the Dead. In 1958, acclaimed director Alfred Hitchcock adapted it into one of his best and most famous movies, Vertigo.
Honorable Mention:
This movie is based on a short story, rather than a book-length work: “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern. After finishing the story, the author was unable to find a publisher, so he paid to have 200 copies printed into a little booklet. He distributed them to friends and family as Christmas gifts in 1943.
By one of those serendipitous gifts from The Universe, a movie producer discovered the booklet and it began to make the rounds in Hollywood. Cary Grant looked at it and expressed interest in playing the lead role. Meanwhile, the story was officially published and reprinted a couple times as a standalone book and in magazines.
Finally, in 1945, director Frank Capra’s production company purchased the rights to the story, and it became the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life.
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