kind of like songwriting in the age of studio production. For example the Gerry Rafferty song Baker Street is made by the saxophone riff, improvised on the spot by some studio musician and uncredited for years.
Novels (if you don't count the contributions of editors) are the only solo effort left in art. Well maybe painting and sculpture but those have other issues these days.
Damn- looks like I am kind of contradicted below on the novel thing (and possibly in the text above, which I will now finish.
Playwright/screenwriter David Mamet had a line summarizing the attitude of Hollywood producers towards the talent: "Film is a collaborative process. Now bend over."
Based on my viewing of Ethan Coen’s movie Driveaway Dolls, and the reviews of his new upcoming movie, Honey Don’t, I’m scared he may be pissing away the brothers’ brand.
Do you think the Coens suffer in the IMDB rankings because they're too consistently Very Good, rather than having a clearly-identifiable peak (cf. Baseball Hall of Fame arguments -- Tommy John vs Sandy Koufax)?
Remember that Steve's list is from IMDB, which is (well, supposedly) purely democratic in its rankings.
I can tell you from my own lived experience and truth that some young males -- whom Steve rightly identified as eager movie rankers -- really don't connect with or like Coen brother movies. (And I suspect lots of women don't.)
I've thoroughly enjoyed most of the Coen oeuvre, but quite a few of my friends over the years have had little time for Coen products, other than Lebowski and maybe Fargo and Raising Arizona.
But I agree that several of their movies should be on the list. I'd nominate Raising Arizona, which I find debilitatingly hilarious -- and I don't even like Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter much as actors.
Irrelevant to our host's post today, I felt obliged to write that Sailer's Law on Shootings was apparent in a mass shooting north of Myrtle Beach, SC this weekend in the town of Little River on the border with North Carolina. It's been Black Bike week in Myrtle Beach, a beach town that effectively extends for miles along the Atlantic Coast. Black Bike week is also a week where many Myrtle Beach businesses close because of fear of violence, marauding, pillaging and physical damage of property. Racists!
Whole idea of two different bike weeks struck me as bonkers so I checked in with Google and Grok.
Grok suggests a racial bias in how incidents at the two events are perceived particularly as the data suggests that serious violence is not an annual constant at black bike week.
I thought that's good to know, if I happened to be there in a particular year I might get lucky.
Regarding collaborative efforts by literary novelists, there developed a tradition of strong editorial influence on literary fiction in the US in the 20th Century, though I don't think that the same was true of Europe. Editors like Maxwell Perkins and Robert Gottlieb (among many others) were instrumental in crafting the finished novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cheever, Heller, Percy, et al.
It also seems to be the case that poets tend to rely on other poets in developing their ideas more often than novelists. See, for example, TS Eliot's acknowledgement of the contribution of Ezra Pound to the creation of The Waste Land.
Of course, in neither case do the authors give co-writing credit to their collaborators, which is seemingly the case in every cinematic screenplay, where too many cooks apparently are necessary in order to keep the broth immaculate.
French writer Pierre Boulle has a double. He wrote "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Planet of the Apes." Both are fine novels which made excellent films.
Now do the best novelizations of famous movies. I haven't read it yet, but I have it on good authority that number one will be "Once upon a time in Hollywood."
"The Joker" is more based on "The King of Comedy" (a better movie) and to a lesser extent "Taxi Driver" (a better movie) than the Joker from Batman comics.
I was told that "The Seven Samurai" is based on "Seven Against Thebes" but Wikipedia disagrees.
Screenwriting is a different skill from novel writing. You have the advantage of actors cheating to bring the characters to life and gain empathy from the viewer. That's is much more laborious with a novel. OTOH a novel has the luxury of sharing character thoughts and feelings (which often seems stupid if done to any great extent on celluloid).
Movies need to be short so anything that doesn't advance the plot tends to be removed (a shame I think).
Novels don't have the same budget concerns. There's no such thing as an expensive scene in a book.
The main thing that links them is story. You need a good story. People love good stories.
Tarantino's novelization of his own movie is all the stuff he reluctantly cut out of the final movie. So it's second tier material, but it's a pleasant read if you like Rick and Cliff.
Okay, I am biased because of my links to Archer City but Larry McMurtry has to have a place somewhere. Perhaps those voters need to see The Last Picture Show for an introduction.
Actually, driving down Hwy 79, or Main Street, it feels like nothing has ever changed. The Royal Theater, the real last picture show, is around the corner across from the courthouse. The wind blows, constantly, and the vehicles are mostly pickups. I loved it when McMurtry opened 4 storefronts called Book It 1-4, where he sold his massive book collection. He has passed and only one store remains, but they still show his movie at the Royal
When I reread Tom Wolfe's book about Ken Kesey, I recalled Wolfe explaining it was an easy book to write, because all the participants were fine writers. Even so, I was surprised when the Merry Pranksters go to Texas to visit Ken's friend Larry, who turns out to be the young Larry McMurtry, who was pretty much unknown when Wolfe's book came out.
I see that in old age, after Kesey's death, that McMurtry married Kesey's widow. I wish them a happy old age.
The Merry Pranksters were a strange group. Signe Toly of the original Jefferson Airplane was married to a Merry Prankster named Anderson, bore his child and left the band.
But it’s remarkable how few famous novels have been written by partners."
Is it really? Throughout history, authors tended to work alone. From the pre-novel days of the late Middle Ages, Thomas More, Erasmus, Chaucer, Boccaccio, etc. worked alone (they certainly did their research, or at least were well familiar with sources for their works). It's not really that big a deal, Steve. Either people can walk and chew gum at the same time, or they can't. It was always taken for granted that the majority of the novel was written by a single author. It's not rocket science. Much like Picasso, Dali, Rembrandt, Da Vinci, etc. somehow managed to paint their masterworks all by themselves, writing a novel alone isn't that difficult for those who can write and create. Helping with editing that's one thing. But creating the characters storyline, plot, tension etc that tends to be on the shoulders of a single person (for the most part).
I think LOTR might be the only case where the movies and novels have comparable acclaim/influence.
Also, what’s funny is that both Coppola and Lucas (friends from USC) prefer artsy-fartsy European cinema. But they ended up making some of the greatest American commercial films of all time.
A member of Clint Eastwood's production company, Malpaso Productions, was at an airport in the South with time to kill before a flight. He picked up a novel in a little airport store to pass the time. It was self-published and called "The Outlaw Josie Wales." This man enjoyed the book so much that he brought it to the attention of Clint Eastwood. Eastwood read and enjoyed the book and decided to film it. The writer was a drunk and a racist but no matter. "The Outlaw Josie Wales" was a fine action film that made a lot of money. Eastwood even met a new girlfriend on the set, Sondra Locke.
"The Long Hot Summer" had an all star cast who smoldered in a summer of down-home lust driven by a hot script loaded with juicy 50's-style innuendo. The script was mashed up from William Faulkner's various tales of life in north Mississippi's fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
The title "The Long [hot] Summer was taken from Faulkner's novel, "The Hamlet" where the character\villain Flem Snopes is introduced. Flem becomes patriarch to a long line of villains.
I've watched LHS a half-dozen times over the years and have yet to be disappointed. Orson Welles deftly intuits the character of high-class redneck, Will Varner. Welles' cosmopolitan talent is the magnet holding the cast and the story together. "The Long Hot Summer" pretends to greatness. Its inspiration is taken from genuinely great literature.
"The Hamlet" is a is a stone cold killer of a novel. Human nature in general is characterized with unsparing honesty and compassion. Another of Faulkner's great tales is "Go Down Moses" which takes the reader from days just following the Civil War up to the times of no more horse-and-buggy, no virgin forest and the great Mississippi Delta hemmed with levees and 4 lane highways.
"The Long Hot Summer" was not a great film but a fun film. Starred Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, Lee Remick and others. It was very loosely based on William Faulkner's novels.
The two auteur GOATs, Kubrick and Hitchcock, took material from a huge variety of sources (e.g., “Vertigo” is based on an obscure French detective novel, “Eyes Wide Shut” on an Austrian novella, “Full Metal Jacket” on a pulpy Vietnam memoir), then employed hired screenwriters to work it into shape, while taking advice from their go-to guys: Hitchcock ran dialogue and plot past the highbrow writer V.S. Pritchett. The best argument for the auteur theory is that it worked somewhat like a master painter’s studio with the top man always in charge despite a lot of the work being done by underlings.
Picking up on the previous piece, I imagine the problem with a “Confederacy of Dunces” adaptation is that you need a famous fat funny man who’s under 40. Philip Seymour Hoffman or John C. Reilly could have done it, but were they famous enough to carry a movie at 35?
I think the window for a 'Confederacy' movie adaptation has closed. How much of the book's humor could be depicted in 2025 USA? It would have to be wokelerized beyond recognition.
O'Toole makes fun of gays, lesbians, blacks, and left-wing intellectuals. Maybe The Board could still play a starring role . . . .
“Rosemary’s Baby” is probably the Platonic ideal of an unpretentious but serviceable novel becoming a genuine classic A+ movie, but Ira Levin’s later work probably suffered from being too obviously written for the screen.
"Dr. Strangelove" was a loose adaptation of the 1958 novel "Red Alert" by Peter George, who was also one of the screenwriters of the Kubrick film. Unlike the film, the book was completely serious (it didn't even have the titular character) and in fact closer to the other nuclear threat film of 1964, Sidney Lumet's "Fail Safe". But it was still mentioned in the film's opening credits as the source.
kind of like songwriting in the age of studio production. For example the Gerry Rafferty song Baker Street is made by the saxophone riff, improvised on the spot by some studio musician and uncredited for years.
Novels (if you don't count the contributions of editors) are the only solo effort left in art. Well maybe painting and sculpture but those have other issues these days.
Damn- looks like I am kind of contradicted below on the novel thing (and possibly in the text above, which I will now finish.
Playwright/screenwriter David Mamet had a line summarizing the attitude of Hollywood producers towards the talent: "Film is a collaborative process. Now bend over."
ahhhhahahahahaha.
I love that
Strange that there are no Coen Brothers movies on the list. In my mind the GOATs whatever the source material.
Similarly, the Coens seem to me like the best ever across 19 movies.
Based on my viewing of Ethan Coen’s movie Driveaway Dolls, and the reviews of his new upcoming movie, Honey Don’t, I’m scared he may be pissing away the brothers’ brand.
Do you think the Coens suffer in the IMDB rankings because they're too consistently Very Good, rather than having a clearly-identifiable peak (cf. Baseball Hall of Fame arguments -- Tommy John vs Sandy Koufax)?
Remember that Steve's list is from IMDB, which is (well, supposedly) purely democratic in its rankings.
I can tell you from my own lived experience and truth that some young males -- whom Steve rightly identified as eager movie rankers -- really don't connect with or like Coen brother movies. (And I suspect lots of women don't.)
I've thoroughly enjoyed most of the Coen oeuvre, but quite a few of my friends over the years have had little time for Coen products, other than Lebowski and maybe Fargo and Raising Arizona.
But I agree that several of their movies should be on the list. I'd nominate Raising Arizona, which I find debilitatingly hilarious -- and I don't even like Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter much as actors.
The Coens are so smart that a lot of people find them irritating.
Irrelevant to our host's post today, I felt obliged to write that Sailer's Law on Shootings was apparent in a mass shooting north of Myrtle Beach, SC this weekend in the town of Little River on the border with North Carolina. It's been Black Bike week in Myrtle Beach, a beach town that effectively extends for miles along the Atlantic Coast. Black Bike week is also a week where many Myrtle Beach businesses close because of fear of violence, marauding, pillaging and physical damage of property. Racists!
Odd. I was at Sturgis last year. Hundreds of thousands of (White) bikers and no one got shot. Separate but equal seems like a way forward.
Myrtle Beach has a white bike week as well. No violence.
Whole idea of two different bike weeks struck me as bonkers so I checked in with Google and Grok.
Grok suggests a racial bias in how incidents at the two events are perceived particularly as the data suggests that serious violence is not an annual constant at black bike week.
I thought that's good to know, if I happened to be there in a particular year I might get lucky.
I live in North Myrtle Beach (and Chicago metro area), so let’s just say I know what it looks like.
This year, you could see it coming. The area had an ominous vibe and there was definitely a contingent of gangsta.
True, there isn’t violence every year, but it’s not unusual, either.
Yes. I thought grok might be giving me the soft-soap
Regarding collaborative efforts by literary novelists, there developed a tradition of strong editorial influence on literary fiction in the US in the 20th Century, though I don't think that the same was true of Europe. Editors like Maxwell Perkins and Robert Gottlieb (among many others) were instrumental in crafting the finished novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cheever, Heller, Percy, et al.
It also seems to be the case that poets tend to rely on other poets in developing their ideas more often than novelists. See, for example, TS Eliot's acknowledgement of the contribution of Ezra Pound to the creation of The Waste Land.
Of course, in neither case do the authors give co-writing credit to their collaborators, which is seemingly the case in every cinematic screenplay, where too many cooks apparently are necessary in order to keep the broth immaculate.
French writer Pierre Boulle has a double. He wrote "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Planet of the Apes." Both are fine novels which made excellent films.
Wonderful!
Now do the best novelizations of famous movies. I haven't read it yet, but I have it on good authority that number one will be "Once upon a time in Hollywood."
"The Joker" is more based on "The King of Comedy" (a better movie) and to a lesser extent "Taxi Driver" (a better movie) than the Joker from Batman comics.
I was told that "The Seven Samurai" is based on "Seven Against Thebes" but Wikipedia disagrees.
Screenwriting is a different skill from novel writing. You have the advantage of actors cheating to bring the characters to life and gain empathy from the viewer. That's is much more laborious with a novel. OTOH a novel has the luxury of sharing character thoughts and feelings (which often seems stupid if done to any great extent on celluloid).
Movies need to be short so anything that doesn't advance the plot tends to be removed (a shame I think).
Novels don't have the same budget concerns. There's no such thing as an expensive scene in a book.
The main thing that links them is story. You need a good story. People love good stories.
I really enjoyed the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization.
Tarantino's novelization of his own movie is all the stuff he reluctantly cut out of the final movie. So it's second tier material, but it's a pleasant read if you like Rick and Cliff.
And I do!
Okay, I am biased because of my links to Archer City but Larry McMurtry has to have a place somewhere. Perhaps those voters need to see The Last Picture Show for an introduction.
Elmore Leonard might also be a thought.
"The Last Picture Show" is a very interesting novel just like the film. Brings you back to 1952-53 Texas, a world that is long gone.
Actually, driving down Hwy 79, or Main Street, it feels like nothing has ever changed. The Royal Theater, the real last picture show, is around the corner across from the courthouse. The wind blows, constantly, and the vehicles are mostly pickups. I loved it when McMurtry opened 4 storefronts called Book It 1-4, where he sold his massive book collection. He has passed and only one store remains, but they still show his movie at the Royal
When I reread Tom Wolfe's book about Ken Kesey, I recalled Wolfe explaining it was an easy book to write, because all the participants were fine writers. Even so, I was surprised when the Merry Pranksters go to Texas to visit Ken's friend Larry, who turns out to be the young Larry McMurtry, who was pretty much unknown when Wolfe's book came out.
I see that in old age, after Kesey's death, that McMurtry married Kesey's widow. I wish them a happy old age.
The Merry Pranksters were a strange group. Signe Toly of the original Jefferson Airplane was married to a Merry Prankster named Anderson, bore his child and left the band.
But it’s remarkable how few famous novels have been written by partners."
Is it really? Throughout history, authors tended to work alone. From the pre-novel days of the late Middle Ages, Thomas More, Erasmus, Chaucer, Boccaccio, etc. worked alone (they certainly did their research, or at least were well familiar with sources for their works). It's not really that big a deal, Steve. Either people can walk and chew gum at the same time, or they can't. It was always taken for granted that the majority of the novel was written by a single author. It's not rocket science. Much like Picasso, Dali, Rembrandt, Da Vinci, etc. somehow managed to paint their masterworks all by themselves, writing a novel alone isn't that difficult for those who can write and create. Helping with editing that's one thing. But creating the characters storyline, plot, tension etc that tends to be on the shoulders of a single person (for the most part).
I think LOTR might be the only case where the movies and novels have comparable acclaim/influence.
Also, what’s funny is that both Coppola and Lucas (friends from USC) prefer artsy-fartsy European cinema. But they ended up making some of the greatest American commercial films of all time.
A member of Clint Eastwood's production company, Malpaso Productions, was at an airport in the South with time to kill before a flight. He picked up a novel in a little airport store to pass the time. It was self-published and called "The Outlaw Josie Wales." This man enjoyed the book so much that he brought it to the attention of Clint Eastwood. Eastwood read and enjoyed the book and decided to film it. The writer was a drunk and a racist but no matter. "The Outlaw Josie Wales" was a fine action film that made a lot of money. Eastwood even met a new girlfriend on the set, Sondra Locke.
"The Long Hot Summer" had an all star cast who smoldered in a summer of down-home lust driven by a hot script loaded with juicy 50's-style innuendo. The script was mashed up from William Faulkner's various tales of life in north Mississippi's fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
The title "The Long [hot] Summer was taken from Faulkner's novel, "The Hamlet" where the character\villain Flem Snopes is introduced. Flem becomes patriarch to a long line of villains.
I've watched LHS a half-dozen times over the years and have yet to be disappointed. Orson Welles deftly intuits the character of high-class redneck, Will Varner. Welles' cosmopolitan talent is the magnet holding the cast and the story together. "The Long Hot Summer" pretends to greatness. Its inspiration is taken from genuinely great literature.
"The Hamlet" is a is a stone cold killer of a novel. Human nature in general is characterized with unsparing honesty and compassion. Another of Faulkner's great tales is "Go Down Moses" which takes the reader from days just following the Civil War up to the times of no more horse-and-buggy, no virgin forest and the great Mississippi Delta hemmed with levees and 4 lane highways.
"The Long Hot Summer" was not a great film but a fun film. Starred Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, Lee Remick and others. It was very loosely based on William Faulkner's novels.
The two auteur GOATs, Kubrick and Hitchcock, took material from a huge variety of sources (e.g., “Vertigo” is based on an obscure French detective novel, “Eyes Wide Shut” on an Austrian novella, “Full Metal Jacket” on a pulpy Vietnam memoir), then employed hired screenwriters to work it into shape, while taking advice from their go-to guys: Hitchcock ran dialogue and plot past the highbrow writer V.S. Pritchett. The best argument for the auteur theory is that it worked somewhat like a master painter’s studio with the top man always in charge despite a lot of the work being done by underlings.
Unsurprising Kubrick and Hitchcock’s attempts to adapt literary classics, “Lolita” and “Rebecca”, are among their less memorable movies.
Picking up on the previous piece, I imagine the problem with a “Confederacy of Dunces” adaptation is that you need a famous fat funny man who’s under 40. Philip Seymour Hoffman or John C. Reilly could have done it, but were they famous enough to carry a movie at 35?
I think the window for a 'Confederacy' movie adaptation has closed. How much of the book's humor could be depicted in 2025 USA? It would have to be wokelerized beyond recognition.
O'Toole makes fun of gays, lesbians, blacks, and left-wing intellectuals. Maybe The Board could still play a starring role . . . .
“Rosemary’s Baby” is probably the Platonic ideal of an unpretentious but serviceable novel becoming a genuine classic A+ movie, but Ira Levin’s later work probably suffered from being too obviously written for the screen.
"Dr. Strangelove" was a loose adaptation of the 1958 novel "Red Alert" by Peter George, who was also one of the screenwriters of the Kubrick film. Unlike the film, the book was completely serious (it didn't even have the titular character) and in fact closer to the other nuclear threat film of 1964, Sidney Lumet's "Fail Safe". But it was still mentioned in the film's opening credits as the source.