@franciscawrites@bookstodon Claire Keegan’s Foster was filmed as The Quiet Girl/An Cailín Ciúin (2022), and was a magnificent film. Her So Late in the Day is being filmed currently, I believe, and will star Cillian Murphy. Both novellas are less than 100 pages.
@arratoon@bookstodon
I haven't read the story. The film, however, it's beautiful. Devastating and hopeful all at once. And the young actor is magnificent.
@franciscawrites@bookstodon Arrival, from "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. A Boy and His Dog from the story by Harlan Ellison. Total Recall from "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," by Philip K. Dick. Most PKD adaptations have been from short stories.
@franciscawrites@gevoel@octothorpe@bookstodon Seems consistent. Foundation is a series based on his short stories (then made into a book series) and it goes against the whole thing he wrote about.
@adriano@gevoel@octothorpe@bookstodon
The Foundation Series are full-grown novels not short stories. Regardless, I haven't seen the series but have no doubt Hollywood has done its thing again and turning them into the opposite of what the source material was about.
@franciscawrites@adriano@gevoel@octothorpe@bookstodon While I would agree with the typical Hollywood twisting of books, I also have to say I have enjoyed the Foundation TV show. Which is a rare thing for my nerdy bookworm soul :)
This series, any series, could be enjoyable and good even if it goes against the source material. For Asimov adaptations, though, my only reference is the awful Will Smith I, Robot. I Think my judgement is clouded by it. I may give Foundation a change, if it ever crosses my way.
@janbartosik@franciscawrites@gevoel@octothorpe@bookstodon Oh, I loved the series. The Empire parts especially. But the whole thing about psychohistory is that "things would happen no matter what", and the series goes "Well there's this exact precise woman everything depends on".
@adriano@janbartosik@franciscawrites@gevoel@octothorpe@bookstodon I haven't seen the series, but I read the books decades ago. That 'precise woman everything depends on' sounds like the pivot in Foundation and Empire. They may be reasonably faithful to the books.
The Mule, you mean? They do foreshadow him, but he's represented as something predictable and also different from this "pivotal woman." It's kinda a mess.
The series focuses on Seldon himself and other heroic figures doing heroic things, rather than on the idea of psychohistory working with large populations over long time scales. This may be because Asimov's Marxist-influenced interpretation of history is something they found distasteful, or it may be because the idea of replacing the entire cast every few episodes was considered commercially unviable. Either way, it's really not very Foundation once you scratch the paint off.
@franciscawrites@gevoel@octothorpe@bookstodon The Foundation originally was written as a series of published short stories, at least for what then comprised the first book. I don't remember if Asimov wanted them to be a full novel from the start.
Oh! I did not know Foundation started as short stories before the novels. Makes sense though, especially the first book, which is very much like a series of short stories.
Foundation was my book introduction to SciFi, and Dr Who my audiovisual intro, back when my brother in law decided he was tired of being the only SciFi fan in the family.
@franciscawrites@bookstodon The Thing (both the 1950s version and 1980s John Carpenter remake) was based on the novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell. And, though not many people have seen it, Spiderhead was based on the George Saunders short story "Escape from Spiderhead." Then, of course, there's Short Cuts, Robert Altman's adaptation of a number of Raymond Carver short stories.
@alexlubertozzi@bookstodon
You post made me curious about the original novella behind The Thing, so I went looking for it. Now I'm just waiting for it to arrive. Thanks!
@franciscawrites@bookstodon The Shawshank Redemption, and I think it benefits from it. King's longer works rarely adapt in a faithful way that's also good, but being shorter enables the story to be told in full, at a good pace, with all the detail.
@dance_along_the_edge@bookstodon
I haven't seen any of the adaptations but The Lottery is quite the story. So subtle and so powerful, it gets under your skin and stays there for long.
@mozz
I knew about, but I thought it was three of his lesser-know stories, not one. Several student-films had been adapted from those stories. Yet, the stories involved aren't particularly good (IMO).
Oh I thought there were a whole bunch on the list.
And the stories not being good isn't necessarily an obstacle... they made "The Lawnmower Man" without even bothering to pretend that it was related to the content of the story.
Also, holy shit - I just looked it up and there were some real masterpieces on the list. "The Last Rung on the Ladder" and "Night Surf", among some others I thought were outstanding little horror one-offs, were apparently part of it.
@mozz@bookstodon
Yes, several of the adaptations are far superior to the source material.
What's interesting, or at least that's how it was explained to me, is that the 1-buck rights deal was not for everyone but for cinema students and newcomers, which is the bast part of it, I think.
or a shorter story is PKD's Second Variety, made into a film called Screamers
in that case, i thought the terrifying & delightfully paranoid short story was less effective as a movie while Minority Report was pretty clearly better as a movie
@franciscawrites@peachfront@bookstodon "Second Variety" is in the U.S. public domain, so it's readily available online. I like Standard Ebooks' PKD collection, which has it, but I imagine it can be found many places.
how short? Minority Report was adapted from PKD's The Minority Report, a novella, but it was published in book form as a part of a short story collection
@peachfront@bookstodon
I was surprised when I learned about this particular example, and rushed to read the story. It's still a short story, even if on the longish side.
@Rtorres81@bookstodon
Not often are authors asked (or request) to adapt their own works, it's interesting when one does, particularly when the results are as good as in this example. Now, adding to it that he directed the adaptation, well, that's rare.
@HauntedOwlbear@franciscawrites@bookstodon And directing that film was (according to several interviews) a response to someone else making a terrible movie out of the short story "Rawhead Rex"
Although honestly, Hellraiser expands on the imagery of his early short film The Forbidden so well, it would have been a shame if something hadn't pushed him into making a feature.
There's a lot to be said for a theatrical background. I have one of the compilations of his scripts, and there's a great deal of consistency of vision between his theatrical, literary and cinematic approaches, IMO.
Not often are authors asked (or request) to adapt their own works, it's interesting when one does, particularly when the results are as good as in this example. Now, adding to it that he directed the adaptation, well, that's rare.
@liesvanrompaey@bookstodon
Yes, and I remember reading that story as a teen. In the story, the woman swallows the getting-younger man when he becomes the size of a pea (or something like that), which kind of traumatized me of a while.
@franciscawrites@bookstodon El Sur/ The South by Adelaida Garcia Morales was made into a film of the same name by her then husband, Victor Erice. OK, technically it’s a novella, but at 50 pages I’ve read longer short stories. I actually started reading the novella last night, because I love the film, but finances were pulled from the movie production before the final third could be made, and I’ve always longed to find out what happened.
@liesvanrompaey@WJBL@bookstodon
It's a long-short story (almost a novella) but was first published as part of a collection (if I remember well). And, as someone else has already mentioned, several other stories from this collection/anthology had been adapted into films.