40 Comments on “Your Saturday Amusement”

1. I always wanted to be a writer of novelizations of films that were themselves adapted from novels.

2. I know of at least one: Planet of the Apes

3. I can give you a second. Rough Night In Jericho starring Dean Martin as the villain was based on a novel titled The Man In Black by Al Conroy. John Benteen did a novelization of the script.

4. I’m also fairly sure there was a novelization of the 1994 Little Women movie, but at the moment I can’t find evidence of it.

5. Correction. Richard Meade did the novelization of Rough Night In Jericho. Both names are pseudonyms of Ben Haas.

6. “I always wanted to be a writer of novelizations of films that were themselves adapted from novels.”

   A lot of the Marvel films taken from comic books have been novelized. Fred Saberhagen and James Hart co-wrote a novelization of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula which was (very) loosely based on Bram Stoker’s book.

7. _Face-Off_
   “Foreward by John Travolta, Backward by Nicolas Cage.”

   Winner!

8. Does “Total Recall” count? I have its novelization around here somewhere, done by Piers Anthony I think.

9. Q: How many Immortals does it take to change a light bulb?

   A: There can be only one.

10. Shame about the sequels.

    There should have been only one.

11. Somewhat slightly askew from this, my wife has a Bible somewhere about the house with Billy Graham as the author. To be kind, it is supposed to be an edition of The Bible with commentry by Graham but the front page says simply “The Bible by Billy Graham”. I knew he hs been preaching for a long time but I had no idea how long.

12. Two more I suddenly remembered. Christopher Wood did two James Bond novelizations: Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me.

13. I always thought it was cool that Max Allan Collins wrote the novelization of the movie Road to Perdition, which was based on a comic book that he wrote.
    I like the karmic circularity of that.

14. So awesome. Saw this yesterday. God bless Photoshop. God bless the series of little tubes that makes all this possible.

    Here’s one for you… best novelization evah: I’m going E.T. by Kotzwinkle.

15. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Francis Ford Coppola Film – novelization by Fred Saberhagen and James V. Hart, Based upon the screenplay by James V. Hart from the Bram Stoker novel.

16. The Dracula novelisation, of course, gave rise to the story that Saberhagen offered to write a novelisation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, so that it could be marketed as ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, by the author of Bram Stoker’s Dracula‘. (MSF did indeed have a novelisation, but not by Saberhagen.)

17. Joe Hill:

    Yes, but there was no original novel!

    That said: Yes. I love me that E.T. novelization.

18. I did a novelisation of a film based on a series of novels – The Little Vampire. Angela Sommer-Bodenburg wrote the original novels, which is why she is listed as writer of this film tie-in (I also did uncredited work on the script).

19. No, I know. I was just saying, in general, good movie novelization. I know my comment was sort of drifting away from the discussion further up the thread.

    Best novelization of a movie that was a novel first? Uh… that’s giving my pop culture muscle a cramp… Well, David Morrell wrote good novelizations of Rambo II & III even though… ***SPOILER SKIP A COUPLE LINES***

    … Rambo gets smoked at the end of his original novel, First Blood. Does that almost sort of kinda count? It doesn’t count, does it. I tried.

    On a different note, dude, I didn’t get spamblocked! I’m psyched. Your blog likes me again. But did you know even my own blog sometimes blocks my comments? How much of a kick in the ass is that? I can’t get no respect.

20. I remember First Blood’s ending to be a bit ambiguous as to whether he actually dies or not. I guess there was only minimal retconning required.

21. Much laughter here. The Ghostbusters one was inspired.
    Fankoo!

22. I think the weirder thing is novelizations of movies based on children’s books. I’ve seen one for The Polar Express, and I just recently saw one for The Tale of Despereaux.

23. Wow, those are awesome. And in an odd bit of synchronicity, today a friend sent me a link to a flickr set of Penguin Classics covers for videogames such as Half Life: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ollym/sets/72157612646893506/

24. The first ones I thought of were the James Bond novelisations. How does 2001 fit in? Novelisation or not? There was a short story beforehand too.

    David Morrell writing the novelisations for movies inspired from the original novel he wrote is interesting. He may have been the first to do this but he wasn’t the last – I’m sure I recall a more recent example… nope, gone. Can’t remember.

    Let’s be thankful there wasn’t a Lord Of The Rings novelisation.

25. Wow! Thanks so much for the mention and kind words, guys. :D These are a blast to make and I’m glad some people GET the whole “rewriting of a rewrite” aspect.

    xoxo
    Your Friendly Neighborhood Spacesick

26. “Jumper” takes the cake in this category. How can you beat a case where the author wrote the novelization of a movie based on his own book?

27. The novel and screenplay for2001: A Space Odyssey were written concurrently by Clarke and Kubrick, so it’s not really a novelization. Or a novelisation, since Clarke was English. The short story that was the starting point was “The Sentinel”.

28. The winner is one of the strangest — fittingly — stories in film history.

    A serving RAF officer Peter Bryan George wrote a pseudonymous novel, 2 Hours to Doom [US title Red Alert] as Peter Bryant.

    George, under his real name, collaborated on the script.

    Then, in a bizarre chain of events where the studio suits lost sight of the development chain for the film, the studio contacted Peter Bryant’s literary agent to write a novelization of Dr. Strangelove because Bryant “just happened to have written” a similar if more serious novel on the same theme.

    Which George did.

    JJB

29. More than a decade ago (goodness!), the A.V. Club compared key lines from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and the novelization of the Ethan Hawke/Gwyneth Paltrow smash blockbuster hit Great Expectations.

    http://www.avclub.com/articles/great-expectations,1347/

    The article worked better in its original chart form, but I still like the comparison to the film’s scene where “Pip/Jimmy nervously fondles Estella, the elusive love of his life” to the original novel, and finds that there is no applicable scene.

30. Apologies if you’ve already seen this, but I just had to send. It was compulsion, you understand.

    Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

    …

    “I was written by JAAAAAAAAANNNNE.”

    -Ted

31. “Bedknob and Broomstick” (Andre Norton, err, Mary Norton) –> Disney “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” –> Norton renovelization.

    Those are terrible covers, don’t see where the excitement comes in. New things redone badly in pseudo-retro style?

32. My favorite is “Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too — a novelization of the minor motion pictures”

33. DG Lewis @ 27 – “Or a novelisation, since Clarke was English”

    I’m British and also use the ‘s’ spelling, as do the vast majority of British people, I gather – and it is interesting that we do this even though it flies in the face of the guidance of the titanic Oxford English Dictionary, the leading authority on this sort of thing and soi-disant “definitive record of the English language”, which spells “novelize” (and all similar words) with a ‘z’.

    Maybe us peasant Britonz toiling in the muddy fieldz of normal language are being contrary as a small revolt against our intellectual lordz and masterz, just to remind them there iz no Academie Anglaize.

34. Zeph @31 are you sure of this?

    Since I’ve been re-reading some of the Borrowers series recently, I’m aware that Norton wrote the Bedknob originally as two books and combined them in 1957.

    I not aware of any novelization.

    JJB

35. Nicholas Waller: I fear it is the result of people constantly telling us that ‘This is the British way, whereas that is the American way’, even if the truth is more complicated. There is also the influence of Microsoft; the spellchecker in the UK version of Word marks forms in ‘-ize’ as misspellings. So although there are many precedents for ‘-ize’ in British English, people nowadays see it as a nasty Americanism. The Times used to use ‘ize’, but abandoned it a few years ago because people kept writing in to complain about the Americanism.

36. I love how these covers are scuffed, like they’ve been traveling from one yard sale to another since the 60s.

37. Robert Sheckley wrote the novelization of the Italian film The Tenth Victim based on his short story the Seventh Victim. Which led to the game TAG The Assasination Game which inspired a movie or two thus leading to two sequels by Sheckley.

    Those covers are brilliant. More in line with the cover for Androids Dream than John’s other books.

    Ethelred

38. Thank you; these are fantastic.

39. Wait a minute. There really *is* a novelization of “Highlander.” It’s not a fake! (It’s also not very good.)

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