15 Best Screenplays Written by Novelists

15 Best Screenplays Written by Novelists
Story by Adri;n Duston-Mu;oz •

© Provided by MovieWeb
Here's a truth: writing for the screen is very different from writing just about anything else. What makes screenwriting unique is that it's not published, it's performed. The words on the page will be read by no one but cast and crew. You could just as rationally call a cookbook kitchenwriting and give out Oscars for Best Adapted Meatloaf. It's silly, but true. That probably helps explain why there's very little crossover between novelist and screenwriter; and when it does happen, the results are not necessarily guaranteed to be successful.

Gone With The Wind
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a decade or so after the success of The Great Gatsby, decided to move to Hollywood to make a quick buck as a screenwriter, as was in fashion in the 1930s. Despite filling hours and days and untold pages with handwritten scripts, synopses, and any other form of cinematic literature, he just never seemed to get the hang of it.

"[Fitzgerald was] a great sculptor who [was] hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the pipes so the water could flow." — Billy Wilder


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After a couple of unsuccessful and forgotten scripts, he thought he could relegate himself to rewrites, and that's how he came to work on Gone With the Wind — for about a week. He tried to cut a key plot piece (Scarlett's miscarriage), though was forbidden from deviating from the original novel by Margaret Mitchell. Fitzgerald left Hollywood after two and a half years, and was not credited for his work on the Victor Fleming epic.

The Canyons
Brett Easton Ellis is an acquired taste for many; the novelist behind the source material for The Rules of Attraction and, famously, American Psycho, isn't exactly fireside reading for the family. His literary protagonists, and their cinematic counterparts, often engage in or instigate violent, abusive, or sexually aggressive behavior with an icy lack of remorse. While largely satirical, it can be difficult, in the wrong hands, to know where the joke ends and the story begins, and that's part of the reason that so many people absolutely despised The Canyons.

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Top critics took aim at the mechanical dialogue and two-dimensional acting from the leads, a post-fall from grace Lindsay Lohan and pornstar James Deen. Even that wasn't as harsh as the audience response, which gave the film a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, though Easton Ellis himself reports that video on demand made the film profitable. Like many Lohan properties, it was reported widely in the press, but garnered little more attention aside from the good-humored folks at the Golden Raspberry Awards.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
By now, the origin story of J.K. Rowling, the UK's most successful young adult novelist, and the world's highest-paid author, is well known. But after seven Harry Potter novels and eight screenplays, in which Rowling had final approval of the content, she expanded her repertoire to include penning the script herself for 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a spinoff in the same universe at Harry Potter.

The concept of the story is a guidebook used by Harry and his wizard cohorts as a field atlas of magical creatures. The movie concerns the arrival of Newt Scamander, a cross between a wizard and zoologist, to 1920s New York, and the misadventures that abound when his deceptively small suitcase is opened, freeing the sorts of beasts that inhabit the titular guide.

Although the script was lauded for introducing the new and exciting characters that fans count on from Rowling, the film itself was criticized both for the movies that came before and those that came after: it's very existence was to bridge the fandom from a previous franchise to a new one, making its purpose seem more commercial than artistic.

Yo, La Peor de Todas (I, the Worst of All)
When Mexican novelist Octavio Paz unearthed the litany of writings by 17th century feminist author Sor Juana In;s de la Cruz, he republished and contextualized her writing in 1988, including a poem of false atonement that she entitled I, the Worst of All. Two years later, Argentine filmmaker Mar;a Luisa Bemberg dramatized her life in a film with the same title. It's a low-budget, but interesting tale of a scholarly nun taking up academic arms against the Catholic patriarchy that seeks to silence her.

Spider-Man 2
The celebrated modern American novelist Michael Chabon, responsible for the book Wonder Boys was based off of, has found himself an in-demand property in Hollywood. When Sam Raimi was trying to nail down a production script for Spider-Man 2, he turned to the Pulitzer Prize winner to pen a draft.

"Go get 'em, Tiger."

Chabon was the fourth (that we know about) writer to take a crack at it, and Raimi cherry-picked his favorite parts from each to create the finished film, with parties generally agreeing that it represents about a third of what Chabon wrote. There are copies of the draft floating around the internet, but since then, Chabon has been tapped for several scripts, and is even the co-creator of Star Trek: Picard, a Paramount+ reboot of the character that recently finished its three-season run.

Caligula
Respected American novelist Gore Vidal built a sterling reputation as a witty writer unafraid of tackling cultural mores in his work, particularly progressive sexuality as a catalyst for social progress. It seems natural that he might turn to ancient Roman emperor Caligula's hedonistic lifestyle for inspiration, and the result was a screenplay. That's where it all started to go t*** up.

The main producer was a man named Bob Guccione, whom the publishing world recognizes as the creator of Penthouse magazine, a pornographic pictorial from when men sought such pleasures from the corner newsstand. Guccione changed Vidal's rampant homosexual sex scenes and made them heterosexual, causing Vidal to disown the script. After it was shot, Guccione still wasn't satisfied, and secretly re-shot un-simulated sex scenes with Penthouse models as extras, then inserted them into the film, prompting director Tinto Brass to also walk away from the project.

Despite the casting of prominent and respected British actors like Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, and Peter O'Toole, the resulting picture, released in 1979, was a mess. It was a critical and commercial flop, labeled largely as unfocused smut, and banned in several countries. Today, it's regarded as a cult classic, much in the way that a Big Mac preserved in transparent epoxy is art.

Moby Dick
The 1956 feature film, based on the novel of the same name by Herman Melville, starring Gregory Peck as Ahab and featuring Orson Welles, was from a screenplay written by Ray Bradbury. Fans of science fiction will know Bradbury as the author of Farenheit 451, although his writing was more about cultural observations than futuristic adventures.

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Legendary director of Treasure of the Sierra Madre John Huston had been wanting to make a Moby Dick movie for years, and felt that Bradbury was the man to get the script right. However, their relationship was fractured by Huston's tyrannical mien and insistence over how the script should be written. Their arguments even made their way into a novelization of the time Bradbury spent in Ireland, entitled Green Shadows, White Whale, in which a writer travels to Dublin in order to write an adaptation of Moby Dick for a director, simply named John. It wasn't the first book written about Huston's viciousness.

"From hell's heart I stab at thee! For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee! Thou damned whale!"

The film itself is pretty good, especially for the time. Peck would later lament his immaturity in the role, playing a 50-something Ahab at 38. Despite a lackluster reception, the film is true to the spirit of the novel and does its best to portray a frightening, monstrous whale, as well as the real monster, the one-legged captain intent on killing it.

You Only Live Twice
Seminal British children's book author Roald Dahl is responsible for the source material of Matilda, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, and most famously, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (originally titled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

While he is mainly remembered for his contribution to early childhood literature, many didn't know that he was a flier and a spy in the Royal Air Force during World War II, some of which is chronicled in his semi-autobiographical Going Solo. His experience with wartime intelligence, even a stint with James Bond author Ian Fleming, which is likely why he was asked to write the screen version of Fleming's You Only Live Twice. Most of the action is new to the film and disregards the book, which is ironic, because it was for that very reason that Dahl was furious with the producers of Willy Wonka.

The film is the first to show the face of bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played by Donald Pleasance, and plays off the US-Russo tensions of the time; the Cuban Missile Crisis having been only five years earlier. With a winning song from Nancy Sinatra and a compelling, gadget-filled plot, the film stands up as an exemplar of Bond films from the time.

Double Indemnity
Raymond Chandler is arguably responsible for the best mystery movie of the decade for three different decades. He wrote the novel for The Long Goodbye, which, after his death, 1970s star Elliott Gould portrayed his Detective Marlowe character as a mumbling anti-hero. He wrote the screenplay for Strangers on a Train in 1951, probably the best early work of Hitchcock's career. But it was Chandler's first screenplay, 1944's Double Indemnity that's his best.

"Do I laugh now, or wait 'til it gets funny?"

An insurance agent devises a con to steal another man's wife and, in the process, live off the payments from his policy, and then some. It's a film about seduction, temptation, and betrayal, and was nominated seven times at the Academy Awards, though it went home empty-handed. Nevertheless, it remains one of the best mystery stories of all time.

Superman
For the first major motion picture adaptation of a superhero in 1978, the team behind Superman originally hired novelist Mario Puzo to write the story and screenplay. Puzo, best known as the wordy author of The Godfather series, was paid a whopping $600k for his draft in a movie that ended up costing $55 million to make, a record at the time. It would get it all back and more, earning $300 million at the box office, joining Jaws as early examples of Summer blockbusters. Only, you know, in December.

Superman was also planned to be written and filmed concurrently with Superman II, and thus, Puzo's screenplay was over 500 pages. Not altogether unexpected, as The Godfather had been forced to excise large portions of Puzo's book, even for a movie that's just under three hours long.

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Superman was rewritten by Tom Mankiewicz, nephew of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, because director Richard Donner felt Puzo's version was too campy, although budget restrictions and studio interference would prevent Donner himself from ever bookending the full story by wrestling away control of Superman II. Puzo would go on to write several more screenplays, though none ever as successful as Superman.

The Big Sleep
Oddly enough, when another Chandler property about Detective Marlowe, The Big Sleep, was being made, director Howard Hawks turned instead to novelists William Faulker and Leigh Brackett.

Faulkner is required reading for many American high schools for his novels As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, both resonating for their distinctly American settings, though the former has its roots in the Greek classic Odyssey. Leigh Brackett, on the other hand, had only just started writing pulpy detective stories, although she quickly got big in science fiction.

However, in The Big Sleep, Faulkner and Brackett alternated writing scenes for the film, which was the second of three in almost as many years starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. They met on To Have and Have Not (which Faulkner also worked on), he divorced his third wife during The Big Sleep, and they were happily married by the time they did Key Largo.

Unfortunately, they only had twelve years together before Bogart passed. Faulkner didn't do much more screenwriting, but Brackett went on to write Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and even made key storytelling decisions in The Empire Strikes Back during the last year of her life.

Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton was already established as a literary heavyweight in Hollywood, having written the novels The Great Train Robbery, Westworld, and The Andromeda Strain, all of which were turned into movies in the 1970s. So when Steven Spielberg took interest in his still unfinished manuscript about cloned dinosaurs, a little story called Jurassic Park, Crichton was allowed to adapt his own work.

"John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists."

Although Chichton's draft went through several rewrites, it would go on to become the linchpin to a massive franchise, spawning two trilogies, video games, and a warehouse of marketing tie-ins. Careful not to hum more than five notes from John Williams' massively popular score, or you'll owe Crichton a buck fifty.

The Counselor
Cormac McCarthy, who died three months ago, wrote the book No Country for Old Men, among several other modern American Westerns. His first screenplay was The Counselor, and when it came out, it felt like the whole world came out against it. Which is further proof that the whole world is a bunch of stupid jerks, because this is a great film.

"The point, Counselor, it that you may think there are things that these people are simply incapable of. There are not."

It is bizarre, shockingly perverse, indecently bloody, and the characters are so verbose that each scene requires strict attention. That said, if a film is nothing more than an assembly of the most interesting moments of a protagonist's story, then The Counselor undeniably gets high marks. Michael Fassbender's titular lawyer is about to dive in over his head with money laundering for a drug cartel, but he doesn't yet know it. By the end, everything beautiful about his life is taken from him, most grotesquely. If No Country For Old Men is an 8 of 10 on the meter of cruelty and chaos in criminality, then The Counselor is a 9.5.

It's a sitting-around-and-talking movie, except for the horrifying moment when you learn what a Bolito is.

Wild
Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, about her sweeping emotional journey over a months-long backpacking trip, was adapted by fellow novelist Nick Hornby.

After think-hit High Fidelity and highly-regarded feeler About a Boy, both of which were adapted from his books, Hornby gave us the screenplay for An Education, about a British suburban teenager beguiled by the charms of an older conman. It's a troubling but honest story about betrayal from your first love.

His sensitivity no doubt spoke to Strayed. In the film, Reese Witherspoon gives a barebones performance of a woman turned inside out by the death of her spirited mother from cancer at forty-five. Her resulting depression causes withdrawal from her marriage, divorce, and experimentation with heroin. She resolves to hike the PCT, fixating on it as a personal goal, sacrificing much on the trail to get there. Hornby's screenplay was enough to help get Witherspoon and Laura Dern, who plays her mother, an Oscar nomination each. It's the rare, underrated film that's relies on emotional stakes, but never feels lachrymose.

The Princess Bride
There is no greater example of the cross hyphenate author-screenwriter than William Goldman, and no more prolific an era for him than the '70s.

After writing plays, novels, and librettos, he wrote his first original screenplay, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in 1969. It would win him an Oscar for best Original Screenplay, and immortalize Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the duo with the best chemistry in cinema. His second Oscar came seven years later, again with a Redford picture, in All the Presidents Men, this time for adapting the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal and subsequent downfall of Richard Nixon. Another legendary film, often counted among the best of all time. In between those two wins, he wrote another couple screenplays called Marathon Man and The Stepford Wives, and wrote a fun fantasy novel called The Princess Bride. All in the space of about seven years.

"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is: never get involved in a land war in Asia. But only slightly less well known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

It was over ten years later that the novel would get turned into a screenplay, which Goldman himself adapted. The touching tale of monsters and miracle men, pirates and princes, gentle giants and swordplay is among the most beloved movies ever; a combination of fantasy, love, swashbuckling action, and humor. That it found a place in the Library of Congress is almost insignificant next to the ubiquitous place it holds on the screens of Greyhound buses everywhere, entertaining schoolchildren during field trips. It's without a doubt The Beatles of film: anyone who doesn't like it is only saying so to be contrarian.