You won’t be blamed if you weren’t aware that “Cool Hand Luke” was based on a book. Donn Pearce’s 1965 book was quickly overshadowed by the iconic 1967 Paul Newman film, with the movie having the more enduring legacy. Both are about a Florida prison inmate named Luke who works on a chain gang. As far as how they differ — and why Pearce isn’t a big fan of the movie — you need only examine the film’s most legendary quote, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Famed comic book writer Alan Moore has always had a prickly relationship with Hollywood, and that’s probably putting it mildly. More crucially, he has hated basically every movie that has ever been adapted from one of his comics — including “From Hell,” “Watchmen,” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” — and has never been remotely shy about saying so.
But “V for Vendetta” is thus far the most critically acclaimed film adaptation of one of his works, the story of a masked terrorist who uses extreme measures to battle against a version of London that has become a fascist police state. As he explained in an interview with journalist Ian Winterton, so disgusted was Moore by this point at the way Hollywood treated his stories that he demanded his name not be included in any future adaptations of his work, a practice that started with 2009’s “Watchmen.”
As for his issues with “Vendetta” specifically, Moore said he didn’t like the way the political message was shifted to apply to George W. Bush-era America, pointing out how important anarchy and fascism were to the original story and that the movie never even uses either of those words.
The general consensus on “Forrest Gump” has leaned a bit more negative in recent years, spurred on by damning reappraisals from outlets like IndieWire and LA Weekly. But there’s no denying that it was a huge critical and commercial success at the time of its release, going on to win a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture. Telling the story of a man with indeterminate mental and social struggles who ends up inadvertently shaping the course of American history, “Forrest Gump” is based on the book of the same name by author Winston Groom. And Groom’s feelings about the movie are complicated at best.
In a New York Times piece on the author, Groom complained that the movie smooths out too many of the character’s “rough edges” that make the story and his journey more interesting. He disagreed with the casting, too, preferring John Goodman or a similarly more physically imposing actor over Tom Hanks. Things get worse when clever Hollywood accounting made it seem as though the massively successful movie hadn’t actually made a profit, which meant that the studio wouldn’t have to make good on the 3% of the net profits he was promised and forced him to take the studio to court (via the Oklahoma City Journal Record).
Groom seemed to make his feelings on the whole fiasco pretty clear when he wrote the sequel novel, “Gump & Co.,” and had Forrest proclaim “don’t never let nobody make a movie of your life’s story” in the very first paragraph.
What about “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? Most people kind of like it — other than the extremely poorly aged performance of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi, the Blake Edwards-directed, Audrey Hepburn-starring romantic comedy is an American classic that continues to be discussed and referenced to this day. In it, Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, an escort looking to bag a wealthy older man, and she thinks she has found exactly that in Paul Varjak (George Peppard).
The original book of the same name that the movie adapts is written by none other than Truman Capote, and he was certainly not going to hold back if he felt the film didn’t do right by his story. Sure enough, in an interview with Playboy, Capote took issue with everything from the movie’s tone to its casting and portrayal of Holly Golightly. He said that Holly was “a tough character, not an Audrey Hepburn type at all” and that “the film became a mawkish valentine to New York City and Holly and, as a result, was thin and pretty, whereas it should have been rich and ugly.”
According to biographer and journalist Barry Paris (via The Vintage News), Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the lead in the film and remarked that the studio “double-crossed [him] in every way” by going with Hepburn instead.
Stanley Kubrick ruffled a lot of feathers during his filmmaking career, particularly among the authors whose books he adapted into movies. Not only was Stephen King unhappy with what Kubrick did with “The Shining,” but “A Clockwork Orange” author Anthony Burgess also took issue with what Kubrick did to his story when bringing it to the big screen. What’s interesting here is that Burgess was initially a champion for the film — though, incidentally, that’s part of where things ended up going south in terms of Burgess’s relationship with the movie.
This content was originally published here.
