h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd love to see Swallows and Amazons on the big screen.



Brian Lumley's books, The Necroscope series, I'd love to see those transformed into a decent horror flick with lots of special effects.

Anyone else with good reads that they'd like to see in the movies?

The Secret History by Donna Tartt. A dark, American campus movie would be good.

James Barclays .. The Raven!... Brilliant fantasy and dragon stuff..!!!

Swallows and Amazons has been on the big screen. It was a film from the 70s, I think - not too bad, either. I used to own the soundtrack LP. Actually, I've probably still got it somewhere *rummagerummagerummage*

Two more:
The film I'd like to direct myself would be 'The Good Terrorist' by Doris Lessing. (An excellent book. Do read it).

I'd also like to see Voltaire's Candide - which is one of the funniest books I've ever read. A short book that would make an epic film. I wonder who they could get to play Cunegonde, the old lady who had only one buttock.

Candide could be excellent
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists would make an excellent TV drama if anybody bothered making them anymore
Lots of Brecht would make good films especially The Threepenny Opera, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (saw an excellent ballet version of that once), and Mother Courage and her Children
Last but not least Sunset Song (although unless we're talking LOTR length it would be much too long for a film)

Sunset Song. Lewis 'Jurassic' Gribbon?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072233/

H.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, one of the finest authors of the 20th century

Ohhh those all sound rather good....

I didn't know there was already a Swallows and Amazons movie, didn't get a good review tho.

Trin *heee* you have most awesome collection of miscellany stuff..

Philip K. Dick's 'A Scanner Darkly'

It's et in a druggie commune. And undercoverc policeman has infiltrated and reports back to HQ occasionally, wearing a sort of hi-tech camoflage suit. As he goes through the hologram surveillance recordings, he points out the commune member who is the evil ringleader of a drugs gang. His colleagues point out that that's him. Usual Dick theme of 'what is reality' etc. etc.

Unlike other Dick adaptations (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report), I'd film it in a deliberately non-futuristic non-SF style. Video-8, with camera angles tight on the actors' faces, or with mid-shots looking past someone's face at someone else. All very sordid and claustrophobic. Maybe for the hologram bits, I'd use unfamiliar, Kubrick-esque perspectives. Music would be very bad hardcore-thrash-grungey stuff.

That's the concept. Can I have some money to develop it into an idea? (line from Annie Hall).

Adaptations of Dick's non-SF novels could be interesting, too (Puttering About In A Small Land; The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike).

Eric Frank Russell's, Next of Kin (1959)

Comedy sf of this bloke that goes into enemy territory, and crashes his ship into a distant planet and was captured by aliens.

Very funny, he does all these weird and unpredictable things, because these aliens had never before seen one of his type..all he had to work with was block of wood and a length of copper, and an imaginary friend called Eustace.

I've never heard of those Ed They sound really captivating.

PKD is great--but I didn't know he'd done some non-SF novels. I'll have to look out for them. I love his short story 'The Invasion of the Fnools', about how the world is taken over by aliens disguised as three-foot-high real estate salesmen. That'd make a good film, I think. Not too expensive to make, either.

See also the Kilgore Trout short story about a race of aliens who communicate by farting and tap dancing. One alien lands his flying saucer on a farm and notices that the barn is on fire. So he runs into the farmhouse, farting and tapdancing.....and the farmer shoots him.

(Kilgore Trout is a fictitious SF writer who appears in various of Kurt Vonnegut's novels).

Oh my!