6 Unfilmable Books That Actually Got Made Into Movies

Most books considered “unfilmable” are so considered because of their form. Rather than a cohesive through narrative, such that easily translates into narrative cinema, they tell circuitous tales from multiple perspectives, shift genres, or provide stream-of-consciousness so constant or abstract that attempting to place it up on the screen becomes a near impossibility. But never tell a director that it's impossible to make a movie out of something, because they'll probably go right ahead and make it just to prove it can be done. Sometimes the results are works of art, and sometimes round failures, but the more difficult the book, the more fascinating the film. So, on that note, here are 6 books that were considered unfilmable, but were still subsequently made into films. Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs is not the most film friendly writer. His books are Beat-style forays into the human experience masquerading as prose novels. His most famous work, Naked Lunch, is a fascinating, obscene, wildly imaginative and wholly surreal story of…something. I’m not really quite sure, and I’ve read it twice. The attempt to make it into a film would have challenged even the most surrealist directors, but David Cronenberg did give it the old college try. Naked Lunch stars Peter Weller as Lee, an exterminator whose wife (Judy Davis) has begun using his insecticides as a drug. He becomes involved in the drug as well, and during a trip accidentally murders his wife. Afterwards he flees to Interzone, where the film takes a turn for the even weirder. In the midst of drug-induced hallucinations, Lee begins writing reports for a “handler,” which in turn become the book Naked Lunch. There are typewriters that turn into bugs, strange alien-like creatures, and Roy Scheider as an evil doctor. As an attempt to make a totally narratively disconnected book into a film, Naked Lunch does its best. It uses the device of mixing some of the real events of Burroughs’s life – such as the accidental death of his wife - with the loosely connected events of the novel in an attempt to create a cohesive narrative. The film starts to fall to pieces as Lee plunges deeper into drug addiction and the world of Interzone. Unfortunately, that does not make for a meta-narrational commentary on the character. It's simply a mess. Utilizing some of the obscene imagery from Burroughs’s work to rather predictable Freudian affect, Naked Lunch also incorporates other pieces of the author's books, and tries to tie the whole thing together via a meta-narrational “writing of Naked Lunch." Naked Lunch cannot quite decide what it is: an adaptation of Burroughs’s book, an examination of the author himself, or a strange dystopian sci-fi. As such, it fails to be any of the above. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Terry Gilliam is perhaps the only director who could take a semi-true story of a journalist and his attorney’s drug-fueled weekend in Las Vegas and make it not only cinematic, but halfway true to the original book’s vision of carnival mayhem and political commentary. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on the original novel by Hunter S. Thompson. The novel has a loose narrative thread made a little less tenuous by Gilliam’s direction and script. It’s an epic road trip, an epic drug trip, and a surrealistic take on America in the 1970s, as the hippie culture winds down and enters the dark and murky waters of Watergate, Vietnam, and the aftermath of the Manson killings. The film follows journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his “Samoan attorney” Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) as they travel to Las Vegas in a fire-apple red convertible to cover the Mint 400 Motorcycle Rally. The weekend turns into an excuse for all kinds of drugged-up debauchery, as the pair destroy Las Vegas hotel rooms, attend the National Convention of District Attorneys while high on acid, and try to escape Las Vegas in one piece. Like the novel before it, however, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is more than a mere excuse for hedonism and excess. It’s a surrealistic rumination on the “death of the American dream” in the midst of the Vietnam War and the slow decline of the countercultural movement. While fueled by drugs, Duke and Gonzo navigate a disturbing underworld that stands in for the strange twisted nature of American culture. Gilliam’s signature style, candy color scheme, and love for wide angle lenses perfectly compliments the script, largely lifted from the book itself, as the pair wander about Las Vegas in a cloud of narcotics. Fear and Loathing is a brilliant introduction to the works of Hunter S. Thompson, and far more than just the sum of its parts. Ulysses Did you know that there was a 1967 film of James Joyce’s ultra-modernist epic Ulysses? I certainly didn’t, not until I read the book and immediately went “man, they could never make that into a film.” But they did. The novel Ulysses follows the perambulations of a number of characters through a single day in Dublin, 1904, focusing on the movements, thoughts, memories, and desires of Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged man in the midst of a difficult marriage, and Stephen Dedalus, a young schoolteacher and scholar. Nothing happens in the novel, and yet everything does, as we’re privy to the characters’ meandering consciousnesses, their desires, and fears through extended stream-of-consciousness narrative and shifting among genres, including epic poetry and philosophic dialogue. The book is a weighty, confusing, profound narrative, often considered the ultimate modernist novel. How, then, to make this 800 page behemoth into a coherent film? Remarkably, Joseph Strick’s film Ulysses maintains an interesting and coherent through narrative without sacrificing much of the novel’s substance. Rather than attempting to approximate the extensive stream-of-consciousness monologues that permeate the book, the film makes use of snippets of Joyce’s prose (spoken in voiceover) over montage sequences that visually demonstrate the purport of the language. It focuses stringently on a few main characters, cutting out large swaths of other narrative, and develops the apparent “cuckoldry” of Bloom (Milo O’Shea), the intellectual fever of Stephen (Maurice Roeves), and the passions of Bloom’s wife Molly (Barbara Jeffords), who provides the most extensive voiceover passage. While the film is forced to pass over a number of the book's fascinating sequences to keep to the two hour run- time, the viewer is left with a sense of both confusion and profundity, as the ephemeral nature of the single day gives way not to resolution but to a deeper understanding of the characters’ all too human problems. The film does the impossible: it manages to express some portion of Joyce’s pageantry without becoming trite or simplistic. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story The novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne is a book about a man failing to write his autobiography. So, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is naturally a film about failing to make a film of Tristram Shandy. It follows a difficult, self-centered actor (Steve Coogan) playing Tristram Shandy in an adaptation of Sterne's novel. Coogan’s love life forms the center of the film, as well as his interactions with fellow actors, including Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson, and Dylan Moran, all of whom play themselves and characters from the novel. Interweaved through the narrative are events from the novel, both taking place in the film-within-a-film and as part of Coogan’s meta-narrative. The film meanders between two fictional worlds, acting both as a faux-documentary and an adaptation. This mirrors the novel’s tangential narrative, in which Shandy wanders off on discussions of his family’s past, rumination on philosophy and romance, and stories about his Uncle Toby (here also played by Rob Brydon). Interspersed throughout the film are discussions of the book they're enacting, adding yet another twist to a complicated metafictional narrative. In some ways, Tristan Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is an incoherent film, failing to be either a faux documentary or an actual adaptation. But that is also its project: it is film about failing to make a film of a book about a man failing to write a book about himself. So if it does fail to maintain coherent narrative, perhaps that’s the point. You can’t get much more meta-narrational than that. Cloud Atlas David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas traverses genres, time periods, and storylines in a seemingly effortless manner that avoids establishing a straight-forward narrative without sacrificing clarity. The book has been described as a “puzzle box” of sorts, moving between dystopian sci-fi, a 19th Century diary, a modern novel, a thriller, and more. So when the Wachowski siblings and director Tom Tykwer decided to make a film version of the novel, they had their work cut out for them. The Wachowskis’/Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas follows six stories, each of which take place in a different time period but nonetheless inform on each other. All of the narratives, from the odd sci-fi of the “Big Isle” sections to the 19th Century “Pacific Island” sequences tell a story of power, imprisonment, control, and corruption. The film attempts to intertwine each story via the use of the same actors playing multiple major and minor characters throughout, as well as references to characters seeing or reading elements that appear in other stories. While the novel divides the stories into two distinct parts for each, the film jumps around between key sections, allowing for a more cinematic building of tension. The intercutting juxtaposes key scenes in each story against similar key scenes in the others, convincingly drawing parallels as the tale proceeds. The film of Cloud Atlas remarkably succeeds in its project, keeping the general concerns of the novel intact while simultaneously maintaining audience interest and keeping the shift in periods clear. The bending of gender and race among the various actors can produce a somewhat jarring effect, and some of the prosthetics used to accomplish are both distracting and, in places, borderline offensive. While the result is not a wholly successful film – it’s overlong in places, and perhaps a bit trite in some of the philosophy – it takes a very difficult novel and turns it into an interesting, provocative work, well worth the time. Where the Wild Things Are Children’s books are deceptively simplistic. The best of them contain within a very short and uncomplicated space, a depth of meaning that can appeal both to the child and the adult who still remembers being a child. One such book is Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, later adapted into a fascinating film from director Spike Jonze. Sendak’s short and sweet picture book features a young boy named Max who dresses up as a wolf and runs rampant in his household, much to his mother’s dismay. After being sent to his room, Max falls asleep and awakens to find himself on a jungle island populated by the Wild Things. He’s eventually hailed as a king and cuts loose with a “wild rumpus” with his new subjects, but finally decides he has to return home to his family, where a hot supper awaits him. The book comes in at just over 300 words, and most children who grew up reading it probably remember the pictures and the phrase “let the wild rumpus start!” more than anything else. Spike Jonze took the book and ran with it, stretching the scant narrative into a full film about anger and loneliness. It roughly follows the plot of the book, as Max turns into a king of the Wild Things, but veers off into unknown territory as his relationship with the complex family unit of the Wild Things intensifies. Loyal to Sendak’s drawings, the Wild Things are live action versions of the book’s famous images, but their personalities are expanded upon, expressing Max’s desire for family and friendship, and also his anger, resentment, and loneliness. It is a curious and melancholic film, not particularly aimed at children, but rather at the adults who remember, perhaps all too well, the pain of being a child. As an adaptation, Where The Wild Things Are maintains Sendak’s deeper psychoanalytic understanding of child (and adult) mentality, but in fleshing out some of the characters and their “wildness” the film risks overdoing it. While Sendak’s work does much with very little, Jonze’s film is slightly overinflated, complicating the relationships among the Wild Things while failing to take into account the anarchic joy that is a major facet of the book. Unlike Sendak's book, which is about children and for children, the film is really about children but for adults.