by Shannonn KellyÂ
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) –
Every year there are several book-club favorites that turn up at the multiplex. Perusing the list of Academy Award best-picture winners can feel like a trip to Barnes & Noble, from “Gone With the Wind” and “The Godfather” to “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The English Patient.”
But during this tumultuous, strike-hobbled awards season, at least a dozen movies with literary roots have real shots at winning the biggest prizes. Some of those novels, like Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner,” are beloved and readers feel proprietary about them.
Others, like Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” which won best drama and musical score at the Golden Globes on Sunday night, and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” which won the directing prize for Julian Schnabel and the foreign-language film honor, seemed impossible to adapt because they were too complicated, too internal.
The adaptations themselves range from the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men,” which maintained much of Cormac McCarthy’s rich Texas vernacular, to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” in which the writer-director merely used Upton Sinclair’s “Oil!” as a leaping-off point. Still others come from novellas (”Lust, Caution“), graphic novels (”Persepolis“), or are based on non-fiction works such as (”Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Into the Wild,” “A Mighty Heart”).
To read about screenwriter David Benioff and his experience while working on an adaptation of “The Kite Runner”, click Here.
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