Three Cheers for Short Stories on the Silver Screen

Gimme an B!

Gimme an O!

Gimme another O!

Gimme a K!

Gimme an F!

Gimme yet another O!

Gimme an X!

What’s that spell? That’s right, the name of the guy who’s on vacation while I’m stuck here in sunny Southern California. Hmm, maybe that’s not so bad, after all … And, really, I guess a dude who blogs under the name “Cheerleader Chad” should put across a more positive persona.

So … Yay, Southern California!

Anyhow, until the book-buying public cries out for my humorous history of male cheerleaders in America (tentatively titled GIMME AN X! GIMME A Y!), I will likely continue to toil as the editor of a movie magazine up in Hollywood — a gig that requires me to regularly write items about motion-picture projects that have been greenlit.

More often than not these days, these seem to be silver-screen adaptations of comic books (alright, alright: “graphic novels”). And, look, I get it: Comics come complete with colorful characters that have already attracted fervent fanbases, and the narratives are essentially storyboarded out for the studios at the moment of optioning. But as an aficionado of short stories, I wish I were writing more articles about feature films based on that form of fiction.

My subscription to Zoetrope: All-Story is long lapsed, but I continue to admire how Francis Ford Coppola publishes a “Classic Reprint,” a short story that inspired a great film, in every issue. In the Summer 2008 issue, it’s John Hughes’ “Vacation ’58,” which inspired National Lampoon's Vacation. Previous reprints include Mary Gaitskill’s “Secretary,” Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (which was adapted into Away from Her), and James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

Anyway, in the interests of starting a spirited discussion, here are my personal picks for the best movies based on short stories:

1. Rear Window (1954) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted from “It Had to Be Murder” by Cornell Woolrich (published in Dime Detective Magazine in 1942 under the pseudonym “William Irish”).

2. Memento (2000) Directed by Christopher Nolan, adapted from his brother Jonathan Nolan’s story “Memento Mori” (which was subsequently published in Esquire in 2001, after Memento’s premiere on the film-fest circuit).

3. Rashomon (1950) Directed by Akira Kurosawa, adapted from “In a Grove” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (published in 1922 in Shincho).

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Directed by Stanley Kubrick, adapted from the short story “The Sentinel” by Arthur C. Clarke (which was written in 1948, but first published in 10 Story Fantasy in 1951 under the title “Sentinel of Eternity”).

5. Minority Report (2002) Directed by Steven Spielberg, adapted from “The Minority Report” by Philip K. Dick (published in Fantastic Universe in 1956).

6. Brokeback Mountain (2005) Directed by Ang Lee, adapted from the story of the same name by Annie Proulx (published in the New Yorker in 1997).

7. Field of Dreams (1989) Directed by Phil Alden Robinson, adapted from “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa” by W.P. Kinsella (published in his 1980 collection of the same name).

8. A Christmas Story (1983) Directed by Bob Clark, adapted from “Red Ryder Nails the Hammond Kid” by Jean Shepherd (published in Playboy in 1965).

And, since they seemed worthy of a semi-separate sub-list, my favorite films based on short-story collections:

1. Smoke Signals (1998) Directed by Chris Eyre, adapted from the 1993 collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (particularly the story “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”) by Sherman Alexie.

2. Million Dollar Baby (2004) Directed by Clint Eastwood, adapted from the 2000 collection Rope Burns by F.X. Toole (the pseudonym of the late Jerry Boyd).

Now, before the quibblers start … well, quibbling, there were a couple criteria I should spell out:

First, I had to have watched the movie in order to put it on the list (thus ruling out, for instance, All About Eve, the 1950 adaptation of Mary Orr’s “The Wisdom of Eve” which won a whopping six Academy Awards).

Second, the source material had to be an actual short story, not a “novelette” or a “novella” — eliminating, say, The Birds (as Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” is the former) and The Shawshank Redemption (as Stephen King’s “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” is the latter). However, short stories that their respective authors later expanded into novels — as was the case with “The Sentinel” (which became 2001: A Space Odyssey) and “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa” (which became plain ol' Shoeless Joe) — were allowed.

Third, it was the movie that had to be great, not the short story. William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic,” for example, is great; Robert Longo’s silver-screen adaptation of it is not.

Now if anyone out there still wants to argue for another adaptation — or to debate whether or not Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is really the best male-cheerleader movie ever — feel free to drop by my regular blog, AskAMaleCheerleader.com, or email me at cheerleaderchad@gmail.com.

Cheers!

Cheerleader Chad

Comments

[Amy Holman]

I think that Field of Dreams was based on the novel, "Shoeless Joe," and that that was an extension of the short story. I recall reading an article about how Kinsella had to change the author to black civil rights guy because in the book the writer is J.D. Salinger, and the author's lawyers were very threatening. Anyway, lots of great ones on your list. I think poems could make good movies. You could dialogue and scenes and still keep the basic idea, and never have to cut anything. If anyone could benefit from the cash from an option, it is the poet.

[petra]

"Short Cuts" [1993, dir by Robert Altman] was based on a group of Raymond Carver stories.

And just today I heard that the William Gay story "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down" is being made into a movie.