This one is good with all the recent
Top 100 Books Discussion.
NEW QUESTION:
What author or book would you like to see brought to the screen?Ebert posted this one before No Country For Old Men and he talked about
Cormac McCarthy, whose books are great pieces of literature but could exist also as great cinema without one version making the other irrelevant. He added a good luck to anyone who tackles
Blood Meridian, which is the story he'd most want to see adapted though it's the one least likely to survive the development and production process with its teeth.
I like that Ebert considers how much you want to see the movie vs. what it would do to the legacy of the book. The more successful films nowadays are almost direct translations. The book acts as a production draft of the screenplay, because that's what the fans want to see. Ebert asks for a Lolita (1962) approach, where a book that thrives on its word choice became a film that works on its performance and direction.
I'm not a big reader, but I always thought
Clive Barker never got his due. His stories became increasingly fantastical and overflowed with too many great ideas, but a lot of his early horror and fantasy material could make for great cinema without taking away from the original stories. Barker adaptations usually end up as grindhouse fare with budgets too low and filmmakers more interested in the gore and slime than the themes. The Midnight Meat Train is a nifty, original idea but the film reduces it to a serial killer on a train with a muddled ending that's a nod to Barker's original concept. This is common with Clive.
Two Barker stories I would like to see. His short story
The Age of Desire is a Frankenstein-esque manhunt set in a modern metropolis. Characters defy labels of right and wrong as wonderfully as in Princess Mononoke. Then there's his first novel,
The Damnation Game, an epic masterwork of fantasy horror with some of the greatest sequences of terror I've ever known. Plus, again the villains are more of a sympathetic evil while the heroes actions are called into question.