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Stories that should be made into movies

Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein

Grunts by Mary Gentle

The Riverworld stories (done right!)
 
How about some of Caleb Carr's work?

The Alienist -- Think Jack the Ripper crossed with Silence of the Lambs, set in 1890 New York City.

Killing Time -- Quick little story about a bunch of vigilante scientists.

Cheers,
-CM-
 
My dream Canadian project would be a film about Isaac Brock's brief, brilliant career in the War of 1812, from the declaration of war to his death at Queenston Heights (basically the content of The Invasion of Canada, but I'd use Flames Across the Border as the title).

I'd prefer to see a film about John Macdonnell myself, but I like this idea a lot.
He already got a cool Stan Rogers song.

Seriously, though, wouldn't a movie about him just cover the same events but from the perspective of the guy who wasn't in charge?
 
total summer popcorn movie,

Mara, Daughter of the Nile, starring Jessica Alba and Keanu Reeves and Johnny Depp.

Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, faithfully done. Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, the ones that haven't already been filmed, again faithfully done.

I wish the Narnia people hadn't bothered to re-make Lion Witch and Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, which have already been done well enough. I wish they'd go on and make movies of the books that haven't been filmed yet - especially A Horse and His Boy and The Magician's Nephew.
 
some other stuff i remember from the book

Atreyu was green
we first meet Falcor trapped in a giant spider web
That wolf actually had a long and interesting back story

Yep. Potential book spoilers:

There are four emissaries to the Ivory Tower, not three, and they are all named. The Night Hob has a different appearance, but the book states there are several varieties. Atreyu himself doesn't go to the tower, instead being visited by Cairon, who is a centaur in the book.

Atreyu's horse Artax was sentient and could talk, though he only has a few lines in the book. He sacrificed himself in the Swamps of Sadness to protect Atreyu so he could continue the quest.

Atreyu rescued Falkor, albeit unintentionally. Atreyu's wound was from Ygramul the Many, who had captured Falkor. He allowed it because he could wish himself anywhere in Fantasia.

During the quest, Atreyu sees some natives of Fantasia develop an unnatural attraction to the Nothing, and become compelled to throw themselves into it. This compulsion even affects him to a degree, despite having the Auryn.

The encounter with Gmork is entirely different (though the movie is good too), and a little of his origin is explained.

The Southern Oracle has three gates, not two, and no physical form. She exists only as a voice that speaks in rhyme, and can only understand poetry.

The dialogue between Atreyu and the Childlike Empress is longer, and it's revealed that she already knew the answer when she sent him on the quest. The answer was not the purpose, but the means of bringing Bastian to Fantasia. It's also explained why she needs a new name to get well.
 
I've also thought that, if handled with the necessary sensitivity and intelligence, historian Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland could be a riveting historical drama.

All previous Holocaust films--Schindler's List, The Pianist, etc.--have focused on the experience of the victims, and told the story from their perspective. And it is altogether fitting and proper that they have done so.

What Browning did, by contrast, was focus on the perpetrators, and try to understand why they acted the way they did. In particular, he tried to determine how and why a unit of draftee policemen took part in the genocide of Poland's Jews, both directly (by committing massacres) and indirectly (by rounding up Jews and sending them to the death camps).

I'd like to see that. I really liked that German movie Downfall about the last weeks of Adolf Hitler's life, sequestered in his bunker during the inevitable Allied advance on Berlin.

I'd like to see a movie based on the Asimov novella "The Martian Way". A bunch of Martian colonists go to Saturn to harvest a mile in diamater piece of ice from the rings to combat Earth's embargo on water shipments to Mars. All you have to do it write around the fact that ice doesn't come that big in Saturn's rings (which they didn't know at the time.)

Oh, it's the movies. Scientific impossibility is no problem. Just remember how impossible Waterworld is. (Even if you melted every single piece of ice on Earth, sea levels would still only rise a grand total of 45 feet.)

But seriously, would Kurt Warner's life story be Invincible-Miracle-Glory Road-Remember the Titans inspirational, or did he not have enough obstacles in his life to go from grocery store clerk to Super Bowl MVP?

Well, he was in the Arena League for a while. If that's not adversity, I don't know what is. Just don't include the part at the end where he joins the Arizona Cardinals. That would be too depressing. (Welcome to the Cardinals, where NFL careers come to die!)

For fiction, I'd like to see adaptations of...
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
and a GOOD adaptation of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

For non-fiction, I'd like to see something about the 19th century British occupation of Afghanistan as chronicled in The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk.
 
Speaking of Britain in Afghanistan, I'd like to see someone do an adaptation of Flashman, purely because I'd be interested to see how much they would dilute the character to make him more sympathetic.
 
Thunder Run - This book basically tells the story of US Army battalions moving into Baghdad in 2003 conducting "thunder runs" where you pretty much drive balls to the wall and shoot at anything that shoots at you. It was a very good book and if done properly could be like BlackHawk Down.
 
There's a great book named "The Most Wanted Man In America" that would be good.

The guy's name is Jack Clouser. A former cop, he was convicted of something. Conned his way into serving his sentence in an asylum. After escaping, he was on the FBI's Most Wanted list for years back in the 1960s. The one time they had him cornered, almost in cuffs, the Watts riots broke out outside the door and he slipped away.

A great read. Would be a great movie.

Joe, fan
 
I've got lots, especially a 1906 San Francisco earthquake epic, but #1 would have to be:

... To the Stars: A warts-and-all biopic of Gene Roddenberry up to the end of TOS, with a heavy focus on the preparation and making of that series.

Besides, most of the roles have just been cast. :-P
 
I'm a Civil War junkie so I would have liked to have seen them complete the "Gettysburg trilogy" by making The Last Full Measure into a movie. But I guess after Gods and Generals was panned, that will never happen. :(
 
A Coens Brother style dramedy about Lisa Nowak, her rise to become an astronaut, her relationship with William Oefelein and how it all fell apart.

A film about the Barbary wars. Ridley Scott was doing a film called Tripoli ages ago but it fell apart.

A story about sailors who are part of the Great White Fleet's historic circumnavigation.

A film about the following submarine tragedies: The USS THRESHER sinking; the loss and search for the USS SCORPION; the KURSK.
 
Blood Music by Greg Bear

A real, proper, doesn't-suck-worse-than-Earth: Final Conflict's-fifth-season-unlike-the-last-two-times-they-tried-this version of Asimov's Nightfall
 
While we've already had films like The Missiles of October and Thirteen Days, I'd like to see an epic/comprehensive film or mini-series about the Cuban Missle Crisis of 1962. Shows us not only what was going on in Washington DC, but also in the Kremlin, and on the ground in Cuba, and at see with the blockade, etc. I think with a lot of the information from both sides that has come to light and/or made public in the last few years this could be a very interesting and compelling story if done right.
 
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