Six Novelists Who Wrote Screenplays

SCREEN > THE SIX PACK

By Matt Prigge

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jun. 9, 2009

Away We Go

Photo by Francois Duhamel

William Faulkner, The Big Sleep (1944): In an attempt to buy some class, Hollywood execs ate up the era’s great, cash-strapped novelists—authors like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Raymond Chandler, who then drank themselves into oblivion. They even adapted each other’s work. For Bogie, Bacall and Howard Hawks, Faulkner tackled both Hemingway’s lackluster To Have and Have Not and Chandler’s singularly screwy Philip Marlowe outing. This period was memorably evoked in Barton Fink , with John Mahoney as the Faulkner stand-in. 

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1949): Squeezing 752 pages into 114 minutes is something few authors would want to do. But Rand was up to the task, as you’d expect of anyone who would soon start her own dickish philosophy. 

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959): Alain Resnais had a thing for hiring avant-garde novelists. Before he nabbed Alain Robbe-Grillet for 1961’s Last Year at Marienbad , he solicited Duras—a fan of minimalism and repetition—to craft this ur-art film. Like Robbe-Grillet, Duras was so inspired, she went on to direct herself, yielding such maddening classics as Nathalie Granger , The Truck and India Song . 

Gore Vidal, Caligula (1980): Vidal racked up a string of screenplays— Ben-Hur , Suddenly, Last Summer , The Best Man —before the disastrous adaptation of his Myra Breckinridge soured him on H-wood. He attempted a comeback with a lavish biopic of one of Rome’s nuttier emperors, produced by Penthouse ’s Bob Guccione. But as the film turned out a little too, ahem, accurate, Vidal withdrew his name from the film, leaving the writing credit as “Adapted From an Original Screenplay by Gore Vidal.” 

David Benioff, 25th Hour (2002): Hired to adapt his first novel for Spike Lee—and well, at that—Benioff became a Hollywood bitch, churning out Troy, The Kite Runner, Wolverine and an in-production Kurt Cobain biopic. He’s published only one book since. 