Books & Best Sellers & Movies Oh, My! by Karla Stover

Author of: Wyners Way
                  Murder; When One isn't Enough
                  Murder on the Line
                  and a miscellaneous bunch of things available to download for 99 cts. off Amazon




A writer in my district of garden clubs had one of her books made into a Hallmark movie. I would love to have those bragging rights (though maybe not as a Hallmark movie)  but I'm not sure that many books turn into movies these days--Harry Potter and Marvel comic books excepted.

When I was young, one of the local TV stations ran movies about the time I got home from school and if I liked the film, I always checked the credits to see if it came from a book. The Uninvited was a good book and a good film though the star, Ray Milland, was much too old to romance the heroine, Gail Russell.

Meet Me in St. Louis was a lovely movie and more or less faithful to the book with two exceptions: it omitted the family vacation and fiddled with the ending a bit.

Greta Gerwig has a new version of Little Woman out. I wonder who owns the rights because they must be making a ton of money. Beginning with the silent film days, it's been made into movie a bunch of times. I liked Katherine Hepburn as Jo and June Allison was okay. I missed Winona Ryder's version. PBS has its own version, so do the Japanese. It's been turned into a Broadway play, a ballet, and an opera, not to mention various adaptions on television.

Anne of Green Gables is another book frequently adapted for film, television, and radio. Some of the books have been stand-alone movies, and there is even a book about Marilla in her pre-Anne years.

I liked both the written and film versions of Gone With the Wind, but a really good novel, Forever Amber was a lousy movie.

In my opinion, The Shining was much scarier in book form than the movie but Silence of the Lambs had a better movie ending than did the book. And A Year of Living Bibically is so enjoyable I'm rereading it but the television was canceled after showing only eight of its 13 episodes.

A Google search has lists of authors whose books were adapted to film; frequent favorites include Agatha Christie, Daphne Du Maurier, and Dashiell Hammett. Google also has people who advise writers on selling their books to various producers. Maybe we should all send them copies of our books and see what happens.