The Best Book-to-Film Adaptations

Mario Puzo's 1969 novel is a paperback bestseller stuffed with subplots, and Coppola threw most of them out to keep the family. Puzo and Coppola shared Best Adapted Screenplay at the 45th Academy Awards, and what they built is the argument this whole list rests on. Watch the christening cross-cut, baptismal vows laid over five executions, a structure the novel never attempts.

Spielberg discarded Benchley's subplots wholesale: the adulterous affair between Ellen Brody and Hooper went first, cut because it would have poisoned the camaraderie aboard the Orca, and the shark's slow death by wounds became an exploding scuba tank. Benchley wrote the screenplay with Carl Gottlieb; his novel had come out in 1974. Quint's Indianapolis speech, told below deck by lamplight, is where a monster picture turns into something else.

Two screenwriters, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, took the bounty hunter out of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, left behind the religion and most of what surrounds it, and built a wet neon city instead. Dick read the Peoples rewrite and called it a symmetrical reinforcement of his original work. Roy Batty's rooftop speech in the rain, dove in hand, belongs entirely to the film.

Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness runs up the Congo; John Milius and Coppola moved it to a river in Vietnam and Cambodia and kept the shape, a man sent upstream after another man who has gone past the edge of the map. It shared the 1979 Palme d'Or at Cannes with The Tin Drum. Kilgore's helicopter assault, Wagner on the loudspeakers, is pure invention.

Kubrick kept the hotel and the family and discarded most of what King's 1977 novel takes care to explain, which is why Stephen King has criticised the film ever since for its deviations from the book. He is right about the novel and wrong about the movie. Danny pedalling his trike down the Overlook corridors, the sound flipping from carpet to floorboard and back, does what a hundred pages of interiority cannot.

Adapting their own 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky left very little of it standing, and Tarkovsky said in 1979 that the film had nothing in common with the book except two words, Stalker and Zone. Gone is nearly all of the science fiction. What remains is three men arguing across wet grass, and the long handcar ride into the Zone where the image eases into colour.

Cornell Woolrich's source is a short story, It Had to Be Murder, published in Dime Detective in 1942 and barely long enough to fill a lunch break; John Michael Hayes turned it into a courtyard full of lives, every apartment across the way carrying a plot of its own. Jeff firing flashbulbs at Thorwald in the dark, buying seconds while a killer's eyes reset, is the whole picture in one gesture.

Dorothy's shoes are silver in L. Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and in the book it is the Good Witch of the North, not Glinda, who hands them over. MGM made the shoes ruby and gave the moment to Glinda, folding two of Baum's witches into one. Watch Glinda move the ruby slippers onto Dorothy's feet in Munchkinland: two adaptation decisions land inside a single beat.

Paul Thomas Anderson used roughly the first couple of hundred pages of Upton Sinclair's Oil!, first published in 1926 to 1927, then said the film was really unfaithful to it and changed the title because too little of the book survived to call it a proper adaptation. Daniel Day-Lewis took Best Actor at the 80th Academy Awards. That bowling-alley confrontation at the end belongs to Anderson alone.

Nobody else would have solved the problem this way. Susan Orlean's 1998 non-fiction book The Orchid Thief has almost no plot, so Charlie Kaufman wrote a film about failing to adapt it and credited the screenplay to himself and a fictional twin brother, Donald. Chris Cooper won Best Supporting Actor at the 75th Academy Awards. An alligator dragging Laroche under in the swamp is the moment the film hands the wheel to Donald.

Short fiction is supposed to be the easy adaptation, all room and no baggage. Annie Proulx published this one in The New Yorker on 13 October 1997, and Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana stretched it to feature length without padding it, winning Best Adapted Screenplay at the 78th Academy Awards. Ennis finding two shirts on one hanger in Jack's childhood closet lands harder on screen than on the page.

Moving a plot two centuries and a continent is the hardest trick on this list, and Amy Heckerling made it look like nothing. Jane Austen's Emma appeared in December 1815 with an 1816 title page; Heckerling wrote and directed the version set in a Beverly Hills high school, keeping the structure rather than the bonnets. Cher's freeway panic, merging with her eyes shut and screaming, is Austen's comic method in a Jeep.

Ken Kesey wrote a screenplay from Chief Bromden's first-person point of view, the producers did not use it, and he disliked what he knew of the film that came out instead. Forman shot the 1962 novel in the third person and swept five Academy Awards at the 48th ceremony. Bromden heaving the control panel through the window at dawn quietly pays back the narration that got cut.

Three farmers, one hungry animal, and a slim 1970 children's book by Roald Dahl to work from. Wes Anderson added a marriage, a mid-life crisis and a sulking son, then recorded his cast outdoors in a forest, an attic and a stable to get the spontaneity he was after. The whack-bat explanation, rattled off at speed by a coach nobody follows, is a joke Dahl never wrote.

Greta Gerwig took Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel apart and ran childhood and adulthood side by side, so every warm memory arrives with its cold consequence attached. Jacqueline Durran won Best Costume Design at the 92nd Academy Awards. Beth's two sickbeds, staged almost identically and cut against each other, show you what the restructuring is for: one girl comes downstairs, the other does not.

Depositions, of all things, gave Aaron Sorkin his frame. Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires arrived with its author insisting it was not fiction despite the narrative style, and Sorkin dropped the atmosphere, built the film from two legal hearings, and won Best Adapted Screenplay at the 83rd Academy Awards. That opening bar argument with Erica Albright, played at the speed of a fight nobody can win, was written for the screen.

Halfway through development the whole film turned around. David Grann's 2017 non-fiction account is a procedural about the Bureau of Investigation arriving in Oklahoma, and DiCaprio was first cast as agent Tom White; after he asked where the heart of the story lay and Osage Nation members pressed the same point, Scorsese and Eric Roth rebuilt the script around Ernest and Mollie. Ernest injecting Mollie with her insulin is where that rewrite pays off.