5 films we didn’t know were books first
While you might already know that films such as Gone With The Wind or The Shining were based on books, there are some other very well known films that you may not have realised started out the same way.
Not many people know that, for instance, Forrest Gump was actually a novel first. How many of these have you seen?
1. Jaws
The film that made us scared to go back in the water started out as a chilling novel called Jaws by Peter Benchley. Interestingly, Benchley based the novel on a series of real shark attacks at the Jersey Shore in the early 1900s. The producers of the film read an advanced copy of Benchley’s book and purchased the rights to the 1975 film before the book was even published.
2. Forrest Gump
This box office sensation was based on a novel of the same name by Winston Groom. There were many differences between the two, and several more ‘out there’ parts of the novel were left out of the film. For instance in the novel Forrest is sent on a mission for NASA where he meets an ape named Sue. They crash in the jungle and get attacked by cannibals.
3. Die Hard
Bruce Willis became a household name starring in the 1988 film adaptation of Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. Thorp penned the novel based on NYPD detective Joe Leland (the main character’s name is changed to John McClane in the film). The movie has a relatively happy ending compared to the book - one might assume they had planned to make the sequel if the original film was successful.
4. Slumdog Millionaire
The smash hit Academy Award winning film directed by Danny Boyle was based on the novel Q&A by Indian author Vikas Swarup. Both the novel and the film follow the story of a young orphan who faces accusations of cheating after becoming a winner on a popular game show. One of the main differences is the main character’s motivation for going on the game show – in the novel his love interest Latika is a prostitute and Jamal hopes to win the prize money to pay off her pimp. In the film he hopes to reach out to Latika as he knows that she watches the program and hasn’t seen her in a long time.
5. Psycho
Robert Bloch sold the rights to his horror novel Psycho to Alfred Hitchcock for $9,500 in 1959. So keen was Hitchcock to keep the story a secret that he bought every copy of the novel in the country. Psycho became one of the director’s most popular films but at the time Paramount Pictures didn’t want it made. Hitchcock believed in the film and used his own money to make it, shooting in black-and-white to save money on production costs.
Related links:
Read these five books before you see the film
6 classic books to get you in the mood for autumn
7 celebrities that you didn’t know have written a book