15 Books That Will Never Hit Theaters

Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow'? Not likely
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 20, 2010 1:17 PM CST
15 Books That Will Never Hit Theaters
Don't expect to see 'Maus' coming to a theater near you.   (Flickr)

The Great Gatsby is about to get the celluloid treatment again. And while we can only hope that Baz Luhrmann does it justice, a great book does not automatically equal a great film. (The Scarlett Letter much?) The Huffington Post lists 15 novels that it considers "unfilmable":

  1. Pale Fire, by Vladamir Nabokov: Truly a riddle, this footnote-ridden book revolves around a 999-line poem.
  2. The Waves, by Virginia Woolf: It's basically six monologues, making the book one big monologue.

  1. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: It's not the book, so much as the author, that's the issue here. A famously private recluse, HuffPo can't imagine him giving anyone the movie rights.
  2. Maus by Art Spiegelman: This Holocaust-era biography/graphic novel about Spiegelman's father depicts the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats ... just too serious for a cartoon. Notes HuffPo, it's tough when your pitch is: "Think Schindler's List, but with dogs and reindeer."
Click here for the complete list, which, of course, includes a book by James Joyce.
(More literature stories.)

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