WHICH DID YOU like better—the book or the movie? Books-turned-film, from Gone with the Wind to Harry Potter, have delighted and (perhaps more often) frustrated bookworms: “Rhett Butler played by Clark Gable, a Northerner?” or “The story of Voldemort had way more detail in the book!” But there are plenty of films that you may not even realize are based on books, such as the masterworks of Akira Kurosawa, who turned Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear into the samurai classics Throne of Blood and Ran. See if you can name the great books behind the silver screen…then get back to arguing over the book versus the movie.
1. Clueless (directed by Amy Heckerling, 1995)
2. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (directed by Joel Coen, 2000)
3. Apocalypse Now (directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
4. She’s All That (directed by Robert Iscove, 1999)
5. Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott, 1982)
ANSWERS
1. Emma, by Jane Austen.
2. The Odyssey, by Homer.
3. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad.
4. Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw.
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick.