Buzz Sugar takes note of 15 books you have to read this summer before they become movies, like Water for Elephants and On the Road. Or, you can just watch the movie, I suppose, and save yourself hours.
On the flip side, Variety takes note that literary fiction is taking a hit in Hollywood.
From the piece...
As the adult-skewing drama becomes an endangered species at the studios, is there any hope for that venerable subcategory, the literary-book-to-screen adaptation?
Such books -- with their focus on characterization and ideas rather than plot -- have proven awards fodder for decades, in both book and film form. The pics also helped give studios and audiences a balanced diet by offering quiet and thoughtful fare that was uplifting, enlightening -- and entertaining. Pics such as "Greed" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" drew from literary sources in the early days of film. In the last few years, there has been a wide range of such prestige projects, including Dennis Lehane's "Mystic River," Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," Michael Cunningham's "The Hours," Ian McEwan's "Atonement," Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" and just about any manuscript Scott Rudin gets his hands on.
But what was once a steady stream of bigscreen book adaptations has become a trickle. As one exec wryly notes, "Clint Eastwood is single-handedly holding up the adult drama at the studio level."
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