An abridged history of ‘unfilmable’ book adaptations

polygon.com:

No one can quite agree on what makes a book unfilmable. Some books are thought to be too boring, plotless, or introspective; others are too interesting, exciting, imaginative, or complicated. The one thing people agree on, though, is that there are some books that should never, ever, be adapted into TV shows or movies. What makes the idea of unfilmable books fun, however, is that once in a while a project comes along that proves everyone wrong and adapts a difficult book into something new and good in its own right, with artistic value independent from the work it was based on.

Any adaptation from one medium to another is complicated. Turning books into movies involves translating words into images, trading in the explicitness of dialogue and descriptions on the page for the vague complications of actors conveying feelings and emotion. Books don’t have to obey the laws of physics or reality, and movies can capture subtler humanity in one glance or facial expression than many authors can on the page. With all these differences, even the most cinematic books have to undergo changes on the way to the screen, simply because of the different requirements and considerations for each medium — to go from a text-based medium to a visual one requires asking different questions and making new choices. But to do all of this with a work that doesn’t naturally lend itself to the screen — whether that’s because it’s too complicated, too fantastical, or simply too strange — is a truly staggering feat.

The history of these seemingly unfilmable projects is a tough one to track, because there’s no way to truly keep log everything that has been considered unfilmable — and that’s true even when limiting ourselves to mostly popular works in English. Instead, let’s take a journey through some of the biggest examples of books thought to be unfilmable, and some of the movies and TV shows that tried to tackle adapting them.

There were plenty of ambitious adaptations before 1970’s Catch-22