The account on classic and hit films. Details provided in our making of stories is direct from cast/crew or 3+ sources. Check out our podcast @ATRMPodcast 😁
66 subscribers
In 2003, Dennis Lehane’s gothic psychological horror novel Shutter Island was published, and film studios were immediately interested. Columbia optioned it but when they did nothing about it, the rights lapsed back to Lehane, who sold it to Phoenix Pictures.
In the mid-1980s, screenwriter Dana Olsen had some minor Hollywood success with comedies It Came From Hollywood, Wacko and Going Berserk. Looking for a bigger hit, he started looking inwards for inspiration…
The Warriors is based on Sol Yurick's 1965 novel of the same name, which was inspired by the classic ancient Greek story Anabasis by Xenophon. Yurick drew on his experiences working in the Department of Welfare in New York City for a gritty portrayal of gang life.
After the huge success of Shaun of the Dead in 2004, production company StudioCanal gave its director/co-writer Edgar Wright and star/co-writer Simon Pegg pretty much free rein to do what they wanted for a follow-up.
7 years after the success – and film adaptation of – his 1981 novel Red Dragon, author Thomas Harris published a sequel. It followed an enigmatic character from the first – Hannibal Lecter – and was called The Silence of the Lambs.
In 1990, aspiring screenwriter Danny Rubin was looking for an idea. Reading Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire in an LA movie theatre, he began to ponder the immortality of vampires and considered what he would do with his own time if it never ran out.
By the early 2000s, Martin McDonagh had established himself as one of Ireland’s best young playwrights with The Leenane Trilogy and The Aran Islands Trilogy. Saying that he had “respect for the history of films”, McDonagh was keen to get into moviemaking.
In 1972, 26-year-old screenwriter Paul Schrader was in the midst of a divorce and depression. Feeling isolated and alone in LA, he went weeks doing nothing but working as a delivery driver, visiting porn theatres, and slaving away at his typewriter on his new screenplay.
In 1812, German folk storytellers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published a collection called Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Tale 53 was a story of a magic mirror, Evil Queen and young princess. Their final story revision came in 1854, by which point the name of the piece was Snow White.
Pixar's story began in 1979 when George Lucas recruited Ed Catmull to head Lucasfilm's The Graphics Group. The group was tasked with developing cutting-edge computer technology for the film industry, including digital editing systems and computer graphics exploration.
The idea for Before Sunrise came from the real-life experience of Linklater in 1989 after he met a stranger named Amy in Philadelphia and spent a night walking and talking with her. (Linklater said they kissed but never met again).
In 1966, Fantastic Four no. 52 was released. In that comic book, industry legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created a new character. T’Challa was the king of fictional African country Wakanda and, enhanced by superpowers, fought Wakanda’s enemies under the name Black Panther.
Following his controversial-but-successful Lolita in 1962, Stanley Kubrick had anidea for his next film - a thriller about a Cold War nuclear crisis. Looking for inspiration, he read 50+ books on the subject and made contact with the Institute For Strategic Studies.
Titanic by Morgan Spence
M*A*S*H began life as a novel, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, written by Richard Hooker and published in 1968. Hooker was the pen name of H. Richard Hornberger, himself a former military surgeon who served in the Korean War.
In 1956, English novelist Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians was published. A children’s book about the kidnapping of a family of puppies, it was serialised in Woman’s Day as The Great Dog Robbery. When it became a huge success, Hollywood began to take notice.
In 1938, playwright Murray Burnett and his wife visited Nazi-controlled Europe. In a small French town they went to a nightclub overlooking the Mediterranean. A black pianist played jazz for a mix of French, Nazis, and refugees. It was an image Burnett never forgot.
As an 11-year-old in the 80s, Alex Garland learned coding. Feeling the computer might develop a mind of its own, and not convinced by a neuroscientist friend who said machine sentience was an impossibility, Garland developed a strong interest in artificial intelligence.
In the 1980s, aspiring filmmaker S.S. Wilson worked for the US Navy as a video editor in the Mojave Desert. One day off, he went hiking and, taking a breather on a boulder, had a thought: ‘What if there was a predator under the ground and I couldn’t get off this rock?’
In 2006, J.J. Abrams was in Japan promoting his new film Mission: Impossible III. He visited a toy store with his son and was struck by how Godzilla was still hugely popular. This planted the seed and Abrams began to conceive of his own monster movie…
In the late 1980s, make-up effects guru Robert Kurtzman had an idea for a film - a crime thriller that, midway through, would morph into an action-horror-vampire film. The idea being it would be a great showcase for Kurtzman’s effects company, KNB.
