Each of these books is considered to be practically unfilmable, but why? Let’s look at the histories of novels like Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, <em>No Country for Old Men</em> writer Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and more iconic works of American literature, movie versions of each of which have been stuck in developmental hell since its publication.
The novels listed here all offer something intangible that it seems a movie just can’t touch. That doesn’t mean Hollywood hasn’t tried plenty of times, though.
Below, we’ll get into the failed attempts to bring these books to life, as well as exploring what has kept them from getting off the ground.
At The Mountains Of Madness
Written By H.P. Lovecraft; Published In 1936
H.P. Lovecraft is one of the foundations of modern horror, but as much as traces of his work are all over 20th and 21st-century scary movies, his bibliography itself remains woefully underrepresented on celluloid. That is, except for the Re-Animator films and their thematic cousin, From Beyond, and a few other scarce examples. One of his novellas in particular, At the Mountains of Madness, has been in developmental hell for decades.
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Director Guillermo del Toro has attempted off-and-on to make Madness going as far back as 2010. In 2021, del Toro suggested he might do it as an animated, or even stop-motion feature. However, during the press tour for Frankenstein, del Toro revealed work on the Lovecraft adaptation is once again dead in its tracks.
The thing about Lovecraft is that he writes about unfathomable evil in such a way that no on-screen depiction could live up to it. Creatures inspired by Lovecraft are one thing; the Hellboy franchises notably borrows liberally from Lovecraftian ideas. But to actually capture the scope of the author’s “Old Gods” on camera is another matter, and by Hollywood’s estimation, it can’t, or shouldn’t be done.
Catcher In The Rye
Written By J.D. Salinger; Published In 1951
The Catcher in the Rye is in the running for the ultimate “forced to read in high school” book along with Great Gatsby, Romeo & Juliet, and a few other select classics. It’s one of those books you really should try to read again as an adult because you’ll come away with a completely different understanding of what author J.D. Salinger was trying to do.
And it doesn’t seem like a movie version is coming anytime soon. Catcher in the Rye turns 75 this year. Major Hollywood players in every era since have at least kicked the tires on adapting Catcher, including directors like Billy Wilder and Steven Spielberg. Salinger himself blocked several attempts and personally believed his protagonist Holden Caulfield’s interiority and POV couldn’t be reproduced on screen.
Though the book remains revered as a literary opus, time isn’t on its side when it comes to translating to film. The movie still has something timeless to say about coming of age, but the question is whether a period-accurate adaptation would hold contemporary viewers’ attention or whether the essence of Holden Caulfield could be captured in a modern teenage equivalent.
The Sirens Of Titan
Written By Kurt Vonnegut; Published In 1959
In 2017, it was reported that Community creator, and Rick &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;aacute;, was working to bring The Sirens of Titan to television. A decade later, that series never happened. Kurt Vonnegut’s second-ever novel has still not been brought to the screen. But there is an even earlier attempt than Harmon’s that would make for a great movie in its own right.
In the early 1980s, Vonnegut sold Sirens’ movie rights to Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who spent several years working on a script for the project. The adaptation never got farther than that, and after Garcia passed away in 1995, the rights were eventually sold to filmmaker Robert B. Weide, who had previously adapted Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Weide’s version also never materialized, though in 2021 he did release a Vonnegut documentary he’d been working on for decades, Unstuck in Time.
After Weide, screenwriter James V. Hart reportedly secured Vonnegut’s approval on a Sirens of Titan script draft shortly before the author’s death in 2007, but it never went into production. Fast-forward a decade to Harmon’s unsuccessful attempt, and now, nine years later, here we are, still with no movie version of the beloved novel.
The Crying Of Lot 49
Written By Thomas Pynchon Published In 1966
The work of Thomas Pynchon in general is widely considered to be unfilmable, to the point where only one filmmaker has really been willing or been allowed to try. Paul Thomas Anderson adapted Pynchon’s later-career surprisingly conventional novel.
