One Book You'd Like to See Made Into a Movie?

The Brothers K

 

"The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll.

Stoll, a hippie astronomer at Cal-Berkeley, lost his research grant and took a job as a computer systems administrator at the nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Soon after he started in 1986, someone kept hacking into their system. Stoll became obsessed with tracking the hacker down. Little did he suspect it would lead him to a Cold War showdown.

 

Aztec
by Gary Jennings
It'd have to be a mini series rather than a movie, something along the lines of James Clavell's "Shogun."

 

At this point I’d rather see my favorite novels made into “prestige TV series” with 8-12 episodes per season rather than turned into a Hollywood blockbuster.

 

I've always thought broadcast (maybe PBS Masterpiece - or streaming - could do a lot worse than undertake a series on Teddy Roosevelt. So many fascinating chapters of his life, personal tragedy, it's a love story, a war story, a Western, a political saga. You could do 10 eps on his time in the Badlands being a cowboy following the death of his wife alone.

 

"Veeck ... as in Wreck," along with its sequel "The Hustler's Handbook."

For years and years, Bill Murray was attached to the nascent project, first as star, then in some kind of production role. Every couple of years rumors would heat up that the movie was about to be made.

Haven't read or heard much of it the last 15-20 years; I've seen some random speculation that put Will Ferrell (god help us) into the title role.

But really Ferrell (now 53) has now aged out of the age range of playing a young Veeck in his teenage days as a do-everything gofer around Wrigley Field and his wild and crazy minor league days in Milwaukee leading into his first glory period in Cleveland and then his purgatory days with the St. Louis Browns.

I kind of vaguely envision Michael Cera or maybe Jesse Eisenberg as being able to handle the young frizzy haired Veeck.

Ferrell I suppose could play the mid-career Veeck with the Go-Go White Sox in 1959-61, and Murray could play the grizzled wizened Veeck who returned to the White Sox in 1975.
But you certainly wouldn't want to base the whole movie on the old wizened Veeck, who seemed a quaintly helpless figure for much of his later Sox tenure -- literally days after his purchase of the White Sox went through, the Messersmith arbitration decision came down which blew the absolute lid off player salaries and pretty much doomed Veeck's private-syndicate ownership model.

The younger years were when Veeck was breaking barriers and making history.

But it would still be a fun episodic movie (or maybe miniseries).

 

That is a terrible book. I can't express how disappointed I was by that book. Why I would want to watch that contrived piece of shit is beyond me.

 

That was my first thought. People have been trying to produce it for decades. There have been live readings of a script, but nothing happens.

It is so rambling and expansive that I think it couldn't be made into a film. Plus, so much of the book is Ignatius's thought I don't know how it could be transferred to film.

 

American War by Omar El Akkad

Don't sleep on this book.

 

Mine.