The novelization of the movie

William Kotzwinkle also did a respectable novel of {i}E.T.[/i]

From a serious movie fan’s perspective, the novelization does serve a useful purpose. Since they’re based off of screenplays, typically they have more backstory and scenes included that were cut out of the movie (or were never filmed in the first place). Of course, if you really wanted to know that, you could always just pull up the original movie script… but then you’d be missing out on horrible metaphors!

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Before the mid-eighties, when the video rental market allowed people to check out their favorite films at their convenience, your only chance of reliving a great theater experience was either to hope for a TV-edited broadcast or to grab the film novelization. Thus, there was a much bigger demand for these buggers, and even smaller or more niche titles could find themselves transferred to paperback (versus today, as only the really big blockbusters are given novelization treatment).

ones you never had:

http://spacesick.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-can-read-movies-series.html

The Wonka one wins, esp. the subtitle.

hard to disagree

LOVE the ghost dad one

Cover designs are pretty fantastic, though.

where's the Wonka one?

great stuff.

Japanese one.

Those are all great.

ah :)

Bumping after chat on the 1982 movie thread. Since this thread was first started, prices on certain titles - eg John Carpenter’s The Thing - have gone through the ice crater, and movie novs in general are v collectible.

I think the only one I ever read was Superman III by mentioned-in-the-other-thread William Kotzwinkle.

And wow, love the cover design for The Thing paperback.

I have some Rod Serling paperbacks that are novelizations of Twilight Zone/Night Gallery episodes, for which he of course wrote a lot of the teleplays

The best is called A Season to Be Wary, a collection of three novellas from the Night Gallery pilot (one of which was the directorial debut of a certain Steven Spielberg, featuring Joan Crawford)

I loved the Return of the Jedi novelization.

I had a bunch of these — first 3 Star Wars movies, Alien, Buckaroo Banzai, CE3K, Capricorn One, probably more. Not ET for some reason. Demon Seed freaked me out, but I just looked at wiki and the novel predated the movie by several years.

yeah, a lot of original books would be reprinted after the film, but with new artwork referencing the film.. I have a paperback of Willard like this

The ET novelization pissed 9 year old me off by replacing g Reese’s Pieces with M & Ms.

Bantam had a Movie Tie-In series of paperbacks in the 70's that I used to gobble up as a kid. They had a special section in the middle with film stills. I wasn't old enough to see R-rated movies but I could sure as hell read the books.

Different neighborhood, but Graham Green adapted a stand-alone novella from his "treatment" basis for The Third Man---said in the intro that he wasn't all that satisfied with the results, but I thought it was pretty good, having been jonesing for some more prime-time Greene (been a long time since I read it, though) Pretty tight, and no damn zither, which I did get a bit tired of in the movie.

Also did that for The Tenth Man, which was never filmed! But had a good crisp cinematic texture, like The Third Man on the page.

That's what No Country for Old Men (the novel) was as well: an unproduced screenplay turned into a novel.

I had the Marvel Comics adaptation of Blade Runner, which I read like thirty times before I ever saw the film

I had Arachnophobia

was weird because it was actually more compelling than the movie

and Star Wars trilogy

see some of those novelizations _are_ better than the books

it was interesting to see kotzwinkle's E.T. get trashed in that thread, it's got a good reputation (morbs called it "respectable" on this very thread in '07, ned raggett said "I heard that was about the one novelization-as-such out there that was worth a damn.")

the one novelization i have is tom disch's pseudonymous novelization of "alfred the great" (disch being one of my favorite writers). i haven't seen the film. the novel is hackwork, obviously something disch churned out for money. as a kid, i was more into bubblegum cards. i had a shit-ton for the '89 Batman film. i had some issues of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones marvel comics, which started out as film adaptations, but they were all issues from after the adaptations themselves ended.

i'm guessing home video killed the tie-in novel? i remember the '89 Batman as being one of the first films that wasn't "priced for rental" - we owned it on VHS.

now what i did grow up with were the doctor who novelizations. are there other tv series that have that? novelizations of pretty much every single episode? some of those are _definitely_ better than the tv episodes. donald cotton's novelizations, for instance, and lucarotti's _the massacre_ (which, based on one of those wonderful pieces of fan scholarship released as an ebook, represents lucarotti's original vision for the story before the production team of tosh and wiles butchered it.)

I read the novelisation of WarGames when I was 9. Everyone is way more of a jerk than in the movie.

There were also some screenplays published as movie tie-ins: my sister had a mass market paperback of William Goldman's Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid---and I may still have the mass market paperback transcript of Don't Look Back---fascinated me to see actual and idiosyncratic speech on the page like that.

^^The one for Nashville had a bunch of character backstories inserted into the action descriptions.

As a kid I got the cartoon book of Jetsons: The Movie and got mad that they changed the result of Elroy's space ball game

Also the Altman tip, the tie-in paperback for Brewster McCloud contained a transcript of the finished film, the very-different original screenplay, and a day-by-day production diary from a film student who worked as a PA/Intern on the production that for many years was the most in-depth print account of Altman's working methods.

I think I bought my dad the novelisation of, er, Down and Out in Beverley Hills.

I can remember my mum reading the novel of Total Recall, which wasn’t the PKD book.

I like how some of these books were based on the scripts before editing – I remember The Goonies book has the octopus scene that didn’t make it into the movie.

I have the TV novelisation of The Beiderbecke Tapes, which is a fantastic little book in its own right, as good as the TV series.

Yes, there's a distinction to be made between film/TV novelisations and film/TV tie-in editions, plus those screenplay paperback editions. I've got a copy of Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos that features a still from the film on the cover - a Robert Bresson movie tie-in!

Obviously they're not nearly as common as they once were, but there are still movie novelisations, especially when it's a genre movie.

I picked up the novelisation of BAD TIMING a few years ago (still not read it lol)

That would be p high on my list of unlikely movie novelisations!

It’s by one Michael James, based on the screenplay by Yale Udoff (itself based on an Italian novel by Constanzo Constantini)