Short stories were once a staple of great literature. Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Carver, Welty, Faulkner, the list of prominent authors who wrote in this format reads like a who’s who of any upper level English literature class. While movies have long be inspired by novels and plays, short stories have also inspired some terrific movies. Often a movie made from a short story more successful than movies made from novels simply because not many are aware of the movie’s source material. This said, here are some movies that have succeeded in making the successful transition from the page to the silver screen.
See if you can guess the movies from the titles of the short stories.
1. “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa” by W. P. Kinsella
Kinsella was a Canadian whose father was a semi-professional baseball player. He instilled in his son a lifelong love for the game of baseball, which Kinsella would write about again and again. This story was written as a love story but not in the traditional sense. It was the love of baseball, of the cornfields of Iowa where Kinsella studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the love of his father. Although the short story is wonderful, the movie version of this story received a bit more notoriety with a title change to Field of Dreams.
2. “Red Ryder Nails the Hammond Kid” by Jean Shepherd
Jean Shepherd was a radio entertainer from 1956 to 1977. He might be in the running to be called the world’s first shock jock, with his garrulous stories about growing up during the Depression featuring the “Old Man”, a character based on Shepherd’s father. Director Bob Clark, an ex Dukes of Hazzard TV writer, whose biggest claim to fame was having written and directed Porky’s , fell in love with one of Shepherd’s short stories about a little boy and his Red Ryder BB gun. Although Clark had tried to get this movie made for years, it was only after his success with Porky’s that he was able to bring the movie, A Christmas Story, to the screen.
3. “Stage to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox
Once a staple of film and television, the Western has had its ups and downs throughout movie history and it was during one of these downturns that John Ford decided to turn a short story by Ernest Haycox into one of the most iconic movies ever made. It took Ford over a year to opbtain financing to shoot the movie version of the short story. Finally independent producer Walter Wanger was able to finance the film. Ford decided to shoot the movie in Monument Valley after talking with a friend who ran a trading post there. His friend pointed out the hardships the Navajo Tribe. Ford decided to film there to help out the Navajos. It would be the first of many movies Ford shot in Monument Valley, and certainly one of his most famous. The movie Stagecoach almost single-handedly resurrected the Western and made stars out of Ford and a little known actor named John Wayne.
4. “The Sentinel” by Arthur C. Clarke
Okay, this is an easy one. However the approach to making the film was rather unusual. Stanley Kubrick bought the rights to Clarke’s short story, then the two worked together to expand the short story into a novel. Kubrick would own the screenplay; Clarke would own the novel. Work proceeded on the two simultaneously. Clarke thought the novel would be published before the movie came out, but Kubrick had other ideas. Finally Clarke had to make adjustments to the novel after seeing the rough cut of the movie. The end result was 2001: A Space Odyssey.
5. “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” by Paul Auster
The short story was commissioned by the New York Times. Director Wayne Wang read the story and thought the story’s premise would make a great movie. He and Auster collaborated on the movie adaptation. It was an unusual adaptation with the original story only present in the film’s final act as a story within a story. The movie version was 1995’s Smoke, starring Harvey Keitel.
