Looking for Help: Sports Books Made Into Movies

. . . especially the latter, reflecting upon how Hollywood will screw with anything for its own debased ends, and if you're an author, and you sell your work to a studio, you can largely kiss the artistic integrity of what you wrote goodbye (while you caress youself with engravings of Ben Franklin . . . )

 

Base on the novel by James Dickey and as good as the movie was, it doesn't pack near the wallop of the book.

 

So I guess you did not like the movie's ending?

I know it is not as artistically as sound as Hobbs going down, but I really enjoy him hitting a bomb off of a young left hander who really looked like a young Roy. You know, all the "circle of baseball (life)" type of thinking.

 

Understand why they did it.

The artistic integrity/Hollywood wrestling match will never end. I loved Kinsella's original "Shoeless Joe" novel beyond rationality. I wasn't wholly pleased with
what Hollywood did to it, but I also understand it could have been so, so much worse.

 

I read the novel of For Love of the Game (by Michael Shaara) and it was a pretty quick, non-challenging read if I remember correctly.

There also the Wikipedia list of sports-books-turned-into-sports-films (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_sports_books)

 

We read TKAM in eighth grade and M&M our sophomore year, FWIW.

 

Of all the authors I've met, Bill Kinsella is near the top of my most disliked list. But that's another story.

Ben, if you loved the novel, "Shoeless Joe" try and get your hands of one of his earlier short stories called, simply "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa", in a collection by the same name.An editor at Houghton Mifflin read the story and talked him into writing a novel but in some cases less is more.

The book is likely out of print (published in '80 by a very small literary Canadian press) but I suspect ABE Books might have it. Personally I think WP is a better short story writer than a novelist but one of the truisms of book publishing is that "short stories don't sell". Well, unless you're John Cheever or Alice Munro, I guess.

Was never a big fan of either the novel (too long and slightly maudlin) and hated the movie but the short story is wonderful.

It's like reading Annie Proulx's almost perfect short story "Brokeback Mountain" and trying to imagine it as a novel.

 

I read it. Understand your point.

 

Thanks for all of the help. My seventh-grade nephew is pretty smart and is a good reader.

I think that in terms of what is happening in the story, reading The Natural might be easier than Friday Night Lights. I think you almost have to be beyond high school to really get Friday Night Lights, because it is something you might not be able to see while you are in high school. The Natural is somewhat simpler not in the sense that there aren't moral complications, but the story is focused on fewer characters and you see what the theme is.

 

21

 

Dead Solid Perfect, by Dan Jenkins. Also made into a movie.

 

The subject matter of The Natural is a little grown-up. Lots of sex talk, as you would expect of a novel about ballplayers. Not being a prude, but just saying it's there.

"Hustle" was a damn good book before it was a crappy ESPN movie, but then you'd have to subject yourself to watching Tom Sizemore run around with that dead beaver on top of his head.

"The Bronx is Burning," was also a book, though I haven't read it.

I'd think "Shoeless Joe"/"Field of Dreams" would be the way to go. Short book, good message, no objectionable subject matter (unless you count Joe Jackson batting right-handed in the movie. Hi Buck!).