Since the first moving images flickered on to a screen in 1895, film-makers have been seeking inspiration for subjects to entertain their audiences. Always eager to please (and keen to protect their investment), they have frequently resorted to source material that has already enjoyed success in other media, such as novels, plays, short stories and comic-books. Magazines and newspapers have also yielded their share of compelling topics, as Cinema Paradiso reveals.
Newspapers and magazines have been around since the mid-17th century and they have been providing ideas for screenwriters and directors for almost 125 years. Surprisingly, nobody has produced an extensive study of the relationship between the print media and the silver screen during this period, so it's difficult to ascertain which was the first picture to be based on what are now called 'long reads'.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has tended to favour literary sources in doling out nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay. However, three films based on press articles have made the shortlist. Robert Wise's I Want to Live! (1958) took its inspiration from a series of articles written for the San Francisco Examiner by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Montgomery and earned Susan Hayward the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance as Barbara Graham, who was the first American woman to be executed in a gas chamber. Three decades later, Michael Apted's Gorillas in the Mist (1988) took as its starting point Harold Hayes's Life magazine profile of Dian Fossey, who had devoted her life to studying the great apes of Rwanda.
Sigourney Weaver won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama and went on to be nominated for an Oscar for her performance. But only one film taken from a factual print source has scooped the hat-trick of Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay and that is William Wyler's Mrs Miniver (1942), which starred Greer Garson as the Kent housewife trying to keep house while fighting off Nazi paratroopers. George Froeschel, James Hilton, Claudine West and Arthur Wimperis shared the Oscar for their adaptation of the Times newspaper columns that had been written by Jan Struther about her own experiences of life on the Home Front.
Reporting From the Front Line
Although films had been based on newspaper headlines since the 1890s, it wasn't until the Second World War that so-called 'think pieces' attracted as much attention from Hollywood as factual reports. Sometimes, the truth proved an inconvenience, as producer Walter Wanger discovered when he tried to make Gung Ho! (1943) out of Lieutenant W.S. LeFrançois's Saturday Evening Post item, 'We Mopped Up Makin Island'. As the US Navy refused to allow Wanger to mention raid leader Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson by name, Randolph Scott had to play a fictional Marine named Thorwald in Ray Enright's film.
Robert Mitchum had featured down the cast list as Private 'Pig-Iron' Matthews. But he was billed only behind Burgess Meredith in William Wellman's The Story of GI Joe (1945), which was based on the Pulitzer-winning columns about a US infantry unit's progress through North Africa and Sicily that Ernie Pyle had produced for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate. Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore and Philip Stevenson were nominated for their screenplay, while Mitchum snagged the sole Oscar nod of his career for his Best Supporting turn as Lieutenant Bill Walker.
Pyle was killed at Okinawa before the picture premiered, but he was still embedded with American troops in Europe when producer Samuel Goldwyn's wife, Francis, spotted a photograph of homecoming Marines in the 7 August 1944 edition of Time magazine. She was moved by the chalk scrawl of 'Home Again Special' on the side of a Pullman carriage and Goldwyn was intrigued by the accompanying article by a team of reporters about the problems that the casualties of the conflict would face on returning to Civvy Street. He commissioned author MacKinlay Kantor to write a screenplay based on the struggle to resume normal life, but the Saturday Evening Post war correspondent submitted a blank verse novel entitled Glory For Me, which Goldwyn considered $12,500 badly spent. However, Pulitzer-winning playwright Robert E. Sherwood saw merit in the tome and created the screenplay for William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which went on to win seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay.
War reportage has continued to inspire films of great power and poignancy. Sidney Schanberg's New York Times piece, 'The Death and Life of Dith Pran', was filmed as The Killing Fields (1984) by Roland Joffé and teamed Sam Waterston and Dr Haing S. Ngor, who had survived the slaughter by Cambodian ruler Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime and was rewarded with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Ben Affleck's Argo (2012) also drew a nomination in the same category for Alan Arkin among the seven citations it received at the 85th Academy Awards. There was bemusement among Affleck's peers that he had been overlooked for Best Director, especially when the Best Picture prize went to his account of how a bogus sci-fi movie shoot was used as a smokescreen to rescue six diplomats from Tehran during the 1979-80 Iranian hostage crisis.
Chris Terrio did win the Best Adapted Screenplay award for a script that combined elements from Antonio J. Mendez's memoir, The Master of Disguise, and 'The Great Escape: How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans From Tehran', Joshuah Bearman's Wired article from April 2007. The same combination of article and autobiography fuelled Todd Phillips's War Dogs (2016), which blends Efraim Diveroli's Once a Gun Runner and Guy Lawson's Rolling Stone article from 16 March 2011, 'The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders', which he later worked into the book, Arms and the Dudes, to show how Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and massage therapist David Packouz (Miles Teller) came to sell arms to the US government during the 2003-11 war in Iraq.
The American-led bid to stamp out Islamist terrorism proved to be the last campaign for New Yorker Marie Colvin, whose globe-trotting career on the frontline is recounted in Matthew Heineman's A Private War (2018), an adaptation of 'Marie Colvin's Private War', Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair article from August 2012 that earned Rosamund Pike a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for her depiction of the eye-patch-wearing Sunday Times journalist whose compassion for those caught up in conflict brought her to the besieged Syrian city of Homs in February 2012.
The Human Interest Angle
As America started to settle into a period of postwar prosperity, films drawing on newspaper and magazine articles began to focus on 'human interest' stories that frequently highlighted extraordinary occurrences involving ordinary people. A case in point is Walter Lang's The Jackpot (1950), which took its cue from a New Yorker item by John McNulty about a man (played by James Stewart) who wins $24,000 worth of merchandise on a radio quiz show. On 10 September 1955, the same magazine also published Berton Roueche's piece, 'Ten Feet Tall', which became the basis of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956), which starred James Mason as a schoolteacher and family man whose personality undergoes a dramatic change after he becomes addicted to the cortisone he is taking for a medical condition.
Jean-Luc Godard ranked this among the 10 best American films ever made, but the restraint with which Ray depicts Mason's decline is lacking in Allen Reisner's tearjerker, All Mine to Give (1957), which was set in the 1850s and can best be summed up by its British title, The Day They Gave Babies Away. Katherine Albert's screenplay was based on a December 1946 Cosmopolitan article by her husband, Dale Eunson, and the innocence of childhood is also central to Theo Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist (1988), which the legendary Greek director based on a newspaper article about a tweenager and her five year-old brother, who sneak away from their Athens home to go in search of the father they have never seen in Germany.
Children were also to the fore in Frank Perry's Ladybug Ladybug (1963), a study in Cold War paranoia that was inspired by Lois Dickert's April 1963 McCall's article, 'They Thought the War Was On'. Surgeon Alfred Blalock died the year after this film was released and the story of his groundbreaking partnership with Helen Taussig and Vivien Thomas is related by Joseph Sargent in Something the Lord Made (2004), an adaptation of Katie McCabe's National Magazine Award-winning Washingtonian magazine article of the same name that teams Alan Rickman, Mary Stuart Masterson and Mos Def as the 1930s heart specialist, pediatrician and laboratory assistant whose collaboration resulted in a treatment for Blue Baby Syndrome.
Defying odds of a less life-threatening sort is the subject of Sean McNamara's Spare Parts (2015), which draws on Joshua Davis's Wired article, 'La Vida Robot', to show how some kids from a Latino high school won a prestigious robotics competition in 2004. Having been paralysed from the neck down by polio, 38 year-old poet Mark O'Brien was confined to an iron lung in the late 1980s. However, he was determined to lose his virginity and Ben Lewin's The Sessions (2012) shows how O'Brien (an Oscar-nominated John Hawkes) and Cheryl Cohen-Greene (Helen Hunt) came to a workable understanding in a dramedy based on 'On Seeing a Sex Surrogate', which O'Brien had published in the American magazine, The Sun, in 1990.
Four years later, Sebastian Junger chronicled the travails of the crew of the Andrea Gail in an Outside article entitled, 'The Storm'. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and John C. Reilly were cast as skipper Billy Tyne and crew members Bobby Shatford and Dale Murphy in Wolfgang Petersen's The Perfect Storm (2000), which also draws on Junger's 1997 book, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea, in order to describe how a fishing boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts survived the fury of the Atlantic off the Flemish Cap in October 1991. Just imagine what Howard Hawks would have done with a topic like that and his fascination with the camaraderie between working men would also have suited him for Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave (2017), which draws on 'No Exit', Sean Flynn's article in the September 2013 edition of GQ, to commemorate the heroics of the elite firefighting crew known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots, who attended the Yarnell Hill Fire near Prescott, Arizona in June 2013.
Courage comes in many forms, as Jean-Marc Vallée demonstrates in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), which was indebted to a 1992 Dallas Morning News article written by Bill Minutaglio, even though Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack were nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category at the 86th Academy Awards. Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto scored a rare same-film double scoop of the acting honours for their portrayals of Ron Woodroof and Rayon, a fictional trans woman who benefits from the experimental drugs that electrician-cum-rodeo cowboy Woodroof starts smuggling into Texas after he is diagnosed with AIDS in July 1985 and given a month to live.
A very different LGBTQ+ story is told in Justin Kelly's I Am Michael (2016), which takes its lead from Benoit Denizet-Lewis's New York Times Magazine article, 'My Ex-Gay Friend', to explore how gay rights activist Michael Glatze (James Franco) abandons both his role at XY Magazine and boyfriend Bennett (Zachary Quinto) to become a Christian pastor in rural Wyoming, where he falls in love with Rebekah (Emma Roberts). Another transformatory tale unfolds in Yann Demange's White Boy Rick (2018), which is based on a feted piece in The Atavist by Evan Hughes, which reveals how 14 year-old Ricky Wershe (Richie Merritt) became the FBI's youngest ever informant when he went undercover to provide intel on the drug scene in 1980s Detroit without the knowledge of his gun dealer father, Rick (Matthew McConaughey).
A father-son relationship also lies at the heart of Felix van Groeningen's Beautiful Boy (2018), which recreates the efforts of New York Times journalist David Sheff to break his son Nic's heroin habit. Sheff had first written about his situation in 'My Addicted Son' in the Times Magazine in 2005, but the film starring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet seeks to present a balanced account by drawing on books written by both Sheffs, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.
The Big Apple is also crucial to the action in John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), which revived the fortunes of The Bee Gees and launched the career of John Travolta, who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as Brooklyn paint store clerk Tony Manero, who becomes a white-suited god whenever he steps on to the dance floor. Based on Nik Cohn's 7 June 1976 New York article, 'Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night', this disco classic also spawned a Chilean gem in the form of Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero (2008), in which Alfredo Castro excels as the Santiago everyman whose obsession with Travolta's character affords him an escape from the grim reality of life under the Pinochet dictatorship.
Travolta became the king of the magazine spin-off in the early phase of his career, as both Urban Cowboy (1980) and Perfect (1985) started life on the glossy page. Inspired by Aaron Latham's Esquire article from 12 September 1978, 'The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America's Search for True Grit', James Bridges's treatise on modern masculinity sees Travolta's Houston refinery jockey spend his nights riding the mechanical bull at Gilley's nightclub. However, he reacts badly when operator Scott Glenn flirts with his wife, Debra Winger, and invites her to try her hand at bucking. Latham and Bridges hooked up again five years later for an exposé on Los Angeles fitness clubs, which was based on a series of articles for Rolling Stone, which is the very publication that Travolta's scribe represents in trying to get the lowdown on press-phobic fitness instructor Jamie Lee Curtis.
Three years previously, Colin Higgins had produced one of cinema's most unusual musicals, which took its cue from an article by Larry L. King in the April 1974 edition of Playboy. Centring on the (in) famous Chicken Ranch bordello, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) stars Dolly Parton as the madam who teams with Sheriff Burt Reynolds to prevent New Jersey TV personality Dom DeLuise from closing her down as part of his moral crusade. Goodness knows what Melvin P. Thorpe would make of the antics on display in David McNally's Coyote Ugly (2000), which stars Piper Perabo as the aspiring songwriter who leaves South Amboy, New Jersey to try her luck in New York. However, as the source of this comic drama is former barmaid Elizabeth Gilbert's March 1997 GQ article, 'The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon', it doesn't take long for Perabo to start strutting her stuff atop the bar of Adam Garcia's watering hole.
With a soundtrack studded with LeAnn Rimes ditties, this millennial musical seems rather tame compared to Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers (2019), which was adapted from the Jessica Pressler article, 'The Hustlers at Scores', which was published in New York Magazine on 28 December 2015 (exactly 120 years after the first Lumière film show for a paying audience). Julia Stiles takes the role of a reporter named Elizabeth, but the core action centres on Dorothy (Constance Wu), who takes a job at the Moves strip club in New York, changes her name to Destiny and falls into the orbit of Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez), a stellar performer who knows all the scams and angles. Or, at least, she thinks she does.
Some Serious Reporting
News happens too quickly for film-makers to keep pace and hot-button stories will invariably have slipped from the public consciousness before a feature re-enactment can be written, filmed and edited. Some events are so momentous, however, that they leave an indelible impression and the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon is a classic example. What makes Alan J. Pakula's Oscar-winning All the President's Men (1976) so fascinating is that it is told from the perspective of Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), the Washington Post journalists who had first intimated in the 19 June 1972 article, 'GOP Security Aide Among Five Arrested in Bugging Affair', that the Oval Office had something to hide in relation to the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Building at 2600 Virginia Avenue.
John Cusack plays Nixon in Lee Daniels's The Butler (2013), which stars Forrest Whitaker as Eugene Allen, who served eight presidents during a 34-year career on the White House domestic staff. Danny Strong's screenplay was based on the 7 November 2008 Washington Post profile, 'A Butler Well Served By This Election', which was written by Will Haygood, who expanded upon Allen's brush with power in the biography, The Butler: A Witness to History. While much of the action turns around Allen's relationship with his Black Panther-supporting son, the emphasis is firmly on father-daughter relationships in Dick Lowry's Forgotten Sins (1996), a film à clef based on the 1988 Thurston Country satanic ritual abuse case that was reported in a series of New Yorker articles by Lawrence Wright.
The May 1996 edition of Vanity Fair was the source of Marie Brenner's 'The Man Who Knew Too Much', which provided the impetus for Michael Mann's The Insider (1999), which landed seven Oscar nominations for its account of how 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and presenter Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) coaxed former Brown & Williamson executive Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) to whistleblow on the American tobacco industry. Mann drew three nominations for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay (with Eric Roth), while Crowe received a Best Actor nod for his convincingly conflicted performance.
He was on equally fine form in Taylor Hackford's Proof of Life (2000), which derived from another Vanity Fair item, William Prochnau's 'Adventures in the Ransom Trade', which appeared in the May 1998 issue. Writer and executive producer Tony Gilroy also took ideas from Thomas Hargrove's novel, The Long March to Freedom, in order to shape a fictionalised story about the efforts of hostage retrieval specialist Terry Thorne (Crowe) to recover the husband of Alice Bowman (Meg Ryan), whose oil executive husband (David Morse) has been abducted in the Latin American state of Tecala and will only be released if she pays $3 million to the rebel liberation army.
The link between the US government and drug smugglers in Central America is explored in Michael Cuesta's Kill the Messenger (2014), which draws on both the 'Dark Alliance' articles that journalist Gary Webb wrote for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 and Nick Schou's book, Kill the Messenger. Jeremy Renner plays the Pulitzer-winning Webb, who follows the leads connecting both Oliver North and the CIA with the cocaine profits being used to provide weapons to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
Another Pulitzer was presented to the Boston Globe Spotlight Team for its investigation into the Catholic Church's attempts to cover up the sexual misconduct of priests in the archdiocese. Taking inspiration from the articles following 'Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years' (2002), director Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Spotlight (2015), which also took the Oscar for Best Picture for the gripping re-enactment played by an excellent ensemble led by Liev Schreiber as editor Marty Baron, Mark Ruffalo as Michael Rezendes, Michael Keaton as Walter Robinson, Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfeiffer and John Slattery as Ben Bradlee, Jr., whose editor father had been played by Jason Robards in All the President's Men.
Ruffalo is also to the fore in Todd Haynes's Dark Waters (2019), which chronicles the 20-year battle between Cincinnati lawyer Robert Bilott and the DuPont corporation after it was discovered to have dumped chemicals linked to a spate of deaths among cattle and humans in Parkersburg, Virginia. Screenwriters Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan factored in information from a range of sources, including Nathaniel Rich's New York Times Magazine article, 'The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare', Mariah Blake's Huffington Post item, 'Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia', Sharon Lerner's The Intercept piece, 'Bad Chemistry', and Bilott's own memoir, Exposure.
Breaking the Law
Hollywood has always been partial to a fact-based crime story and magazines like True Detective sold in large numbers Stateside in the postwar period, alongside scandal mags like Confidential, which provided the inspiration for Curtis Hanson's neo-noir, LA Confidential (1997). Mainstream publications were also after scoops, however, and many a film noir and B movie centred on hard-bitten newshounds risking their necks to get their story. In Henry Hathaway's Call Northside 777 (1948), for example, James Stewart plays PJ McNeal, who is based on the Chicago Times reporter James McGuire, whose efforts to prove that Joseph Majczek (Richard Conte's Frank Wiecek in the film) is innocent of killing a cop in the early 1930s. In addition to drawing on McGuire's own copy, screenwriters Jerome Cady and Jay Dratler also took into account an August 1945 Time article on the case and the December 1946 Reader's Digest item, 'Tillie Scrubbed On', which profiled Majczej's cleaner mother, who worked overtime to raise the funds to place a newspaper ad offering a $5000 reward for information that could establish her son's innocence.
The crimes of amateur counterfeiter Emerich Juettner were reported in the New Yorker by St Clair McKelway, whose book, True Tales From the Annals of Crime & Rascality, provided further background for Edmund Goulding's Mister 880 (1950), which earned Edmund Gwenn a Best Supporting nomination for his à clef portrayal of Skipper Miller. But it was the New York Sun that carried the 24-part 'Crime on the Waterfront' series that landed Malcolm Johnson the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and earned him a lucrative rights deal for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), which saw Marlon Brando win the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as Terry Malloy, the Hoboken longshoreman whose brother, Charley (Rod Steiger), is the henchman of Mob-connected union boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb).
There's little doubt that Budd Schulberg's Oscar-winning screenplay was a response to Fred Zinnemann's 1952 Western, High Noon, which had admonished those who had testified during the House UnAmerican Activities Committee's investigation into Communism in Hollywood. But this 12-time nominated neo-realist drama (winning eight, including Best Picture) helped change the way in which Hollywood tackled weighty issues.
On a related theme. Ramón Menéndez's Money For Nothing (1993) also takes place on the waterfront, as it reveals the efforts of unemployed docker Joey Coyle (John Cusack) to hang on to the $1.2 million in cash that literally falls into his lap when it rolls off the back of an armoured car. The script was based on the Philadelphia Inquirer articles (and subsequent book) written by Mark Bowden, the reporter whose tome about a UN peacekeeping force in Somalia also inspired Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001).
Harking back to the good old days of monochrome, former New York Evening Graphic crime reporter Samuel Fuller drew on his own experiences for Underworld USA (1961), which had been on Humphrey Bogart's radar when he died. Telling how Tolly Devlin (Cliff Robertson) vows vengeance on the gang members who had killed his father, the hard-boiled story was based on both a series of Boston Globe articles by Joseph F. Dinneen and Riley Cooper's book, Here Is to Crime. Set in the late 1960s, Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007) charts the battle of wits between Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) and Newark detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), with screenwriter Steven Zaillian taking his cues from the Mark Jacobson article, 'The Return of Superfly', which had been published in New York Magazine on 14 August 2000.
The scene shifts to Queens in the 1980s for Andrew Lau and Andrew Loo's Revenge of the Green Dragons (2014), which boasts Martin Scorsese among its executive producers and is based on Frederic Dannen's November 1992 New Yorker article about the Chinatown turf war between the Green Dragons and the White Tigers. Next stop is Long Beach via Manhattan for Michael Caton-Jones's City By the Sea (2002), which draws on Michael McAlary's 1997 Esquire article about Vincent LaMarca (Robert De Niro), an NYPD detective whose cop father had been executed for murder when he was a boy. Now, with his estranged junkie son, Joey (James Franco), implicated in a drug-related killing, LaMarca has to face his demons.
De Niro famously starred with Al Pacino in Michael Mann's Heat (1995), which recreated the showdown between former Alcatraz inmate Neil McCauley and Detective Chuck Adamson. But Pacino's most iconic true-life tale is undoubtedly Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which was spun off from 'The Boys in the Bank', PJ Kluge and Thomas Moore's Life Magazine 22 September 1972 item about a bungled bid by John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturale to rob the Gravesend branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Brooklyn. In what would be the last film released during his lifetime, John Cazale plays Naturale, while Pacino essays the renamed Sonny Wortzik, who needs money to fund a sex-change operation for his boyfriend, Leon Shermer (Chris Sarandon). Notwithstanding the debt owed to the Life spread, Frank Pierson won his Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Published in the New Yorker the year before Lumet's heist classic was released, Daniel Lang's article, 'The Bank Drama', provides the inspiration for Robert Budreau's The Captor (2018), an account of the origins of Stockholm Syndrome that shows how teller Bianc Lind (Noomi Rapace) falls under the spell of robber Lars Nystrom (Ethan Hawke) during an armed raid on the Kreditbanken in the Swedish capital in 1973. The moustachioed bandit brandishes a machine-gun. But, despite the title of David Lowery's The Old Man & the Gun (2018), charming 78 year-old prison escapee Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) rarely needs to pull his weapon while carrying out a string of robberies and staying one step ahead of Dallas detective, John Hunt (Casey Affleck). Four years older than his character, Redford announced that this adaptation of the 2003 New Yorker article that David Grann later anthologised in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (2010) would be his last acting assignment.
Clint Eastwood was 88 when he took the lead in The Mule (2018), which marked his first return before the camera since Robert Lorenz's The Trouble With the Curve (2012) and the first time he had directed himself since Gran Torino (2008). Nick Schenk's screenplay was based on Sam Dolnick's 2014 New York Times article, 'The Sinaloa Cartel's 90-Year-Old Drug Mule', which was based on an interview with DEA Special Agent Jeff Moore, who had busted 87 year-old Leo Sharp three years earlier. On screen, Eastwood's character is called Earl Stone, while Bradley Cooper's pursuer is named Colin Bates.
Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray retained the real names for Richard Jewell (2019), an account of how an innocent man (Paul Walter Hauser) was blamed for the park bombing during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that draws on Marie Brenner's 1997 Vanity Fair article, 'American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell'.
The publication of Truman Capote's fabled New Yorker piece of 25 September 1965, 'In Cold Blood: The Last to See Them Alive' was followed by the release of Richard Brooks's four-time Oscar-nominated retelling, In Cold Blood (1967). Evocatively filmed in a number of authentic locations, this sobering reconstruction features chilling turns from Robert Blake as Perry Smith and Scott Wilson as Dick Hickock, who murder the four members of the Clutter family outside Holcomb, Kansas in the autumn of 1959.
We come forward three decades for Richard Linklater's Bernie (2011), a dark comedy that takes as its starting point co-scenarist Skip Hollandsworth's 1998 Texas Monthly article, 'Midnight in the Garden of East Texas', to assess whether 80 year-old millionairess Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine) was murdered in Carthage, Texas in 1996 by her close companion, 39 year-old mortician's assistant, Bernhardt Tiede (Jack Black).
Celebs, Sports and Surprises
Despite the rise of lifestyle and lads mags in the 1980s and the emergence of gossip sites and blogs on the Internet since the turn of the millennium, Hollywood still tends to turn to established periodicals when it goes trawling for stories. Among the Paul Thomas Anderson's inspirations for Boogie Nights (1997) was Mike Sagar's May 1989 Rolling Stone article, 'The Devil and John Holmes'. However, Anderson's 1988 mockumentary short, The Dirk Diggler Story (which he made while still at high school), had drawn on Julia St Vincent's 1981 actuality, Exhausted: John C. Holmes, The Real Story. When Leonardo DiCaprio turned down the lead to star in James Cameron's Titanic (1997), he recommended Mark Wahlberg for the role of the well-endowed busboy whose adventures in the San Fernando Valley porn trade of the 1970s earned co-star Burt Reynolds a Best Supporting Actor nomination and a Golden Globe award.
Rolling Stone also premiered extracts from Hunter S. Thompson's book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, in the editions published on 11 and 25 November 1971. As there's no knowing where the line between fact and fiction actually runs through this account of Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo's misadventures in the counterculture, we shall include Terry Gilliam's 1998 adaptation, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with Johnny Depp and Benecio del Toro as the substance-fuelled likely lads on an odyssey across the Nevada Desert that includes an encounter in a San Francisco club called The Matrix with the real Hunter S. Thompson.
Cameron Crowe was an avid reader of the magazine around the time the original Fear and Loathing passages were published and the 16 year-old proudly appended his byline to 'The Allman Brothers Story' in the 6 December 1973 issue. A quarter of a century later, Crowe returned to this piece and his experiences as a teenage rock reporter in Almost Famous (2000), which harks back to 1969 to show how William Miller (Patrick Fugit) cut his journalistic teeth (and much else besides) while on tour with legendary writer Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the fictional band, Stillwater. Crowe earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, while Frances McDormand and Kate Hudson were also cited for their supporting turns as mother Elaine Miller and groupie Penny Lane.
Twenty-five year-old writer Stephen Glass was so determined to make his name at The New Republic in the 1990s that he started fabricating scoops. Hayden Christensen was cast as the mendacious hotshot in Billy Ray's Shattered Glass (2003), which drew on Buzz Bissinger's September 1998 Vanity Fair exposé, which had detailed how trusting editor Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria) was replaced by the more sceptical Charles Lane (Peter Sarsgaard) after Glass's copy had been challenged by Forbes Digital Tool reporter Adam Penenberg (Steve Zahn). In March 2010, Vanity Fair also carried Nancy Jo Sales's 'The Suspects Wore Louboutins', which formed the basis of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring (2013), which recounts how a group of friends from Indian Hills High School in Agoura Hills, California stole over $3 million of goods from the homes of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. The characters Rebecca Ahn (Katie Chang), Marc Hall (Israel Broussard) and Nicki Moore (Emma Watson) were based on ringleaders Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo and Alexis Neiers, while Annie Fitzgerald plays a variation on Nancy Jo Sales.
Another insider account informs Lenny Abrahamson's Frank (2014), which was co-scripted by Peter Straughan and Jon Ronson, whose Guardian column on 31 May 2006 recalled his relationship with Chris Sivey, who had found cult fame through his alter ego Frank Sidebottom, who was known for his large papier-maché head. Domhnall Gleeson takes the role of aspiring musician Jon Burroughs, while Michael Fassbender plays the leader of the Oh Blimey Big Band.
Marielle Heller's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) revisits the unlikely friendship between journalist Tom Junod and Fred Rogers, the presenter of the long-running children's TV programme, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968-2001). While preparing 'Can You Say…Hero?', which appeared in the November 1998 issue of Esquire, Junod had set out to expose the unfailingly genial Rogers as a fraud. But he soon realises the truth, as this affectionate film reveals through the developing bond between Rogers (Tom Hanks) and the renamed Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys).
Switching to the sporting sphere, Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero (1973) has a highly prestigious source, as this biopic of NASCAR ace Junior Johnson was based on a March 1965 Esquire essay by Tom Wolfe. 'The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!' was anthologised later in the year in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Jeff Bridges plays Johnson, as he discovers a talent behind the wheel while trying to raise some cash from stock-car racing in order to bail out his father (Art Lund) after he is arrested for moonshining. Thanks to Kenneth Li's May 1998 Vibe piece, 'Racer X', the law is right in the middle of the action in Rob Cohen's The Fast and the Furious (2001), as undercover cop Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) finds himself going bumper to bumper with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Johnny Tran (Rick Yune) after he's introduced to the full-throttle world of street racing while trying to bust a gang of Los Angeles carjackers.
The focus shifts to underground motorcycle drag racing in Reggie Rock Blythewood's Biker Boyz (2003), which took an article by Michael Gougis in the April 2000 edition of the now-defunct New Times LA magazine as the inspiration for the showdown between undisputed champion Smoke (Laurence Fishburne) and Kid (Derek Luke), the youthful contender who has been carefully tutored by his father, Slick Will (Eriq La Salle). Passing on wisdom is also the theme of Mike Tollin's Radio (2003), which bases its account of the relationship between the 28 year-old intellectually disabled James Robert 'Radio' Kennedy (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and T.L, Hanna High School football coach Harold Jones (Ed Harris) on Gary Smith's article, 'Someone to Lean On', which appeared in the 16 December 1996 issue of Sports Illustrated.
Dedicated to covering the great outdoors, Outside magazine proved the ideal berth for Jon Krakauer's 1993 article, 'Death of an Innocent', which he expanded from a 9000-word profile to a book-length account of Christopher McCandless's trek across North America into the Alaskan backwoods. Sean Penn directed Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild (2007), which earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Hal Holbrook as Ron Franz, the retired soldier from Salton City, who teaches McCandless the craft of leatherwork. The same publication also carried Susan Orlean's 1998 piece, 'Life Is Swell', which was filmed by John Stockwell as Blue Crush (2002), which follows best friends Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth), Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake) to a surfing contest at the Banzai Pipeline reef break in Hawaii.
The scene of the big showdown between Frank Dux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Chong Li (Bolo Yeung) was switched from Nassau in the Bahamas to Hong Kong for Newt Arnold's Bloodsport (1988), which leaned heavily on John Stewart's interview piece, 'Kumite: A Learning Experience', which was published in the November 1980 issue of Black Belt magazine. Peter Landesman's cerebral Concussion (2015), which draws on Jeanne Marie Laskas's October 2009 GQ investigation, 'Game Brain', to show how forensic pathologist Dr Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) stopped the National Football League from trying to suppress his report on the sport's links with chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
This is the kind of page-turning magazine article that one might expect to find its way on to the big screen. But Cinema Paradiso users may be surprised by a clutch of famous films that have print sources. Like the horror duo of Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), which were respectively derived from Inez Wallace's 3 May 1943 item for American Weekly Magazine (with a little dash of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre tossed in for good luck) and a number of 1970s Los Angeles Times articles about refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Taking to the skies, both Tony Scott's Top Gun (1986) and Mike Newell's Pushing Tin (1999) started out on the printed page, with the Tom Cruise vehicle being based on Ehud Yonay's May 1983 California Magazine piece, 'Top Guns', and the Long Island air traffic control ensembler hailing from Darcy Frey's 24 March 1996 New York Times Magazine spread, 'Something's Got to Give'.
And who would have guessed that Len Wiseman's Die Hard 4.0 (2007) owed its existence to John Carlin's May 1997 Wired article, 'A Farewell to Arms'? Also known as Live Free or Die Hard, this third sequel sees NYPD detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) take on former Defense Deparment analyst, Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), who is now the head of a cyber-terrorist cell bent on shutting down the country's infrastructure. There's plenty more muscle on display in Michael Bay's Pain & Gain (2013), which draws on a series of 1999 Miami New Times reports by Pete Collins for its story about the efforts of Sun Gym boss John Mese (Rob Corddry), trainers Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and motivational speaker Jonny Wu (Ken Jeong) to abduct, torture and fleece wealthy new client Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub).
Rarely has an adapted article played a more peculiar role in a picture than Susan Orlean's 'Orchid Fever', which appeared in the New Yorker on 23 January 1955 and became the basis of her 1998 non-fiction book, The Orchid Thief. In Charlie Kaufman's screenplay for Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002), Nicolas Cage plays a hack named Charlie Kaufman experiencing writer's block and having sexual fantasies about Orlean (Meryl Streep) while trying to fashion a scenario about orchid thief John Laroche (Chris Cooper). Initially, Orlean was dead against the project, which she feared would end her career. But she gave the go-ahead and has since praised Kaufman and Jonze for capturing her core themes of obsession and disappointment.
One wonders how British-born crime reporter Jeff Maysh will react if Ben Affleck and Matt Damon ever get round to adapting his July 2018 Daily Beast article, 'How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions'. Despite HBO telling the McScam story in McMillions, Affleck remains pencilled in to direct, while Damon is expected to star as Jerome Jacobson, the head of security who rigged the burger chain's Monopoly game to the tune of $24 million by removing the most valuable pieces and selling them off for a percentage of the winnings.
If you're interested in more newspaper-themed films, explore the heyday of print in A Brief History of Newspaper Films.
