Which Science Fiction Author Has Had the Most Works Adapted for Film?

[beamjockey]

The following question just arrived in my e-mail from Paul Rodriguez of "The Pop View" blog:

What SF author has had the most works adapted for film?

I couldn't give him an accurate answer on short notice, but I dashed off a quick response, and I'll share it with you. Chime in if you can help.

I think Mary Shelley beats everybody on "most films made from her work," but that is not exactly your question. Verne, Wells, Bradbury, and Dick are leading contenders.

John Scalzi thinks Wells is the champ, but offers no statistical evidence.

Also not exactly answering your question, the Internet Movie Database lists both movies and TV shows. For "writer" it says:

Author	Number of Titles in IMDB
Jules Verne	143 titles
Stephen King	127 (mostly horror, some SF, some non-SF)
H. G. Wells	85 titles
Ray Bradbury	75 titles (some non-SF)
Richard Matheson	75 (a ton of TV, but plenty of features)
Mary Shelley	57
Robert Bloch	44 (mostly horror, some non-SF)
Michael Crichton	28 (several are not SF)
Philip K. Dick	21 (very few remakes, unlike some of his seniors)
Isaac Asimov	18
Robert Heinlein	12 (5 feature films, the rest TV)
Arthur C. Clarke	11 (2 feature films, the rest TV or in-development)

Though he has also enjoyed (suffered?) innumerable adaptations, I won't count Bram Stoker as an SF author. But the others have all written at least some SF.

Can't guarantee this is exhaustive, but on short notice, it may give you a handle on the question. Hope the person you're betting against is still in the bar.

It would take more work to count only adaptations and determine a champion. Has this already been tabulated somewhere?

(Uh-oh: for creators of TV series, IMDB doesn't count every episode as a "title" in its summary for "writer" credit. So these figures may be off for TV writers. J. Michael Straczynski has to be in the running for most prolific SF author on film, as he wrote the vast majority of scripts for the 110 episodes of Babylon 5. But not one of them is an adaptation.

(Furthermore, although there are hundreds of films derived from Frankenstein, IMDB appears to count only those that gave Mary Shelley a "writer" credit. She should talk to her union rep.)

Comments

[erik]

I think I'm skeptical of Verne's numbers. It looks like (similar to Shelley) that's many adaptations each of 20k, 80 Days, Mysterious Island, From The Earth To The Moon, Journey To The Center Of The Earth, and not much else.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Prompted by your comment, I've just gone through Verne's IMDB listing. It lists adaptations of at least 29 distinct works of fiction. I think that's going to be hard to beat.

[erik]

Interesting. I guess we each saw what we expected; I went and looked expecting to see nothing but 20k and 80 Days again and again, and saw that indeed there were many many adaptations of those few titles, and stopped. Because I was looking for confirmation that there were not in fact anything close to 143 distinct works there.

And I was right. But you are also right: 29 is plenty impressive!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Part of what happened was that the famous adaptations of 20k and 80 Days were successful enough that people kept looking for more Verne to adapt in hope of striking gold.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

This is a big effect-- I'm sure it accounts for Master of the World, the 1962 Five Weeks in a Balloon with Barbara Eden and Fabian, and the 1967 Blast Off!/Rocket to the Moon with Burl Ives-- but not the only effect.

Nineteen of Verne's works were adapted for the screen before 1923. Clearly the guy was recognized as a major-league storyteller.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And, more tangentially, for the 1965 City in the Sea, which is not a Verne adaptation but was supposedly inspired by a poem of Edgar Allan Poe's.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I keep forgetting that the Burl Ives movie was the same movie as Those Fantastic Flying Fools. I've seen it but remember almost nothing about it; I think that's indicative of something.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Someday I'll perpetrate my elaborate media hoax about Irwin Allen's 1967 US musical Doctor Who adaptation starring Dick Van Dyke as the Doctor, who regenerates from a white-bearded geezer to a sprightly pseudo-Cockney halfway through. (It was supposed to be a Peter Sellers star vehicle, but Irwin Allen fired him after he started ad-libbing all his lines and demanded to play all the companions and the TARDIS.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think part of what seems to inflate Wells over Verne in memory is that Wells staked out so much more territory in the genre: he wrote the archetypical alien invasion, the archetypical time-travel adventure, one of the two archetypical Mad Scientist Plays God stories, one of the leading space-travel adventures, and the most memorable stories about invisibility and "stuff grows big" (those two had more influence in the movies than in print).

Whereas Verne's well-known works are all in the same narrower subgenre, the extraordinary voyage with possible hard-SF elements.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

At least one of Matheson's writing credits is actually a Jules Verne adaptation: AIP's Master of the World, which was a heavily modified mashup of Verne's Robur the Conqueror and its sequel Master of the World (with Vincent Price as Robur).

[seawasp]

While I have no problem with Vincent Price, he's not the person I'd have chosen for Robur, given the description I read.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the books but I did see the movie a while back, and movie-Robur seemed really closer to Captain Nemo than to Robur according to the synopses of the books I've seen.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Matheson and Bloch both did a heck of a lot of original screen writing. I'd have guessed that for both of them the fraction of adaptations would be relatively small, but it looks as if a fairly large number of Matheson's print stories actually were adapted, some by himself.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

Picking a nit: Technically only One piece of Mary Shelley's work has been adapted to the screen, just it was adapted over and over again.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was what I was implying with the first sentence of my reply to Paul.

We do need to check on her other SF story, The Last Man... yup, there's a movie of that, too. Two books for Mary, then.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Three; her story "The Transformation" also got filmed.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...whoa, there was actually a 1970 Czech adaptation of Hector Servadac.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

Then you've got Richard Matheson, who wrote a crap load for TV and movies, but only some are based on his original works, often adapting others.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

For all these guys, the real task is to sift through the IMDB data (or some other source), count the works adapted, and perhaps try to sort out which ones are SF.

[planettom.livejournal.com]

Then there are things like the 1977 EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (2-minute trailer on YouTube), which H.G. Wells is probably screaming from some afterlife, "Take my name off this!"

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

He is getting no sympathy from Mrs. Shelley.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

The quick-&-dirty Verne data. I may have missed some titles, and please let me know if I have counted an adapted work twice:

Year	Title
1902	A Trip to the Moon (short) (novel "De la Terre à la Lune" - uncredited)
1904	An Impossible Voyage (short) (play "Le Voyage a travers l'Impossible")
1904	Drama in the Air (short) (novel)
1905	20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (short) (story)
1908	Michael Strogoff (short) (novel)
1909	The Invisible Thief (short) (novel)
1910	Inside the Earth (short) (novel "Voyage au Centre de la Terre")
1912	The Conquest of the Pole (short) (novel "Voyages et aventures du Captaine Hatteras")
1913	Les enfants du capitaine Grant (short) (novel)
1914	'Round the World in 80 Days (novel)
1922	Mathias Sandorf (novel)
1958	From the Earth to the Moon (novels "De la Terre à la Lune" and "Autour de la Lune")
1959	800 Leagues Over the Amazon (novel "La Jangada")
1961	Master of the World (novels "Master of the World" and "Rubur, the Conqueror")
1961	Shirley Temple Theatre (TV series) The Terrible Clockman (1961) (novel "Master Zacharias")
1961	Valley of the Dragons (novel "Careers of a comet")
1962	Five Weeks in a Balloon (novel "Cinq semaines en ballon")
1964	Les Indes noires (TV movie) (novel)
1967	Le théâtre de la jeunesse: Le secret de Wilhelm Storitz (TV movie) (novel)
1967	Ukradená vzducholod (novel "Deux ans de vacances")
1968	L'orgue fantastique (TV movie) (short story "Monsieur Ré Dièse et Mademoiselle Mi Bémol")
1969	The Southern Star (novel "L'Étoile du sud")
1971	The Light at the Edge of the World (novel "Le Phare du bout du monde")
1973	Maître Zaccharius (TV movie) (novel)
1974	Fifteen Year Old Captain (novel "Un Capitaine de 15 ans")
1979	Tajemství ocelového mesta (book)
1983	The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (novel "Le Château des Carpathes")
2004	Le docteur Ox (TV movie) (novel)

Care to tackle one of the other authors?

[acmespaceship.livejournal.com]

OT: Whoa, Verne wrote a play? Apparently with song, dance, and special effects. http://www.najvs.org/articles/JTTIreviews.shtml
I must go email some people.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Check his bio-- he floundered around as a playwright* (and totally loved being part of the Literary Scene in Paris) before Pierre-Jules Hetzel slotted him into the "Voyages Extraordinaires" groove.



*Or do you say "operettawright?"

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

This just in: H. G. Wells appears to have had 30 distinct works adapted for film, including 5 prior to 1923.

There is double-dipping: Georges Méliès's 1902 Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) is claimed for both Wells and Verne, which is a lot of freight for a 14-minute film to carry.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Jules Verne 143 titles

And I probably saw most of them.
Even Irwin Allen's 'adaptation'.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I'm seeing at least 11 Philip K. Dick works adapted for the screen.