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

[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.