Saturday, February 14, 2015

The same novelist wrote Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai

Thanks to Will Howells for giving me my Trivial Fact of the Day.

The films Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai were both based on novels by Pierre Boulle.

This reminds me of an incident from my days as a student at York. A lecturer used an incident from Bridge n the River Kwai to illustrate a point of moral philosophy, but the seminar rapidly descended into an argument about which actors had been in the film.

1 comment:

Phil Beesley said...

More unusual film/lit trivia:
Eric Knight created the canine character Lassie in Lassie Come-Home but also wrote cult noir novel You Play The Black and The Red Comes Up as Richard Hallas. In the 1943 film Lassie's owner, Joe Carraclough, is played by Roddy McDowall who later acted in Planet of the Apes.

After leaving the British civil service, Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe novels) wrote for London Liberal newspaper, the Westminster Gazette. Most of his contributions were unattributed at the time but some of his awful poems have been compiled in recent years.

Private Eye cartoonist and writer Barry Fantoni created private eye Mike Dime in two 1980s novels which mimic Chandler's style.

Gangster novelist and screenwriter William Riley Burnett (Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle) wrote The Great Escape screenplay.

Arthur Hailey's Flight into Danger (TV film) morphed into a proper film (Zero Hour!) and a novel (Runway Zero-Eight). You'll probably recognise the plot in the parody Airplane!