Just as certain filmmakers come with automatic awards heat to their name (Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan), there are some authors whose work is so well-thought-of, any adaptation is ready for Oscar buzz. Does it always pan out?
Playwright Maxwell Anderson's work inspired many an awards-caliber film, such as Oscar nominees
The Bad Seed,
Knickerbocker Holiday, and
The Private Lives of Elizbeth and Essex, and Oscar winners
Joan of Arc and
Key Largo. He himself was even Oscar-nominated for one of his many screenwriting contributions - in this case,
All Quiet on the Western Front - and was an uncredited contributor to films like
Ben-Hur and
The Life of a Bengal Lancer.
Filmmakers keep returning to Philip Roth again and again - most recently, Ewan McGregor with
American Pastoral and James Schamus with
Indignation - yet only
Goodbye Columbus has had any success with audiences, critics,
and Oscar. The closest anything ever came to duplicating that success? Possibly
Elegy, the 2008 adaptation of
The Dying Animal starring Ben Kingsley.
The works of James Leo Herlihy had their time in the Hollywood spotlight: 1959's
Blue Denim was a Golden Globe nominee while 1962's
All Fall Down was a Cannes competitor and National Board of Review winner.
Midnight Cowboy was the only film version of his work to make it to the Oscars, and the last significant adaptation of any of his work.
Horace McCoy, like Maxwell Anderson, was known in 1930s Hollywood as a screenwriter, though he originally arrived from Texas to pursue acting. As with his books, he contributed mostly to pulp crime dramas - a genre rarely afforded the respect it deserves.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is, to date, his only brush with Oscar.
It is believed by many - or at least, the authors of
Inside Oscar - that
Z benefited from a heavy awards campaign, and so we may not be surprised upon hearing that Vasili Vasilikos' other works, while internationally-renowned, rarely inspired cinematic treatments outside his native Greece - though there was a 2012 remake of
Z released in India, titled
Shanghai.
Their works
did inspire nominations at least
once - and there they are. The Adapted Screenplay nominees of 1969:
