Films and Media: Film Adaptations

In Greta Gerwig's take on the much-adapted story, this film chronicles the lives of the March sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-19th century. The story chronicles the girls' childhoods, marriages, travels, careers, and even their greatest tragedy.

In 1860s Massachusetts, the four March sisters - beautiful Meg, strong-willed Jo, gentle Beth, and artistic Amy - come of age, growing from girls into young women. A modern American classic, the book hasn't gotten out of print since its publication.

Oskar Schindler, a businessman, arrives in Poland, intending on profiting off of World War II, which has just begun. Pragmatic and cunning, he joins the Nazi party, yet hires mainly Jewish workers for his factory. After witnessing the persecution his workers face, he arranges to have his workers protected. Once he realizes he can protect not only his own staff, but other Jews as well, he becomes an unlikely hero.

Based on a true story, this book details how Oskar Schindler rescued over 1,000 Jews from being sent to Auschwitz during World War II. Though an unlikely hero, Schindler put his own life on the line in Nazi-occupied Poland to save as many people as he could from the gas chambers. Even in the face of unspeakable horror and pure evil, goodness can emerge.

In this adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński's novel, Peter Sellers plays the pure-hearted Chance, a gardener forced out of moneyed seclusion and into the urban wilds of Washington, D.C. Shocked to discover that the real world doesn’t respond to the click of a remote, Chance stumbles haplessly into celebrity after being taken under the wing of a tycoon who mistakes him for a gentleman, and whose wife targets Chance as the object of her desire. As Chance enters high society, his simple gardening wisdom makes him a highly sought-after political mind.

Chauncey Gardiner - heir to a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential advisor, political pundit, and media star. He is the one everybody is talking about, though nobody knows what he is talking about or where he has come from, but everybody knows he has come to money, power and sex. Was he led to all this by the well-connected wife of a dying Wall Street tycoon? Or is Chauncey Gardiner riding the waves all by himself because he floated into the world buoyed up by a force he did not see and could not name? The reader must decide.

Based on Rebecca Skloot's critically acclaimed 2010 nonfiction best-seller of the same name, this HBO Films drama tells the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine & other scientific achievements, and have been bought and sold by the billions - yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, and learned the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, but they never saw any of the profits. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.

Fueled by a suitcase full of pharmaceuticals, journalist Raoul Duke and sidekick Dr. Gonzo set off on a fast and furious ride through nonstop neon, surreal surroundings and a crew of crazy characters.

In this 1961 adaptation of Capote's novella, writer Paul Varjak meets Holly Golightly when he moves into her apartment building. Though seeing an older woman, he becomes interested in Holly, who is seeking an older, rich man to marry in order to secure her future. Though initially caught up in her carefree lifestyle, Paul eventually learns about Holly's past, revealing her to be someone else entirely.

In Truman Capote's 1958 novella, an unnamed writer recounts his memories of Holly Golightly, his free-spirited young neighbor. Charming, witty, and just a little bit tragic, Capote's most famous character remains an American icon to this day.

In a dystopian English future, Alex and his friends participate in "ultraviolence" - wrecking havoc on the public for seemingly no reason at all. When Alex is recruited for an experiment to cure his violent tendencies, nothing goes as expected.

In this satirical black comedy, the young people in a dystopian future are steeped in a culture of extreme violence. Alex, a young man who participates in this violence for his and his friends' own amusement, is "reformed" by the government. But in the process, the reader is left to question good, evil, and what it means to be free.

In a small Southern town, Scout and her older brother Jem spend their days playing with a neighbor boy, Dill, and spying on their reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley. Atticus Finch, Scout and Jem's widowed father, is a lawyer defending Tom, a black man who is innocent of the heinous crime he's been accused of. In the process, he teaches his young children about prejudice and what it means to understand things from another person's point of view.

Author Harper Lee's novel was an instant success after its publication in 1960, and remains one of the most widely-read - as well as widely-challenged - books in American schools. This unforgettable story, set in a quiet Southern town, is narrated by Scout, a young girl living with her brother Jem and widowed father Atticus. In the face of hatred and racial violence, Atticus becomes the only white man in town willing to stand up for what's right.

This film, adapted from a cult-classic comic by Daniel Clowes, is an idiosyncratic portrait of adolescent alienation that's at once bleakly comic and wholly endearing. Post high-school graduation, proud misfit Enid confronts an uncertain future amid the cultural wasteland of consumerist suburbia with her best friend, Rebecca. When Enid finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Seymour, a sad-sack record collector many years her senior, her friendship with Rebecca is changed forever.

Ghost World continues to enthrall and inspire readers over a decade after its original release as a graphic novel. This quasi-autobiographical story (the name of one of the protagonists is famously an anagram of the author's name) follows the adventures of two best friends, Enid and Becky, who face the prospect of growing up, and more importantly, apart.

Young Florida orphan Finn, a talented artist, becomes a success in 1990s New York. Summoned to an overgrown Gothic palazzo where Nora Dinsmoor lives in the past, he encounters beautiful blonde Estella, a woman from his past. When a secret benefactor allows him to work toward his dream of success, and to win Estella, Finn's life is forever changed.

In the gloom of a country graveyard, a young boy encounters an escaped convict, a chance meeting that years later leads the boy to tragedy, mystery and wealth.

When a mysterious benefactor enables the orphan boy, Pip, to rise in Victorian society, Pip is educated as a gentleman and snobbishly neglects his childhood friends.

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir, a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination and taught them how to embrace life fearlessly - but was dishonest and destructive when drinking. Her mother was a free spirit who didn't want the responsibility of raising a family. The Walls children learned to take care of themselves and each other, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

This film chronicles the adventures of an eccentric, resilient and tight-knit family. A young woman who, influenced by the joyfully wild nature of her deeply dysfunctional father, found the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

In 1960s Oklahoma, two groups of teens - the low-income Greasers and the elite Socs - are rivals. The Greasers strive for a better life, while the Socs are determined to keep the order of things as they are. When Ponyboy, a greaser, makes a connection with a girl from the nicer part of town, violence erupts.

Published in 1967, this coming-of-age story about teenagers feels authentic to this day - because it was written by a teenager herself. Ponyboy, growing up along with his brothers & group of tight-knit friends, feels like an outsider in a society that is determined to see them as teenage greasers and nothing more. The greasers are at war with the Socs, teenagers from the far-nicer side of town. One night, when a run-of-the-mill street brawl goes too far, everything changes.

In the not-so-distant future, strong-willed and beautiful Kate possesses a precious commodity that is tightly controlled - fertility. In a brain-washing boot camp that turns fertile women into surrogate mothers for social-elite men and their wives, Kate is assigned to an eminent party leader. But when she learns that he’s sterile, she’s faced with either producing him an heir - or death.

It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, is not permitted to read, and is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she was an independent woman, had a job and family of her own. But now...everything has changed.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe's house has long been troubled by the destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe's past makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives called Beloved, Sethe's terrible secret explodes into the present.

After Paul D. moves in with his old slave friend, Sethe, and her daughter, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved". Strange things happen when Sethe and her daughter take the girl in.