jock123:
Shakespeare apparently adapted Hamlet from a book, Amleth (or perhaps another lost play from the same source… Or a lost play from a different book… Or a book retelling the first book… Shakespeare scholars do like to make things complicated… Anyway, it was an adaptation of an existing story…).
Thanks for the clarification. I see what you mean now.
jock123:
I’d be hard pressed to know just how many great movies are from original screenplays (I don’t doubt it, I’m just blanking on it…).
Well, off the top of my head, some great films that weren't adapted from existing books would be:
Every Chaplin and Keaton masterpiece (not that these silent movies exactly have much of a screenply, but they're certainly original stories, rather than adaptations),
Every Laurel and Hardy film,
King Kong (the original 1933 film, obviously),
E.T.,
Star Wars,
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
Toy Story (1 and 2)
Finding Nemo,
The Incredibles (another of my very favourite films),
The Lavender Hill Mob,
The Ladykillers (the original one , obviously),
Monty Python's Life of Brian,
Airplane.
My list seems to include a lot of comedy films (and I'm sure we could all add more, especially more recent ones). I wonder if original screenplays are more common in comedy films, and if serious drama films are more often adapted from an existing book.
I was going to include Some Like it Hot (surely one of the greatest films and greatest screenplays ever) but then I recalled that that was sort of adapted, maybe not from a book, but from an earlier German film written by one of Some Like It Hot's writers.