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The Best Movies About Real Writers

Writers are some of the most fascinating subjects for biopics. Some of the best writers are solitary, alcoholic, disturbed, and gifted, and the writers on this list definitely run the full spectrum. Although their stories have the power to grip readers and not let go, sometimes the story behind the author is the most fascinating part. The best writer biopics tell the stories of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into writing a novel, journalistic piece, academic journal, or poem.

What are the best writer biopics? Capote might top your list.  S tarring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, this biopic tells the story of the mysterious author who was so obsessed with the gruesome murder of the Cutter family in rural Kansas. The film chronicles Capote’s life as he composes his magnum opus,  In Cold Blood.  It won Hoffman an Academy Award for his performance. On this list, you’ll also find Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , a drug fueled romp based on the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo New Journalism hero portrayed by Johnny Depp. This list also includes writers from bygone eras, including William Shakespeare, as seen in Shakespeare in Love:  a moving tale of theatre, love, and betrayal set in Elizabethan England.

We also included Midnight in Paris , Woody Allen’s delightful time-traveling tale set in Roaring '20s Paris. Although the story is mostly about Owen Wilson’s character figuring out who he is, the film features hilarious and delightful portrayals of many legendary authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.

Vote up the best writer biopics below.  

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

My Left Foot

Midnight in Paris

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

American Splendor

A Man for All Seasons

The Libertine

Bright Star

Out of Africa

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Before Night Falls

Mary Shelley

Shakespeare in Love

Kill Your Darlings

An Angel at My Table

The Trials of Oscar Wilde

Fellini's Casanova

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

Blinded by the Light

The Rum Diary

My Salinger Year

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Lists about novelists, poets, short story authors, journalists, essayists, and playwrights, from simple rankings to fun facts about the men and women behind the pens.

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Streaming: the best films about writers

Elisabeth Moss’s fevered turn as American gothic novelist Shirley Jackson is the latest chapter in cinema’s tireless quest to dramatise the literary life

T he writer generally gets a raw deal in the movies: alternately romanticised and patronised in films that will do just about anything to depict literary genius except actually show them writing. As a process, it’s not inherently cinematic; the best films on the subject try to slip some sense of the writer’s mind into their verbal and visual language.

Newly out on VOD platforms , Josephine Decker’s Shirley plays fast and loose with the facts around its subject, the midcentury American gothic spellbinder Shirley Jackson. Rather than offering any kind of reliable biographical portrait, it instead fashions Jackson’s unglamorous romantic life as the kind of suburban horror fiction she might herself have written. As interpreted in jittery, fevered style by Elisabeth Moss, Jackson becomes a kind of housebound witch with a typewriter for a cauldron, both antagonising her young academic lodgers and feeding off them creatively. I have reservations about its monstrous portraiture, but it works as an atmospheric evocation of her work’s ghoulish, stomach-tightening power.

Cinema is still shorter than it should be on great Jackson adaptations – 1963’s original The Haunting ( on Chili ) came closer than Netflix’s recent mini-series version – but Decker’s film is a strange, ambitious interim measure. It put me in mind of the 1979 film Agatha ( on Google Play ), a similarly imagined, smoke-shrouded mystery that makes a suitable enigma of Agatha Christie, played with strange, sorrowful eccentricity by Vanessa Redgrave. It’s more interesting than watching some dreary dramatisation of Christie’s literary rise, though it’s an elusive tribute.

When it comes to at least somewhat more traditional literary biography, Jane Campion can claim the gold standard twice over. An Angel at My Table (1990; on Amazon Prime ), her expansive, involving study of New Zealand author Janet Frame and the latter’s struggle with misguided mental health treatment, is classical in form but quietly matches Frame’s lyrical imagination. Bright Star (2009; on iTunes ), Campion’s subtly swooning portrayal of the romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, isn’t just pretty but poetic in its imagery. Sticking in a period vein, I have a soft spot for Impromptu (1991; iTunes again ), a drily witty account of the affair between French writer George Sand and the composer Frederic Chopin, which honours the former’s gender-questioning ideas to abbreviated but tart effect. By and large, the literary biopic genre has yet to catch up to a shifting, more diverse canon, though a poignant, straightforward 1979 TV adaptation of Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ( on YouTube , via the fine Reelblack channel) was an early counter-example.

In the ingenious scriptwriting farce Adaptation (2002; Netflix ), which is split between memoir and deranged fiction, Charlie Kaufman served up a skewed self-portrait and an entirely imaginary vision of his less gifted writing twin, with an uproarious take-off of author Susan Orlean for good measure. Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek unsurprisingly captured the tortured tension between a writer’s personal and creative selves in her first and only feature screenwriting credit, Malina : in that rarely discussed 1991 film ( available on Amazon’s Mubi channel ), Isabelle Huppert contributes an unusually authentic, unmannered study in writerly mania.

But perhaps there’s never been a greater, more piquant film on the cruel ebb and flow of literary inspiration than Joachim Trier’s 2006 debut Reprise ( Amazon again ), following as it does the diverging courses of two friends with a common goal to become novelists. It’s the kind of wince-inducing study that makes a writer wonder how they could ever face a keyboard again – before spurring them back to the blank screen anyway.

Also new on streaming and DVD

The Witches (Warner Bros, PG) Nicolas Roeg’s fiendishly macabre 1990 film of Roald Dahl’s children’s classic was scarcely improvable, but this sluggish, plasticky Americanisation from director Robert Zemeckis, new to DVD, falls almost perversely short of the mark, from the peculiar miscasting of an otherwise game Anne Hathaway to the brutally ugly visual effects.

DNA ( Netflix ) French actress turned director Maïwenn trades in high-pitched, confrontational melodrama, with results that can be either exhilarating or irritating – or both, in the case of this family powder-keg exercise about a fractious, extended French-Algerian clan. It offers many funny, thorny scenes of personal warfare, but turns drippy when centred on the quasi-autobiographical self-help journey of Maïwenn’s own character.

The Outpost (Lionsgate, 15) An outnumbered band of American brothers hold down the fort against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in this 2009-set combat drama from film-maker Rod Lurie ( The Contender ), adapting a US nonfiction bestseller by CNN correspondent Jake Tapper. We’ve been here before, but it’s a sturdy war film with a few more brain cells than average, led with commitment by Scott Eastwood and Orlando Bloom.

The New Mutants (Disney, 15) Shot in 2017, this youth-focused X-Men spin-off was delayed for so long that it became something of an industry joke. That the final film feels so indifferent – not a disaster for the ages, just a bit drab and tossed together – is the none-too-funny punchline, though its horror-lite approach is at least a new (and indeed mutant) angle in a clapped-out franchise.

Howl’s Moving Castle (StudioCanal, U) Hayao Miyazaki’s dizzy, tender-hearted Diana Wynne Jones adaptation gets an all-stops-out Blu-ray box set for its 15th anniversary, stuffed with extras and accessories right down to a set of customised drinks coasters. The film, however, remains the principal treat.

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The Piano review – Jane Campion's drama still hits all the right notes

Jane Campion: ‘Capitalism is such a macho force. I felt run over’

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50 Movies About Writers That Are Definitely Worth Your Time

From William Shakespeare to Toni Morrison to Joan Didion to J.R.R. Tolkien, it's no secret that folks who professionally put words on paper are endlessly fascinating individuals. Some writers find inspiration for their work from their own troubled lives and wild backgrounds. Others are simply born with imaginations the size of an aircraft carrier. However different they may be, authors, journalists, poets, and essayists all share the special ability of expressing themselves so well that they take up space in the minds of others.

With a gift so unique — and so fundamentally important to the movie industry — it's no wonder Hollywood loves making movies about writers. And it turns out, audiences truly enjoy watching the misadventures of the literarily inclined. However, movies about writers are all faced with the same problem: The actual act of writing is un-cinematic. There's nothing inherently that interesting about watching a person pound out sentences on a laptop or typewriter, even though the person doing the typing might be deeply interesting. Luckily, these great films have found unique and exciting ways of visualizing the writing process and the figures behind it, so read on to find out the best movies about writers (and don't worry, no one is just sitting behind a desk in any of these).

One of the best movies about a writer not surprisingly comes from the brain and fingertips of the meta movie master himself: Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman wrote the 2002 film "Adaptation," which tells a story about a fictional version of himself and his fictional twin brother, Donald. In "Adaptation," insecure and self-loathing screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ( Nicolas Cage ) suffers from writer's block, as he tries to adapt a book that seems impossible to translate to the screen. Meanwhile, his twin brother Donald (also Cage) decides that he wants to be a screenwriter too, and tries his hand at Charlie's life's work.

If a double performance from Cage isn't enough of a selling point, the fact that Kaufman wrote a movie about a screenwriter adapting a book should do the trick. In his hands, the story turns into a commentary on the Hollywood machine, the difference between reality and fiction, a semi-adaptation of Susan Orlean's real-life bestseller "The Orchid Thief," and an update of Sam Shepherd's classic stage comedy "True West."

Plus, it features a stacked supporting cast. Screen queen Meryl Streep delivers big time as author Susan Orlean, Chris Cooper serves as a perfect antagonist, and Brian Cox shows up to steal a few scenes as Robert McKee. Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tilda Swinton also appear in small roles. All of these actors bring a sense of quirky energy and make what could've been an overly heady movie into a fun ride. Viewers be warned though, anyone looking for a one-for-one recreation of "The Orchid Thief" should look elsewhere.

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen's love letter to Paris in the 1920s is both a sweet high-concept comedy and an evaluation of the virtues of nostalgia. "Midnight in Paris" centers around Gil (Owen Wilson), a Hollywood script doctor, who dreams of writing a meaningful novel. While in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents, Gil discovers a car that takes him back to 1920s Paris at midnight. Gil goes on the trip of a lifetime, where he hangs out with literary and artistic greats like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Salvador Dalí, Gertrude Stein, and many, many more.

"Midnight in Paris" plays like an art and literature lover's dream, as these legendary writers and artists get the chance to engage with someone who already knows their reputations and masterworks, which leads to some hilarious jokes. The casting in this film is excellent, as Tom Hiddleston proves to be an inspired choice as a young F. Scott Fitzgerald, while Adrian Brody is hilarious as a rhinoceros-obsessed Dalí. Any fan looking to get lost in a whimsical story featuring some of the most influential names of the 20th century need look no further than "Midnight in Paris."

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

2018's "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" is based on the true story of professional biographer Lee Israel (via Time ). Struggling to write her next book and pay the rent, Israel (Melissa McCarthy) uses her gift for getting into the lives of other people and forges letters from all sorts of famous folks, which she sells for a high price. What ensues is a deep look inside a damaged and lonely person, who's often more comfortable embodying others rather than herself.

McCarthy — who's typically scene-stealing in comedic vehicles like "Bridesmaids" — plays against type here and brings a prickly exterior to almost every scene she's in. In her hands, Israel becomes a lovable hard drinker and sailor-mouthed depressive. But underneath the movie's pain and drama lies a quietly devastating look at an author whose talents went under-appreciated in her time. Nobody turns to fraud for fun and "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" makes a strong case that forgery really is Israel's last resort.

It also makes pains to not overly romanticize its protagonist's gifts. Even though expertly crafting false biographical correspondence is no easy feat, the audience is never explicitly rooting for Israel to get away with it. It's akin to watching a talented friend burn their skills on a fruitless enterprise and here, the viewer grows to admire Israel's work before wishing she put her efforts towards something else.

Ruby Sparks

Zoe Kazan wrote and stars in "Ruby Sparks," a film about a fictional manic pixie dream girl come to life. Author Calvin (Paul Dano) writes about a character named Ruby Sparks, and is startled to see that this person on his page suddenly appears in the form of a living, breathing Ruby Sparks (Kazan). Calvin soon discovers that his writing about Ruby holds sway over Ruby in the real world.

This high-concept plot explores heady themes like how women are objectified in fiction by male creators or what it means for an author to engage with their material once it leaves the page and enters the real world. While the movie is based around this complex metaphor, it never fails to entertain. Dano and Kazan are wonderful in the lead roles and the cast is rounded out by the likes of Antonio Banderas, Annette Benning, and Steve Coogan — who's funny enough to read a phone book.

The film got mostly positive reviews by critics, including Roger Ebert , who wrote that "the movie's intriguing in its fanciful way." Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris of "Little Miss Sunshine" fame bring Kazan's script to life here, and anyone looking for a meta tale about writing will be sure to enjoy "Ruby Sparks."

Virginia Woolf is an author whose work seems like it would be difficult to adapt for the big screen due to her focus on interiority, or the way that characters think and feel, which is hard to show on-screen. Luckily for Woolf fans, 2003's "The Hours" — based on a book of the same name by Michael Cunningham — heavily vibes on Woolf's " waves " length. 

The movie tells the story of three women in three different time periods, who are all interconnected by Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway." There's Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) trying to write in 1923, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) trying to live in 1951, and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) trying to throw a party in 2001.

Both the film and its source material owes a ton to Woolf's classic works like "A Room of One's Own" and "Mrs. Dalloway." In "The Hours," much like in Woolf's novels, each female protagonist puts on a face for the world (and men) around her, which hides all that she has going on underneath the surface.

All three actresses shine in "The Hours," as do supporting cast members like Richard Harris in a particularly tragic performance. For anyone unfamiliar with Woolf, "The Hours" is a fantastic and emotional ode to a woman who created art at a time that didn't understand her or want her to.

Bright Star

Academy Award-winning writer-director Jane Campion brought her signature light and considered touch to 2009's "Bright Star." The film depicts the romance between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish).

Today, Keats is a well-known 19th century Romantic poet. However, in his own time, Keats felt he was a failure. His published work received mostly middling reviews and he died at 25 of tuberculosis. This context brings a tinge of sadness to the film since anybody familiar with the poet is aware of the tragic future outcome of his budding romance with Fanny.

Campion keeps a movie about a romantic rather subdued. Instead of making Keats' and Fanny's relationship into a loud ball of anachronistic erotic behavior, she spends time on the intimate moments the pair share together. The tiny beats of silence they share, the expression on Fanny's face when she receives a letter from Keats, and the moments where the pair read poetry all create a gorgeous portrait of young love. In other words, Campion captures the romance people are capable of when just being around one another is enough. However sad though it may be, this beautiful movie is quietly excellent and not to be missed.

Becoming Jane

Jane Austen received the Hollywood biopic treatment in 2007's "Becoming Jane." While the movie is not a particularly accurate account of Austen's ascendance to the literary hall of fame, it is a fun romp through Austen's past. In the film, Anne Hathaway plays the budding literary superstar, who's marked by equal intelligence and charm. As she makes her way through the world, she encounters suitors of all shapes and sizes, from all manner of backgrounds both privileged and unprivileged alike.

The movie is framed as "the inspiration" for Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." Any fan looking for a granular recreation of Austen's process or life in the Regency Era be warned — "Becoming Jane" is firmly a rom-com with biopic window dressing. Most of its plot revolves around Austen's relationship with Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy). While Lefroy existed in real life, scholars aren't certain he was ever romantically involved with the author (via The Jane Austen Centre ). However, the fiction weaves into the film is more fun than issue.

"Becoming Jane" may not reveal anything particularly noteworthy about Austen or her literary process. However, it does allow Hathaway to put enough charisma on screen to fill her own novel. So, like a fun read, "Becoming Jane," entices audiences and doesn't overstay its welcome.

Some movies about authors are played for grins, while others — like 2005's "Capote" — are played deadly serious. This biopic details the six years that Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) spends writing his magnum opus, "In Cold Blood," and the heavy toll that this work of investigating and writing about a heinous crime takes on Capote.

This book details the real-life murders of a family in Kansas, as well as the subsequent investigation into the killings, and the trial and executions of the men who committed them. In an interview with The New York Times , Capote discusses his revolutionary approach of writing this true story using the devices of fiction, which is widely credited as creating the non-fiction novel (via Brittanica.com ).

The late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman captures this dark material marvelously. He completely channels the author, and won his only Oscar for the performance. While many authors have led interesting lives, not many have worked on a story that fundamentally altered the course of their life, and "Capote" captures the destructive toll of creation marvelously.

Young Adult

In 2011's "Young Adult," Mavis Gary ( Charlize Theron ) is a former prom queen, who's now a stunted young adult fiction writer with a penchant for bitter put-downs and whiskey. Mavis returns to her hometown and embarks upon a doomed quest to win back her old high school flame, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). That Buddy is happily married with a pregnant wife doesn't deter Mavis one bit, who tries to reconnect with her old flame, all while connecting in surprising ways with Matt (Patton Oswalt), a bullied ex-classmate she barely remembers.

While "Young Adult" could have played like a depressing slice-of-life movie, in the hands of screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman — who team up again after the wildly successful "Juno" — it subverts expectations to become something totally unique, which has as many laughs as dark moments.

Theron shines here, as she goes for broke and swerves between unbridled nastiness and vulnerability on a dime. She's matched only by stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt, who injects a fairly grim film with a much-needed sense of humanity and empathy. In fact, Oswalt's performance is so good that Roger Ebert described it as the "key to the film's success" in his review.

Almost Famous

2000's "Almost Famous" dramatizes the actual and envy-inducing early days of director Cameron Crowe's career in music journalism (via Rolling Stone ). In the movie, a teenager named William Miller (Patrick Fugit) gets hired by Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres (Terry Chen) to go on tour with a fictional band called Stillwater. Stillwater — with their long hair, sweet riffs, and infighting — acts an amalgamation of the legendary rock bands from the 1970s like Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers.

 The movie's secret sauce is its ability to express William's passion for writing. William, like his real-life counterpart Cameron Crowe, loves rock n' roll and Crowe is able to make this enthusiasm vibrate off the screen, so viewers can reach out and grab a fistful of William's lust for life and epic experiences. Plenty of movies deal with the troubled lives of writers and many make hay of the inspirations that lead to their most influential works. However, very few films explicitly show the audience what it feels like to care about something enough to write about it for a living and do so in such a warm, sweet way. If all of that didn't sell it, "Almost Famous" also features the most iconic use of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" of all time. Seek this movie out wherever it can be found.

Stranger Than Fiction

"Stranger Than Fiction" is a somewhat odd movie. Its director Marc Forster was previously known for sad fare like "Monster's Ball," and it stars Will Ferrell in his first real dramatic role as IRS auditor Harold Crick. Crick lives life like any everyman. He works, he chats with friends, and he pines for romance — until this existence is suddenly interrupted by a disembodied voice narrating his life. Crick goes on a quest to find the source of this narrator, and soon discovers that he's the subject of the next novel by author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who's known for killing off her protagonists. 

"Stranger Than Fiction" uses its meta concept to explore the relationship between love, art, and creation, and it tackles these heady topics in a palatable and off-beat way thanks to Ferrell's turn as Harold Crick. Given the surreal nature of the story, Ferrell's acting chops fit into the movie's heightened world. In a film that dives into absurdity from its opening moments, Ferrell reveals a unique ability to reverse his usual funny man shtick. Instead of handling routine moments with absurdity, he handles absurd moments subtly. While the movie is about Harold Crick, it also relies on the relationship between Crick and Eiffel, as two people who discover the unexpected ways they influence each other. It speaks to that on a micro level as well as on a macro one, as Eiffel confronts her abilities and power as a writer, which is done perfectly in Thompson's hands.

Barton Fink

The Coen Brothers' "Barton Fink ” is a lot of things. It's a movie about writer's block — famously written during the Coen Brothers' own writer's block (via Cinephilia Beyond ) — it's a showcase of John Turturro's and John Goodman's acting abilities, and it might even be an allegory for the life of the mind . However, the one thing it most definitely is, is a fantastic movie.

The story follows Turturro's Fink — a successful New York playwright concerned with the common man — when he moves to Los Angeles in 1941 to write for a major Hollywood studio. Fink is assigned to write a wrestling picture and he immediately comes down with a case of writer's block. Fink sets out to find inspiration, which inevitably leads to various bizarre only-in-a-Coen-Brothers-movie-moments.

For the unfamiliar, the Coen Brothers are riffing on a real-life frequent 20th-century practice of the literary-minded heading out to Los Angeles in search of big paychecks and fame. According to the A.V. Club , the Coen Brothers loosely based the character of Fink on the playwright-turned-screenwriter Clifford Odets. In fact, it was their discovery that Nobel Prize-winning icon William Faulkner wrote a wrestling movie — 1932's "Flesh" — that initially inspired "Barton Fink" (and the film's character of W.P. Mayhew). Faulkner and the Coen Brothers? This movie is a novel head's dream.

My Salinger Year

Joanna Rakoff's memoir "My Salinger Year ” gets the Hollywood treatment this 2021 adaptation. The movie follows Rakoff (Margaret Qualley), as she begins her writing career by becoming an assistant to literary agent Margaret Westberg. Margaret (Sigourney Weaver) is a stand-in for real life literary agent Phyllis Westberg (via Variety ). Things take an interesting turn for Rakoff, when she begins taking phone calls from one of Westberg's most famous clients: J.D. "Jerry" Salinger.

"My Salinger Year" unfolds like a coming-of-age story shot through with "The Devil Wears Prada" energy. Over the course of her time working for Westberg, Joanna finds romance, renewed self-confidence in her own work, and makes decisions about where she wants her own life to go. While it doesn't have the same caustic wit that made "The Devil Wears Prada" so popular, "My Salinger Year" is most definitely an interesting snapshot into a career path most folks may not know anything about. And for any movie fan with dreams of writing, the idea of getting paid to talk to Salinger is surely catnip. 

Rob Reiner adapted Stephen King's 1987 novel "Misery" into a classic horror movie of the same name in 1990. The film follows famous romance author Paul Sheldon (James Caan), who gets into a terrible car accident. He's saved by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), a super fan who decides to hold her favorite author hostage. "Misery" mimics Kings real life in different ways, both superficially as it's a chilling nightmare about obsessive fans, and on a deeper level, as he's noted that it's an allegory for his cocaine addiction (via Rolling Stone ).

Bates brings so much demented menace to the role that she not only makes the film, but also won an Oscar for her performance, which is extra impressive considering how infrequently horror films get recognized by the Academy. Seriously, in Bates' hand, Annie Wilkes enters the pantheon of great movie villains alongside Heath Ledger's Joker, the shark from "Jaws," and Darth Vader. For fans of the horror genre or movies about writers, run, don't walk to see "Misery." However, viewers be warned — after watching "Misery," you'll never look at a sledgehammer the same way ever again.

If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

Mary Shelley

Author Mary Shelley is remembered for her 1818 masterpiece "Frankenstein." While the chilling story of Dr. Frankenstein's attempt to play god and create life of his own is known to many, the details of its creator's life are likely not. So, in 2017, indie director Haifaa al-Mansour brought Shelley's miraculous and tragic life to the screen in the biopic "Mary Shelley."

The film follows a teenage Mary (Elle Fanning), who falls in love with famed Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth). As she tries to navigate this relationship, Mary finds surprising inspiration for her "Frankenstein" during a night of telling ghost stories, and later struggles to get her book published.

Elle Fanning plays Shelley with the same vivaciousness she brings to her star performance as Catherine the Great on "The Great." Al-Mansour shoots the film like a romantic period piece, which makes this particular biopic unique. In reality, Mary Shelley lived through the Romantic art movement in Europe due to her relationship with Percy Shelley and friendship with Lord Byron, and her life itself is almost an inversion of a classic romance. Like typical romantic heroines, Shelley was a fiercely intelligent young woman of means, but her life did not wrap up in a neat happy ending. While she did fight her way through the period's sexist attitudes to publish arguably the greatest piece of horror fiction ever written, her life was also marked by various tragedies. "Mary Shelley" focuses on an influential moment of this authors life, and so communicates who Shelley was and her artistic achievements. For "Frankenstein" fans everywhere, it's a must see.

The Ghost Writer

In a time-honored Hollywood tradition, "The Ghost Writer" adapts another thriller by "Silence of the Lambs" author Robert Harris. Based on his novel "The Ghost," the movie follows an unnamed ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor), who's hired to complete the autobiography of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). This being a Harris adaptation, it's not really a spoiler to say it's not long before the ghostwriter's assignment lands the working writer in a hot pile of intrigue.

While the movie's machinations don't move it much beyond standard political thriller fare, its cast most definitely does. McGregor is fantastic in the leading role, as is always and former James Bond Pierce Brosnan as the former PM Adam Lang, since the movie leverages Brosnan's singular charm like a weapon. All the things that made him attractive as 007 make him terrifying as a politician. The rest of the class includes some early work from the always wonderful Jon Bernthal and a superb cameo from Eli Wallach. Yes, Tuco from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," shares a scene with Ewan McGregor. It's glorious.

Little Women

Greta Gerwig's 2019 "Little Women" is one of the great literary adaptations to hit the big screen. Besides the fact that it's based on one of the most beloved novels of all time (of the same name), it also features an incredible range of some of the most talented women in Hollywood.

"Little Women" the life and times of the four March sisters as they come of age, make career choices, get married, and grow up in the 19th century. Gerwig wisely decides to let the cast and Louisa May Alcott's wonderful source material do their thing. She also changes the novel's structure by moving between the "present" day (of 1868) and the past in flashbacks. However, originalists should have no fear. The flashbacks just add to the adaptation and ensure that the book's biggest moments all make it to the screen.

While "Little Women" focuses on all of the March sisters, it's Jo's story at heart, and she's played here by Saoirse Ronan. Jo is the writer of the bunch, whose imagination and creativity let her dream of a world beyond what she's told she can have. Ronan embodies Jo's free writer spirit to perfection, and her work is matched by Florence Pugh as bull-headed youngest sister Amy, Emma Watson as pragmatic eldest Meg, and Eliza Scanlen as kind-hearted Beth. The supporting cast includes Laura Dern as the girls' mother and Meryl Streep as their hilarious caustic aunt. Guided by writer-director Gerwig's confident and considerate hand, "Little Women" is a new classic in its own right.

Before Sunset

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy star 2004's "Before Sunset," the second entry of Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy. Each film in the trilogy depicts a romantic rendezvous between Hawke's Jesse and Delpy's Celine and each meeting is set exactly nine years apart (via Vanity Fair ). What sets this series apart is that Linklater filmed and released each movie in real-time. The first came out in 1995, the second in 2004, and the third in 2013, which gives the "Before" movies a truly authentic touch, as the characters and actors grow and age in real life.

In "Before Sunset," Jesse has just published a novel that recounts his initial meeting with Celine in "Before Sunrise." Jesse hasn't seen Celine since their meeting in the first movie and hopes the book will draw her out. It does and the pair spend "Before Sunset" rekindling their relationship, as they walk around Paris.

Jesse's novel not only ties in the events of the first film in an impactful way, but also gives the trilogy a literary bent. Linklater's "Before" trilogy can almost be viewed as a living, breathing novel set in three distinct time periods of its central characters' lives. Like the most famous romance stories — think Edith Wharton's "Age of Innocence" or Jane Austen's catalog — the "Before" trilogy is all about the ways that love both changes and holds constant over time.

Swimming Pool

"Isolated writer" movies, wherein an author goes somewhere remote to focus on working until things begin to go bump in the night, is a fantastic sub-genre and 2003's "Swimming Pool" is one of its best entries.

Author Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) goes on a retreat to her publisher's remote French country home to work on her next novel. However, her peace and quiet is quickly upended when the young and enigmatic Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) shows up, claiming to be the publisher's daughter. The two women immediately butt heads, as a war of strong personalities kicks off in earnest. However, instead of turning into a clash of the generations comedy, "Swimming Pool" instead becomes a slow burn thriller.

The movie's tension is so thick, the audience can dish it out with an ice cream scooper. Every exchange between Julie and Sarah results in another layer of mystery to untangle. Every guest Julie brings by the house's pool seems to annoy and arouse Sarah's interest more and more. And every answer Sarah gets from the elusive Julie only leads to more questions. By the film's end audiences will be wringing their hands in paranoia. For fans of movies with equal parts mystery, eroticism, and writing, "Swimming Pool" is for you.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Terry Gilliam, former Monty Python member and director of oddball wonders like "Brazil" and "Time Bandits," takes audiences on a weekend getaway they won't soon forget in 1998's "Fear in Loathing in Las Vegas." Based on Hunter S. Thompson's book of the same name, the film follows writer Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) on a trip to Las Vegas. Duke is supposed to be covering an annual motorcycle race, but he winds up taking a laundry list of drugs and tapping into "the savage heart of the American dream." 

As in the book, the movie's Duke is based on countercultural icon Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote the novel out of his own experiences in Las Vegas on two separate writing assignments for Rolling Stone . The book is wonderful in its own gross, hilarious, and acid-dipped way. The movie has some difficulty transferring that plot to the big screen, since the plot is pretty thin to begin with. 

However, Gilliam wisely does what he can to capture the book's energy by letting the writing speak for itself. He lifts Thompson's brilliant prose off the page and puts it on-screen in voice over, and Thompson himself is brilliantly captured by Johnny Depp, who even nails the author's unique staccato speaking style. For any movie fan who's heard the Thompson name but never read any of his work, check out "Fear and Loathing" for scenes that capture the best of his writing. 

Out of Africa

1985's "Out of Africa" is a movie from a bygone era when movie stars headlined films as opposed to franchises. In other words, "Out of Africa's" selling point was the white hot charisma of Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, not its place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There's nothing wrong with franchise movies, but it's hard to watch a movie like "Out of Africa" and not fall in love with its leads.

Loosely on Karen von Blixen's 1937 memoir of the same name (written under her pen name of Isak Dinesen), the film follows von Blixen (Streep), as she moves to a British colony in Africa in the early 20th century and begins a doomed romance with Denys Hatton (Redford). These experiences and more shape a story that she later turns into her memoir.

The movie plays like a highlight reel of adventure romance novels. The pair has differences when they first meet, eventually learn to get along, and then learn how to really get along. Without spoiling how any of these things occur, it's no spoiler to say Redford and Streep are absolutely magnetic together on screen. Both are acting legends in their own right and together, the pair gives off enough steam to power the Trans Pacific Railroad. While writing may not always be at the forefront of the film, it definitely foregrounds the type of fun often reserved for the best beach novels.

Shakespeare in Love

For anybody who likes their romantic comedy served with a side of literary history, look no further than "Shakespeare in Love." The movie — starring Joseph Fiennes as The Bard and Gwyneth Paltrow as his love interest Viola — fictionalizes a forbidden romance between Shakespeare and a high-born lady, which inspires his next play: "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter." Or rather, inspires him to make some changes to it.

The movie is fun for a few reasons. The cast is clearly having a ball, Fiennes and Paltrow have fantastic chemistry, and Dame Judi Dench shows up as Queen Elizabeth I. Plus, "Shakespeare in Love" stays true to its namesake's talent by bundling low comedy, high comedy, and tragedy all into the same package. The movie was an enormous box office hit when it was released in 1998. It was a critical hit too, and won seven Oscars, including Best Picture (via IMDB ). Esteemed critic Roger Ebert gave the movie four stars when it first came out and he credited the film with presenting the reason so many people fall in love with theater.

Some basic knowledge of Shakespeare's works and history will definitely help a viewer pick up on some of the movie's in-jokes. However, Shakespeare essentially wrote for anyone who's ever suffered the trials and tribulations of this mortal coil, and "Shakespeare in Love" has the same broad appeal.

The late great Iris Murdoch remains one the greatest authors of the 20th century. Her writing ran headlong into every oddity that makes humans human, and she never looked away from the quirks of our better and worse angels. 

"Iris" follows Murdoch at different stages of her life, so here, Kate Winslet plays young Iris and Dame Judi Dench plays the elder Iris. For fans keeping score, that's two epic generational talents in the same movie. Iris' husband, writer and professor John Bayley, is portrayed by Hugh Bonneville and Jim Broadbent in his younger and older forms. 

Ultimately, this 2001 biopic about Murdoch's life and eventual battle with Alzheimer's couldn't hope to be as original as its subject , it's certainly worth the watch to learn more about the woman behind some of the best books of the last 100 years, and who saw the world a bit differently from others. Luckily, she shared it in ways that continue to shape writers and readers alike, and "Iris" captures Murdoch's essence and influence as best it can.

Sunset Boulevard

"Sunset Boulevard" is an all-time classic film. Set in 1950s Hollywood, the movie follows Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, who's out of work and out of credit. Gillis hides from repo-men in what appears to be an abandoned palatial estate on Sunset Boulevard. However, he discovers the residence is actually home to reclusive actress Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Desmond was a big star in the silent era and wants Holden to help her write a comeback movie.

"Sunset Boulevard" is a one-of-a-kind love letter to the Golden Age of Tinseltown. For starters, it was directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, who was arguably one of the best talents of the era (if not all eras) and wrote classics like "Ace in the Hole," "The Apartment," and "Some Like It Hot." The writing of the film is fantastic, as it examines Hollywood and screenwriting itself through a sharp and satirical lens. Its commentary on the film industry runs deep, as it looks at the studio system and in particular, the silent era. 

In some meta casting, the role of Norma Desmond is played by real-life silent starlet Gloria Swanson, whose film career was resurrected thanks to her Oscar-nominated turn in this stunning performance. The movie also features cameos from the likes of Cecille B. DeMille, Buster Keaton, and Erich von Stronheim. "Sunset Boulevard" is a truly iconic movie and shouldn't be missed.

Sylvia Plath gets brought to life in 2003's "Sylvia," which focuses on the life of one of the most influential American writers to ever put pen to paper. Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) is studying at Cambridge, where she explores her writing and finds love in the form of the poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig). The two marry, but Sylvia struggles with depression and her writing career, all while taking care of her family.

Paltrow does a lot with a role that could have fallen into clichés by imbuing Plath with a warmth that makes her tragic suicide even more devastating, even though anybody familiar with Plath's story or work knows how it ends. "Sylvia" doesn't connect Plath's death directly to her work, but rather explores the deep sadness that she lived with her whole life, which informed her worldview. Come for more information about Plath herself, stay for Paltrow's performance, and leave with the knowledge that Plath still lives on in her beautiful grasp of language.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website .

The Lost Weekend

Writer-director Billy Wilder makes the list again with his 1945 adaptation Charles R. Jackson's novel of the same name, "The Lost Weekend." The movie follows the harrowing misadventures of alcoholic writer Don Birham (Ray Milland). Over the course of a single weekend, Birham begs, steals, and hits rock bottom in his search of another drink.

At the time, "The Lost Weekend" was one of the first stories to deal with the dark realities of alcoholism in American theaters (via FilmSite ). Thankfully, in Wilder's capable hands, the movie avoids diving into the exploitation deep end that is common in so many addiction narratives. Instead, Birham's addiction is treated with consideration and nuance and gets shown with warts and all.

Considering so many writers, including the author of "The Lost Weekend" (via The NY Times ), have contended with alcoholism and other addictions, it's refreshing to see a movie where the affliction is not romanticized. The Academy agreed as well. "The Lost Weekend" received Oscar wins for its director, screenplay, lead actor, and won the year's Best Picture award. While "The Lost Weekend," is by no means a light watch, it's certainly worth the weight of its heavy subject.

Miss Potter

For many, "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" is one the greatest children's books ever written and its imagery is recognizable the world over. In 2007, director Chris Noonan brought the story of the woman who created Peter Rabbit to the big screen with "Miss Potter." Beatrix Potter (Renée Zellweger) is an unconventional woman in the early 1900s: She is unmarried, and she dreams of writing a children's book based on her drawings of animals. Everything changes when she meets Norman (Ewan McGregor), a kind man who wants to publish her book, and with his help, Beatrix challenges a world that only sees women in the most limited light.

In the movie, Zellweger plays Beatrix Potter with a blend of quiet confidence and kind words. She is as sweet as Mary Poppins in the title role, but the movie's true creative stroke is the way it portrays Potter engaging with her creations, who spring to life on the page with lovely animated sequences. 

The brief inclusion of animation in a live action film goes a long way. It both reminds audiences of the impact of a story as seemingly simple as "The Tale of Peter Rabbit," and also illustrates just how powerful Potter's imagination really was. She had an incredible gift for storytelling, and "Miss Potter" shows how the sexist attitudes of her time almost prevented this gift from ever reaching the world. In the end, "Miss Potter" shows how belief — in oneself and in others — can be stronger than societal demands, and for anyone looking to get lost in pastoral Victorian England with a beloved author and her characters, "Miss Potter" is the film for you.

Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" tells the story of one of the most literally and figuratively revolutionary writers of all time. The movie follows Malcolm X (Denzel Washington) in a cradle-to-grave narrative, beginning with his childhood in Harlem as Malcolm Little and going into his prison time, in which he's reborn as Malcolm X.

The movie is a lot of things — entertaining, interesting, educational — but it's a showcase for Washington and Lee's indelible talents first and foremost. As the movie progresses deeper into Malcolm X's work and teachings for Black liberation and civil rights, Lee's direction gets more confidently stylized. The same goes for Washington's performance. It's almost as if the two men purposefully paced their originality on-screen to line up with the stages of Malcolm's life. 

While Malcolm X's only published work is his autobiography, his verse lives on through recordings and republished speeches. Unlike the majority of the other existing writers on this list, Malcolm didn't write fiction or craft stories. However, the impact of his work has arguably had the most to say about life in America, which is just one of many reasons why Spike Lee's "Malcom X" is an appointment viewing.

Saving Mr. Banks

"Saving Mr. Banks" recounts Walt Disney's efforts to woo author P.L. Travers to grant Disney the movie rights to her work. The work in question? The practically perfect-in-every-way "Mary Poppins." The movie's conflict revolves around Travers' (Emma Thompson) reluctance to let Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) turn her creation into a candy-coated Disney vehicle. The story is based on the real life production of "Mary Poppins." However, publications like Vulture  pointed out that this film excludes a number of things from the true story and in doing so, warps what happened. This makes sense considering Disney Studios released "Saving Mr. Banks," likely had to ensure the story fit their company's squeaky clean brand.

That said, "Saving Mr. Banks" is still a worthwhile watch for fans of Traver's books, the movie adaptation of "Mary Poppins," or both. It delves into the differences between her book and the movie, and it also explores Traver's childhood as an inspiration for the original. Most interestingly, however, "Saving Mr. Banks" depicts a story about an author losing control over the work they put out into the world. It may have too neat an ending for some folks' taste, but it's still an interesting question for a movie to address nonetheless.

Director Jim Jarmusch's "Paterson" is a love letter to folks who find beauty in things like taking the bus or having a beer at the same bar every night of the week, and is a must-watch for the poetically inclined. Paterson (Adam Driver) lives and drives a city bus in Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson is a kind and quirky man, who's also a wonderful poet. There's not much more to the plot than that: Poetry, routine, and the occasional disruption of that routine. 

While this may not sound like much of a story, Jarmusch is a master at communicating feelings. "Paterson" features lush sound design — like the distinct sound of a spoon hitting a cereal bowl in this scene — and marvelously composed shots that capture the granular details of each object in their frames. In other words, Jarmusch takes a movie about a poet and turns it into his own visual poetry.

"Paterson" is a beautiful movie to behold and its subtly meticulous crafting rewards multiple re-watches. Plus, the poetry in the film was written by established poet Ron Padgett (via PBS NewsHour ). It's an excellent showcase of the American author's work and lends the film a sense of authenticity that not many other movies about fictional artists have.

Set at the end of the 19th century, the 2018 biopic "Colette" charts the rise to prominence of the French female writing phenom Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightly), as well as her abusive relationship with her husband and publisher Henry Gauthier-Villars a.k.a. "Willy" (Dominic West).

For the unfamiliar, Colette penned a popular series of French novels about a teenager named Claudine, as she comes of age in France. The novels were largely based on Colette's own life and were enormously popular with young women upon release. However, Colette's husband took credit for her work and originally published the Claudine novel with his name on them (via TIME ). It's probably not too much of a spoiler to say that Colette and Willy eventually divorced.

How Colette eventually gets credit for her own novels is the driving conflict of the film — so we won't spoil that information here with more historical facts. Finding out how she did it in "Colette" is definitely worth any fan's time. Critic Nell Minnow writes for Roger Ebert that Knightley "gives one of her best performances as a girl with spirit and talent who becomes a woman with ferocity and a voice." Knightly and West ooze chemistry — even when they're furious with one another — and the whole movie is a sultry affair about an author, who lived the way she wanted and eventually got the credit for writing the way she wanted too. Cheers to you sister.

The Shining

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 classic "The Shining" is not only perhaps the best of the "isolated writer" movie sub genre, but for many, it's one of the best horror movies of all time . Based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, "The Shining" sees failed writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) move his family into the remote Overlook Hotel for the winter. Torrance takes a job as the hotel's winter keeper as a means to find peace, quiet, and money, while he attempts to write his novel. This being a King story, things in the Overlook Hotel take a turn for the supernatural fairly quickly. This being a Kubrick movie, the scarier things take a turn for the striking as they appear on screen.

It's hard to stress the impact of "The Shining" enough. The 1970s were marked by grizzly low-budget exploitation horror films like "The Last House on the Left" and the iconic "Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and "The Shining" kicked off the new decade like a behemoth nobody asked for or understood. At the time of its release, the movie was widely critically dismissed and even Stephen King panned it (via IndieWire ). 

However, time has been kind to "The Shining." Today, the fingerprints of "The Shining" are everywhere. Its score, cinematography, and classic lines are endlessly honored, parodied, and copied in everything from contemporary horror movies to episodes of "The Simpsons. " In cultural currency, "The Shining's" credit is more than " fine " — it's a perfect 850.

The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society

"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" is an early 20th century romantic drama with a dash of modern sensibilities and a great admiration for the power of book clubs. Based on Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows' book of the same name, the WWII-era film follows author Juliet Ashton (Lily James) on her writing assignment to the island of Guernsey. It's 1945 and Juliet travels to a small British Channel isle to investigate its book club, "The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society," which is rumored to have been founded under Nazi occupation. Once Juliet arrives, she discovers intrigue, book lovers, and the dashing Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman). 

While its plot is a tad predictable — Juliet is engaged before she embarks on her journey but that Mr. Adams is so handsome and charming that she may have to call her wedding off — the movie serves as a sweet love letter to literary fans. The story revels in the connection strangers find over their shared passion for great works of art. Anybody who's ever joined a book club or even an online fandom will appreciate "The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society" for what it is: a familiar conversation for friends of the genre. Books don't always need to be big unwieldy challenging works; sometimes they just need to offer comfort to their readers. Luckily, Juliet and the rest of the "Potato Peel Society" offer comfort in spades.

Gary Oldman stars in a wonderful performance as the man who penned "Citizen Kane” in David Fincher's 2020 biopic "Mank." The movie centers around writer Herman Mankiewicz (Oldman) a.k.a. "Mank" and the drama surrounding the creation of arguably the best movie of all time . Most of this drama stems from the screenwriter himself. Mank is too smart for his own good. When he's not being over-served in bars, he's a hair's breath away from insulting whichever benefactor is bankrolling his good time. Whether it's titan of industry William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) or "Citizen Kane ” star and director Orson Welles (Tom Burke), nobody is safe from Mank's biting wit.

Director David Fincher also uses the movie to shine a light on an odd period of Hollywood history. The movie mirrors the structure of "Citizen Kane:" It unfolds in a series of moments (some fictionalized according to Vulture ), which Fincher argues likely impacted the final script that Mank handed over to Wells. In doing so, the movie dives into early 20th century American politics and the idea that Hollywood has acted as a political machine since its inception.

It's all very heady stuff. It's also all complicated by the feud between Welles and Mank over who really wrote which part of the screenplay. In fact, movie critic Pauline Kael first raised the issue in her 1971 essay " Raising Kane ." The debate around contribution to the screenplay has since continued, but one thing's for sure: "Mank" is a fantastic film about movies and the people who write them.

A Mouthful of Air

Based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Amy Koppelman — who also wrote and directed the film — "A Mouthful of Air" explores the realities of living with postpartum depression. Julie ( Amanda Seyfried ) is a new mom and children's book author, who attempts suicide. The movie then explores Julie's day-to-day life of trying to balance her depression against her various personal and professional responsibilities. 

Koppelman's various works have all dealt with mental health issues in different forms and her experience in depicting the topic in a thoughtful and multi-dimensional way shines through in "A Mouthful of Air." While the film's critical reception was mixed , critic Nick Schager pointed out that the movie's strongest element "is its refusal to propose a one-to-one explanation" for depression in his review for Variety . 

"A Mouthful of Air" tackles its tough subject with an abundance of empathy. It also features a strong central performance from Seyfried, whose inner feelings and conflicts are at odds with what the outside world sees: a woman who "has it all" and writes books that help readers confront their fears. "A Mouthful of Air" is not easy to get through. However, Koppelman's efforts resist exploitative tropes and create a story about understanding and the potential for healing.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention LiLifeline by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

My Brilliant Career

1979's "My Brilliant Career" is about an aspiring author named Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis) and highlights the not-so-glamorous part of the life of the aspiring writer in late 19th century Australia. Sybylla lives on a farm, where she dreams of being a writer, although her parents see this as just a flight of fancy. Unable to afford the cost of her care, they ship her off to live with her wealthy grandmother, where Sybylla experiences love, a world outside of what she knows, and the means of making her dreams come true.

What sets "My Brilliant Career" apart from similar stories of young adults confronted by the unrelenting reality of responsibility is its refusal to look away from Sybylla's faults. She's bright and creative, yes, but like everybody, she's flawed. It's a truly fantastic character portrait that's definitely worth a watch. Audiences at the time agreed too. "My Brilliant Career" won 6 Australian Film Institute awards in 1979 including Best Film and Best Actress for Judy Davis' performance.

Wonder Boys

Based on Michael Chabon's 1995 novel of the same name, 2000's "Wonder Boys" follows Professor Grady Tripp ( Michael Douglas ) over the course of a few eventful days. Tripp wrote a successful novel some time ago, but in the present, his wife has left him and he passes his time getting high and teaching creative writing. Tripp is stuck with writer's block, but a weekend with two of his students Hannah (Katie Holmes) and James (Tobey Maguire) helps him find the story that he needs to tell. 

When the movie was released, it was met with great reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the movie four stars and felt Michael Douglas gave a career stand-out performance as Tripp. Douglas is usually enough reason to see any movie, but "Wonder Boys" also features fantastic turns from then upcoming stars like Toby Maguire and Katie Holmes. Francis McDormand also brings her singular personality to the movie as Tripp's love interest, and there's even a wonderful part for Rip Torn as an aging and mysterious writer named "Q."

A movie that's made with as much care as "Wonder Boys" shouldn't go unnoticed. Most folks who've spent time in a creative writing class will enjoy the movie's specificity; movie fans who haven't will simply enjoy the ride.

The Kindergarten Teacher

"The Kindergarten Teacher” is a pitch-black look at the pain of feeling like you have something to say but don't have the talent to say it well. The 2018 movie is a remake of a 2014 Israeli film of the same name and centers on Lisa ( Maggie Gyllenhaal ), an aspiring poet-turned-kindergarten teacher. Lisa is not a particularly good poet, but one of her students shows promise as a writer. Following in a long line of misguided anti-heroes, Lisa goes to extreme lengths to attempt to foster her student's talent.

Not surprisingly, Gyllenhaal is fantastic in this role, which Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers called a "new career peak" for the actress, who "[compels] us to understand a woman who maybe doesn't understand herself." Viewers be warned: "The Kindergarten Teacher ” is capital "D" Dark. Not since Salieri in "Amadeus" has a character so singularly captured the despair of a person coming to terms with their artistic limitations. It's an unfair fact of life that everybody isn't a genius. However, after "The Kindergarten Teacher,” the audience might feel blessed that at least they're better at coping with that reality than Ms. Lisa.

The bachelor party movie is a time-honored tradition in Hollywood. Most generations have their definitive version and some outings in the sub-genre even include Tom Hanks . Meanwhile, other takes like "Sideways" are helmed by director Alexander Payne, who seems to thrive on stories about human behavior that most audiences wish didn't exist. 

Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) are two old college buddies, who set off to California's wine country for Jack's bachelor party. Miles is a broke divorced writer with a finished manuscript that he's afraid to let anyone read and a drinking problem. Jack is a small-time actor, who's marrying for money and looking for a few more illicit affairs before he gets married and his good looks fade away entirely. Neither man is happy and neither man is what you might call a good person. For example, Miles robs his mother to pay for the trip and Jack beds a wine server early on in the trip.

Admittedly, none of this sounds like a good time. However, Payne shines a light on average folks at their worst in a way that can make everybody laugh at just how low human beings can go. "Sideways," like the 2004 novel it was based on, is side-splittingly funny. It also has a ton to say about wine, relationships, and things that inspire people to take big swings, like finally dusting off that old manuscript and letting someone read it.

Julie & Julia

Hungry viewers beware, "Julie & Julia” puts a bevy of famous chef Julia Child's signature dishes on screen and will make anyone who watches come down with a searing case of hunger. Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is an aspiring author, who's feeling a bit directionless. So, Julie decides to make all 524 dishes from Child's cookbook "The Art of French Cooking" in a year and keep a blog of this massive effort. At the same time, the film follows Julia Child (Meryl Streep) in the years before she becomes a world-renowned chef, when she is just an American in Paris, who enrolls in French cooking school. The film cuts back and forth between Julie and Julia, as each woman faces her own seemingly endless well of challenges in pursuit of her goals of self-discovery, and sharing that self with the world.

Based on two true stories, "Julia & Julia" draws from Julia Child's autobiography "My Life in France," as well as Julie Powell's memoir "Julia & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously," which was the book that Powell published thanks to the popularity of her blog (via Variety ). Both Adams and Streep are marvelous actors in their own right, but it shouldn't be a surprise to hear "Julie & Julia" is very much Streep's vehicle. Her performance as Child plays like a loving tribute to a larger-than-life personality, who brought French cuisine to homes across the United States and world. This was the final film of writer-director Nora Ephron, and her assured hand plus the work of Streep and Adams all bring an infectious energy that is almost guaranteed to leave a smile on viewers' faces.

American Splendor

2003's "American Splendor" is all about the intersection of fact and fiction. The movie is based on a long-running comic series of the same name, which itself is based on the life of its author Harvey Pekar. The real-life Pekar narrates the film, while his on-screen counterpart is portrayed by Paul Giamatti.

While all of this may sound overly complex for a movie about a comic book writer, it's very in line with the spirit of "American Splendor." Unlike "Batman" or "X-Men" comics, Pekar is no superhero. In fact, his comics are very honest about what he is: a file clerk with a few ex-wives, who lives in Cleveland. This honesty is part of what makes his work so engaging. It also makes the movie a fairly unabashed look into the life and times of a very unique creator.

From the highs and lows of Pekar's moderate fame to his bout with cancer, "American Splendor" pulls no punches in covering its subject, which works considering its author never pulled any punches about himself either. The movie's style — a hybrid of documentary interviews with the real life Pekar and well-executed dramatic recreations with Giamatti as Pekar — place the film firmly in the indie category. However, its experimental style shouldn't be considered a barrier to entry. Much like its creator, "American Splendor" is shaggy and weird, but it's got a ton of heart.

2011's film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's 2009 novel "The Help" was not only a smash hit with audiences , but also introduced a wide array of film viewers to the talents of Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer.

"The Help" is set during the early 1960s in the South, and kicks off in earnest when Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone), a young aspiring writer, returns home from college. Since leaving home, Skeeter has discovered a new way of seeing things, and finds that she's deeply uncomfortable with the way that white families in her hometown treat their Black maids. Skeeter begins interviewing domestic workers Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) in an effort to tell their side of the story. Soon, Skeeter's work causes trouble among the racist white community, particularly once the maids begin to demand better treatment from their employers.

Both the movie and novel have been widely criticized for centering the voices of its white characters. Davis herself told The New York Times  in an interview that she regretted her role in the film because "it wasn't the voices of the maids that were heard." So, in respect to Ms. Davis, appreciate "The Help ” for making her and actress Octavia Spencer household names since they are both seriously fantastic in this movie, but don't come to "The Help" for a detailed or thoughtful exploration on race relations in America.

The Diving Bell & The Butterfly

"The Diving Bell & The Butterfly" is the incredible true story of one writer's ability to dictate his entire memoir through a series of blinks after suffering a stroke. Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathiew Amalric) is the French editor of the fashion magazine Elle. He's got a high-flying job, a loving family, and everything going for him until he suddenly has a stroke and wakes up to discover he has "locked-in syndrome." Jean-Dominque is almost entirely paralyzed, but his mental capacities remain as they were before, so he decides to write a book about his life.

Based on Bauby's 1997 memoir of the same name, "The Diving Bell & the Butterfly" deals with a subject matter that is often wildly moving and sometimes hopelessly upsetting. However, director Julian Schnabel deftly keeps the movie from falling into utter despair. It goes without saying, but anybody who can dictate an entire book just by blinking one eye to a speech therapist was born with an indomitable human spirit. It's this spirit and unbelievable energy that Schnabel, Amalric, and company bring to the screen. Come for the story's enrapturing hook and stay for a deep dive into a writer's soul.

Moulin Rouge!

Few people make movies like Baz Luhrmann. The director's more is more approach to filmmaking has produced visually striking movies like "The Great Gatsby” and "Romeo + Juliet," which are difficult to compare to much else and his 2001 musical "Moulin Rouge!" is no exception.

"Moulin Rouge!" follows Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young writer who sets off to find artistic fame and fortune with the Bohemian movement in turn of the century Paris. Christian doesn't find those things, but he does find an impassioned love affair at the Moulin Rouge with a theater singer and courtesan named Satine ( Nicole Kidman ). However, their love must be kept secret from the man who can save the Moulin Rouge from bankruptcy, but will only do so if he can have Satine all to himself.

This plot may sound clichéd, but Luhrmann's gift is to take clichés and infuse them with colors, movement, and set design so loud that any unoriginality is immediately drowned out by its fantastic surroundings. Plus, "Moulin Rouge!" is a jukebox musical. So, while there are a few original songs written for the movie, Luhrmann also repurposes anachronistic popular songs for this 1900 setting, like The Police's "Roxanne." The audience sees this world through naïve writer Christian's eyes, as he finally experiences love, a subject that he'd written about but never known for himself. Like the best airport romance novels, "Moulin Rouge!" turns the ridiculous into a great time. 

The End of the Tour

David Foster Wallace's seminal talent dominated the American literary field throughout the '90s. Chances are anybody who hasn't read his work has heard a portion of his famous "This is Water" speech  or perhaps has some ideas about the type of guy who lionizes Wallace, as Deirdre Coyle describes in "Men Explain David Foster Wallace to Me" for  Electric Lit . With all of that reputation preceding him, 2015's "The End of the Tour" is faced with the Herculean task of bringing Wallace from an idea into an intimate, human form.

Based on a true story, the movie is framed around a days-long interview in 1996 between Wallace (Jason Segel) and Rolling Stone contributor David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg). Lipsky accompanies Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for "Infinite Jest," and gets a surprising insight into the writer's life, at the moment when Wallace's life changes forever. 

In reality, Lipsky wrote about this time with Wallace for Rolling Stone , which Lipsky later turned into his memoir "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself." The memoir is the basis for "The End of the Tour," which is about two strangers connecting. Both Segel and Eisenberg are fantastic in this movie that's entirely carried by their ongoing riveting conversation. The movie isn't without its faults, as writer and former friend of Wallace Glenn Kenny wrote for The Guardian that "it gets everything wrong" about the writer. While the movie's not perfect, it's an interesting attempt to portray a singular artist on screen.

An Angel at My Table

Internationally renowned New Zealand author Janet Frame takes center stage in Jane Campion's 1991 biopic "An Angel at My Table." The film draws from the author's three autobiographies for its story: "To the Is-Land," "An Angel at My Table," and "The Envoy from Mirror City." Each book takes place in a different stage in the author's life and the movie follows suit with Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, and Kerry Fox playing Frame in her childhood, teenage, and adult years. "An Angel at My Table" begins with Frame's childhood growing up in an impoverished household. In adolescence, she gets institutionalized for a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, and finally finds fame on the page in adulthood.

With such a bevy of rich material to pull from, it's no surprise this movie is fantastic. It also doesn't hurt that it's directed by Oscar-winning director Jane Campion, whose characteristic empathy for her subjects radiates through "An Angel at My Table." In Roger Ebert's review, he says the movie gives "great attention to human detail." As usual, Mr. Ebert is dead-on. Campion does away with typical biopic clichés by simply focusing on the movie's one-of-a-kind protagonist and tell Frame's life story, which combines horror, perseverance, and brilliance.

In a Lonely Place

Humphrey Bogart does his noir thing in the 1950 classic "In a Lonely Place." Dixon "Dix" Steele (Bogart) tries to clear his name in a murder investigation, but it turns out, he has more problems than just being a murder suspect. He's a screenwriter who hasn't sold anything in a few years, his experience in WWII has left him prone to flights of rage, and he's not sure if his best girl actually wants to go through with their engagement.

Saying anything else ruins what makes film noir so special: the twists and turns. However, it's no spoiler to say that this is a classic of the genre. The movie is based on a novel of the same title by Dorothy B. Hughes. It was directed by studio system stalwart Nicholas Ray. Bogart's love interest and co-star in "In A Lonely Place" is played by Gloria Grahame Hallward, who brings a fantastic sense of "been there, done that" energy on screen that makes the movie that much more interesting. While this may be the oldest film on the list, it's not to be missed. They really, truly don't make 'em like this anymore.

"Spotlight" is named after the investigative team at The Boston Globe, and masterfully follows the newspaper's real 2002 investigation into allegations of child sexual abuse and systemic cover-ups within the Boston Catholic Church. This work won a Pulitzer Prize for The Boston Globe and set off a reckoning within the Catholic Church.

The movie — featuring a cast that includes Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Stanley Tucci, and Liev Schrieber — is a masterclass in focusing on details. Director Tom McCarthy zeroes on the minutiae of investigative journalism. It captures everything from pouring over personnel files to interviewing victims to waiting for records to be made public to beating down doors to get answers. The actors are all fantastic from top to bottom and everybody gets a moment to shine.

While the movie is not entirely without moments of very loud, very righteous indignation, for the most part, it trades fireworks for the facts of the real investigation. It's a wise choice that highlights the impact that hard-nosed local journalism can still have on the world at large, which is partly what makes it one of the greatest movies about journalists ever. For many, it's the 21st century's "All the President's Men." If all that wasn't enough to convince anybody to check it out, it also won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay in 2016.

Elisabeth Moss gives a powerhouse performance in "Shirley," which adapts Susan Scarf Merrell's 2014 novel of the same. Like the book, the movie tells a fictionalized story about famed horror author Shirley Jackson. For the unfamiliar, Jackson's works include the novel "The Haunting of Hill House" and the short story "The Lottery." Her writing is terrifying and claustrophobic in equal measure. Jackson was a master at saying the quiet part out loud and could turn social anxiety into a reason to hide under the bed.

The movie follows a fictional couple, who move in with Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), and are quickly brought into the strange and surprising world of Shirley Jackson. This framing of the story around outsiders who are brought into Jackson's home allows the audience to see various sides of the writer and her precarious approach to life. It also gives Moss the opportunity to put on an absolute show. Moss is never not fantastic but this role of Shirley Jackson gives her the opportunity to be mean, wounded, drunk, empathetic, brilliant, and anxious, all within the same scene. It should be in the conversation for some of her best work. Moss stans and horror fans, do yourselves a favor by putting "Shirley" on the top of your queue.

Screen Rant

10 great biopics about authors worth checking out.

Storytellers are endlessly fascinating, which might explain why biopics about authors are so popular. Here are 10 such films that are worth a watch.

There seems to be something infinitely appealing about the lives of authors. Time and again, Hollywood has turned to stories about creative talents struggling with their work. This tendency emerged almost in tandem with the industry itself, but it does seem to have moments of particular prominence. During these instances, studios and audiences collectively want to explore what it means to be a writer and to use language to grapple with some of the enormous questions facing humankind.

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While not all such films are successful, there have been more than a few biopics about writers that have managed to bring the inner minds of these figures to life.

Infamous (2006)

Truman Capote was, to put it mildly, a rather eccentric figure . While the big-budget film Capote is probably better-known than  Infamous , in some ways Toby Jones’ portrayal of the strange author and noted eccentric feels more authentic (this might be because Jones looks and sounds more like Capote).

In fact, there are some moments in the film where Jones almost seems to actually become Capote. What’s more, this film has the advantage of having some truly splendid actors in various roles including Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig, and Lee Pace.

Shirley (2020)

Elizabeth Moss is one of those actresses who somehow manages to succeed no matter what sort of role in which she appears. That is certainly the case with Shirley , in which she portrays the eccentric author Shirley Jackson, an author of one of the famous ghost stories ( The Haunting of Hill House ).

As she always does, Moss seems to effortlessly inhabit the psyche of her character, bringing the author to stunning life on screen.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

Melissa McCarthy has shown time and again that she is a truly stupendous comedic talent, but in this film, she gets to show that she also has formidable dramatic chops as well. She portrays the character of Lee Israel, a noted biographer who perpetrated a huge literary scam by selling fake letters from famous literary figures.

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McCarthy ably captures the wit and warmth of this character, as well as the many struggles that she has, including her failing writing career.

Tolkien (2019)

J.R.R. Tolkien was, of course, the author of The Lord of the Rings , arguably the most influential fantasy novel ever written. It took quite a while for a story about his life to come to the screen, but in 2019 it finally did so.

There’s no denying that Nicholas Hoult is an absolutely charming young actor, and he manages to imbue the character of Tolkien with a warmth and a genuineness that shines out from the screen every time that he appears. It’s a lovely little film and a worthy testament to the author’s early life.

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (2007)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of those biopics that manages to both capture the complexity of its subject and also experiments with film form itself. It follows the last years of the famous editor Jean-Dominique Bauby after he is afflicted with locked-in syndrome.

There are several points in the film where the camera actually adopts his perspective from where he is lying in bed, unable to move. It’s a beautiful, sad, and haunting film about one man’s heroic struggle to live.

Trumbo (2015)

There’s no question that Bryan Cranston is one of the best acting talents of his generation. His ability to capture a certain form of raw, masculine rage is unparalleled by almost anyone else working in Hollywood today.

In Trumbo , Cranston brings all of that to bear in his portrayal of the noted Hollywood screenwriter who was willing to destroy his career and his personal life by refusing to name names during the infamous Red Scare of the postwar era. While the viewer doesn’t always like Trumbo as a character, it’s impossible not to admire him.

The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

The Life of Emile Zola is one of many biopics produced in the 1930s (one of the golden ages of the genre). The title character is portrayed by Paul Muni, who went to great lengths to inhabit the character of the noted author Emile Zola. The latter was famous for intervening in the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish man was wrongfully imprisoned due to anti-Semitism in France.

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Despite this, the film doesn’t tackle the issue directly but instead focuses on this significant event in Zola’s life.

Wilde (1997)

Often, the mark of a truly great biopic is a lead who can truly inhabit the mind, body, and soul of their character. That is just what happens with Stephen Fry, who manages to inhabit the persona of the (in)famous writer and playwright Oscar Wilde.

It certainly helps that Fry bears a remarkable resemblance to Wilde, but it’s more than that. He manages to capture the tortured complexities of the film's gay subject, an author who attempted to live life on his own terms in an era in which such things were forbidden.

Shakespeare In Love (1998)

To be fair, Shakespeare in Love is a rather strange biopic, in the sense that it takes some substantial liberties with the known facts of Shakespeare’s life. Despite that, it is still a remarkable film, managing to be uproariously funny and at times wrenchingly sad.

There’s also undeniable chemistry between Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow, both of whom bring their utmost to their roles. And, of course, no discussion of this film would be complete without mentioning Judi Dench, who almost manages to steal the show as Elizabeth I.

Wild Nights With Emily (2018)

When thinking about actresses likely to portray the reclusive yet famous poet Emily Dickinson, most people probably wouldn’t have thought of Molly Shannon, most famous for her comedic talents.

Nevertheless, Shannon is truly extraordinary in her turn as Dickinson. While there is certainly a lot of silliness to the film, there’s no question that there is also a rich warm heart under all of the levity that allows the viewer to truly appreciate the poet’s genius .

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13 Movies About Authors

Annika Barranti Klein

Annika Barranti Klein likes books, obviously.   Twitter: @noirbettie

View All posts by Annika Barranti Klein

Renowned horror writer Shirley Jackson is on the precipice of writing her masterpiece when the arrival of newlyweds upends her meticulous routine and heightens tensions in her already tempestuous relationship with her philandering husband. The middle-aged couple, prone to ruthless barbs and copious afternoon cocktails, begins to toy mercilessly with the naïve young couple at their door. Available Everywhere This Friday.

What is a biopic? As it happens, I dislike the term “ biopic ” because most biographical movies are either dreadfully dull or fiction. That said, there are quite a few movies about real authors that are worth watching, some of them truer to real life than others. Let’s think of these merely as movies about real people, rather than strictly as biopics—though some of them clearly fit the definition of biographical pictures.

Becoming Jane (Jane Austen)

This lovely movie in which almost nothing happens (but that’s okay) is based on Austen’s letters to her sister Cassandra and focuses on a possibly fictional romance between Jane (Anne Hathaway) and neighbor Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), which is an… interesting choice, but works nicely.

Before Night Falls (Reinaldo Arenas)

I include this biopic of Cuban writer Arenas (Xavier Bardem) with a major content warnings for the fact that accused domestic abuser and cis man Johnny Depp plays a trans woman, and for Arenas’s death by suicide in the late stages of AIDS. That said, it’s a fascinating movie about a man who was unapologetically queer at a time when that was extremely unsafe, politically and otherwise.

Bright Star (John Keats)

Jane Campion’s beautiful love story about Keats (Ben Wishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) feels almost entirely like a dream. Paul Schneider notably plays Keats’s friend Mr. Brown, who interferes with the relationship.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Lee Israel)

Director Marielle Heller brings Israel’s (Melissa McCarthy) autobiography to life, in this devastating and biting comedy about the real life freelance writer turned literary forger who wrote and sold hundreds of forged letters ostensibly by other literary greats.

Colette (Colette)

It’s a tale as old as time: a man takes credit for a woman’s (in this case his wife’s) work. Colette (Keira Knightley) was a French writer whose husband published her first several novels in his own name. Rude even when he isn’t played by Dominic West.

Dickinson (Emily Dickinson)

There have been a spate of Emily Dickinson movies in recent history, including  A Quiet Passion starring Cynthia Nixon, but none have centered Dickinson’s (Hailee Steinfeld) queerness nearly so well as the Apple TV+ series, which borrows modern sensibility to tell a true story about a poet who was entirely ahead of her time.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)

With a screenplay by Angelou based on her autobiography, this 1979 TV movie puts Angelou (Constance Good) at the center of the events of her young life, rather than as an observer.

Iris (Iris Murdoch)

Novelist Iris Murdoch (Kate Winslet as a young woman, Dame Judi Dench in her twilight years) is shown in snippets of time through the POV of her husband John Bailey (Jim Broadbent), telling the story of their romance and her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Malcolm X (Malcolm X)

Spike Lee tells the epic story of Malcolm X’s (Denzel Washington) journey from his father’s assassination by the KKK to his conversion to the Nation of Islam in jail to his civil rights leadership, marriage to Betty (Angela Bassett), conversion to Sunni Muslim, and assassination. Based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X , which was co-written with Alex Hailey, in many ways this 1992 movie set the template for modern biopics.

Mary Shelley (Mary Shelley)

Director Haifaa al-Mansour strives to portray Shelley’s (Elle Fanning) life realistically, but the story loses something in its own lack of focus. It is, however, absolutely stunning, and the performances excellent (Tom Sturridge is delightfully terrible as Lord Byron).

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (Dorothy Parker)

This 1994 Alan Rudolph–directed picture follows Dorothy Parker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) from the Algonquin Hotel Round Table to Hollywood, and features a huge (mostly white) supporting cast playing many of her contemporaries.

This Boy’s Life (Tobias Wolff)

Before he was a respected professor of literature and author, Toby Wolff (Leonardo DiCaprio in his first big screen leading role) was an angry kid with an abusive stepfather (Robert De Niro). Though I have not seen it since it came out in 1993, I loved this story about a young teen’s attempts to save his own life.

Vita & Virginia (Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf)

Most lists of biopics include  The Hours , which is also about Virginia Woolf, but I prefer this extremely lesbian movie. Based on their letters, director Chanya Button focuses on popular author of the time Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) and enduringly popular author Virginia Woolf’s (Elizabeth Debicki) relationship. Bonus: Isabella Rosselini also stars.

3 More Movies About Writers

There are shockingly few biopics about authors of color—only three of the above list of 13. But! There have been at least a handful of excellent movies about fictional writers of color. Here are a few of them, all focused on Black writers.

• John Singleton’s 1993 Poetic Justice tells the story of a poet portrayed by Janet Jackson and with poems written by Maya Angelou.
• Kathleen Collins’s 1982 Losing Ground stars Seret Scott as Sara Rogers, a writer based loosely on the director herself (who was the first female Black American director of a feature film since the 1920s).
• Michael Schultz’s 1975 Cooley High is a coming-of-age story about Preach, an aspiring playwright, and his best friend Cochise, a basketball player, as they finish their senior year at Chicago’s Edwin G. Cooley Vocational High School.

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20 Best Movies About Writers That You Should Watch

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Writers are often ignored. But they are probably the most important part of film production. If a writer does not pen down a script, there is nothing to shoot. The director works closely with the writer, the actors come and consult the writers about their respective characters and dialogues. They are the first brick in the building. If you want to explore the writing process. There are some beautiful films that touch on that subject. Here is a list of 20 movies about writers that you should watch.

1. Adaptation

One of my favourite films about writing. Written by Charlie Kaufman about him adapting a book by Orlean. This is Kaufman’s one of the best works. He wrote a movie about him writing a movie.

Stream on: Amazon Prime Video

2. Barton Fink

Whatever Coen Brother touches turns into gold. Barton Fink is no exception. The Coen Brothers were writing a script about a different film when they hit writer’s block. To get their mind off it, they started writing a movie about a writer experiencing writer’s block. This film won a Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival which undoubtedly places it among the best movies about writers.

Stream on: Amazon

3. The Shining

I know. This is not a movie where the primary theme is writing. But, technically it makes sense. Jack is a writer. And he was just trying to get some writing done during the vacation.

Stream on: Netflix

It is a biographical film about Dalton Trumbo who was a top Hollywood screenwriter. This film features Trumbo’s struggles when he was blacklisted and accused of using his scripts as Communist Propaganda.

Featuring an outstanding performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman (who always delivered an outstanding performance) Capote is a film that follows the journey of Capote to Kansas with his partner to investigate a murder. He begins to show compassion for the killers and starts developing a connection with one of them. Hoffman got an Academy Award for his performance in this film.

6. Sunset Boulevard

One of the best from Billy Wilder. It features the story of Nora Desmond who gets a second shot at fame when a screenwriter agrees to write a script for her.

7. Adult World

An aspiring poet takes up a job at an adult bookstore. She meets an isolated writer who decides to be her mentor.

8. Before Night Falls

Being homosexual in Castro’s Cuba wasn’t easy. Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls explores the life and writings of brilliant Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas.

9. Before Sunset

A sequel to Before Sunrise, this film explores Celine and Jesse as they cross paths again for a single day in Paris. They try to find out what might have happened if they acted on their feelings back then.

10. Midnight In Paris

Directed by Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris follows Gil as he travels to Paris for a vacation with his fiancée and her family. The city takes him through different points in time and away from her fiancée.

11. My Brilliant Career

Sybilla, a woman decides that she will focus on her career instead of marrying. Yet proposals from suitors do not stop coming her way.

12. The Player

Robert Altman’s The player follows a Hollywood producer Griffin Mill who begins to receive anonymous threats and feels that a screenwriter, David is behind it. He calls him into the office to sort things out but ends up murdering him.

13. Tolkien

A biographical film based on the life of J. R. R. Tolkien, the writer of The Lord of the Rings. It follows Tolkien as he begins to get inspiration from a tight group of artists he is a part of. It explores his relationship with Edith which was threatened during WWI. Though the film failed to make an impression on the audience. But anyone interested in Tolkien’s life and work might give it a watch.

Stream on: Hotstar

Genius stars Colin Firth and Jude Law in the lead roles. It follows renowned book editor Max Perkins as he begins to develop a friendship with famous novelist Thomas Wolfe while working together on a project.

15. Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley is faced with disapproval from her family when they learn about her relationship with poet Percy Shelley. She elopes with Percy Shelley and stays in the home of Lord Byron where she conceives the idea of her novel “Frankenstein”.

16. Shirley

Another biographical film, this time, about renowned horror author Shirley Jackson. She gets inspiration for her next work as she and her husband take in a young couple.

Stream on: MUBI

17. Wonder Boys

Curtis Hanson paints the life of a college professor on the silver screen as he struggles to get over his writer’s block while dealing with a divorce and his expectant publisher.

18. Providence

This is a really interesting film from the master that is Alain Resnais. It follows an author with declining mental health as he writes his new book the characters of which are based on his family members. As we meet the family members at a dinner table, we get to know about their true nature.

Stream on: Not Available

19. Deconstructing Harry

Deconstructing Harry, directed by Woody Allen follows Harry who is suffering from writer’s block. The characters created by him both real and fictional from his books start to haunt him.

Sylvia traces the life of Sylvia Plath as she dreams of becoming an important writer. By the time she gets to college, she is emotionally fragile and suffering from depression. She falls in love with the famous poet Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath becomes increasingly obsessed with death.

This is the list of the 20 best movies about writers that you should watch. Let us know in the comments if you know any more movies that feature writers.

Apart from being a student of Comparative Literature, I love to watch, write and talk about movies. Approaching every day with pessimistic optimism.

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9 Wonderful Movies About Famous Writers

Discover a new side of your favorite authors and poets.

• Photo Credit: Neon

From Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning turn as Truman Capote to Jane Campion’s subtly beautiful film on the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Bryce, and even to Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose in The Hours , these films about famous writers are a great way to dive even deeper into the books we love to read.

Related: The 12 Best Movies Based on Books

Released during the height of quarantine, Shirley is a tense biopic about the acclaimed horror writer Shirley Jackson. As you might have guessed, the person who wrote such creepy stories and novels makes for interesting content herself. 

Author Susan Scarf Merrell wrote the novel of the same name that the movie was based on. The story is reminiscent of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? —a young couple comes to stay with Jackson and her professor husband, and the unsettling events that follow inspire Jackson to write her next book.

Recommended reading: Shirley , by Susan Scarf Merrell, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle  

The Best Outraged Reactions to Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" 

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The 15 Best Movies About Writers

Writers make the world better. They give us stories of love and horror and they live to inspire others. Every author is a vessel that contains the new worlds about to be born. Can you imagine a world without H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Salinger, Woody Allen or J. K. Rowling? To make us dream, feel, and change, they had to live on their own first. Masterful minds, great sets of words, firm hands and trusty pens are the ingredients that prepare the stories we enjoy so much.

Cinema has been kind and mean to writers. They aren’t as famous as actors or directors; yet, they are the basis of any production. The ups and downs of being a tale teller are shown in a great deal of titles that can’t be put into one single list. However, here are 15 movies that were able to portrait real and fictional writers.

15. Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Every now and then, we see famous people and when we think about them, we can’t remember why that happened. For the younger audience and the ones not paying much attention, Gwyneth Paltrow is just Pepper Potts or the wife of Brad Pitt in Seven. But, the truth be said, she can act. Much of the success of Shakespeare in Love lies in her presence; her first major, protagonist role.

We see a fictional love affair between William Shakespeare and Viola de Lesseps that leads to the making of Romeo and Juliet. Some people hate this film for its length and lack of accuracy; nonetheless, it’s a well-directed film that shows how hard it might be for a writer (even a great one) to create when there is nothing to write about.

If you look for adventures and life changing events, like love, you need to take challenges, even if they’re life- threatening. The way this fictional Shakespeare did.

14. The Ghost Writer (2010)

After the mysterious death of his ghost writer, the former Prime Minister, Adam Lang decides to recruit a new man to complete his memoirs. But deep secrets come to the surface that endangers the life of everyone involved. The new writer discovers the truth that powerful people want to bury and forget. As the movie progresses, we see that sometimes it is best to keep some facts off the record.

Roman Polanski gives excellent rhythm to this thriller starring Ewan McGregor and his most serious face. This doesn’t qualify as shocking like other works of him; it’s a simple plot where the Government links Adam to illegal acts of torture. The curious writer happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

13. American Splendor (2003)

Turn everyone you know into a comic book character. Include all of their strengths and weaknesses, their good and bad times, put all their essence inside a bunch of blank pages and become a teller of your life around them. Funny? 

Harvey Pekar is a strange name for a unique person. He is whom we see in this picture, all grumpy, and he was also real. We see him at his workplace, at home with his ex-wife, him getting a new wife, talking with friends, buying at the supermarket (or trying to), we see him walking, thinking and writing.

What makes the movie extraordinary is the strong personality of Pekar. The regular life of an unusual guy.

12. Stranger than Fiction (2006)

Pay attention to the sounds around you, you might listen to something weird. Maybe it’s the voice of the narrator of your life, the writer of your destiny. Harold Crick is a lonely man that seems to be living according to Kay Eiffel’s will. She’s the God of Harold, he can’t escape her, but he’ll try.

When Kay discovers that what she puts in her novel is affecting directly the life of someone else, she has to find a way to finish her book, knowing that whatever fate she chooses for her character, it will happen to a real man too.

The movie transports us to a world full of possibilities. When the movie ends, we realize that the real world is often the one that surprises the most. It doesn’t matter if you think there’s someone out there making choices for you, or if you believe you make your own path. You will find something here to make you think.

11. Before Sunset (2004)

Strange is how life works, it gives and takes equally. This is the second part of a successful trilogy that began with Before Sunrise. After nine years apart, the paths of Jesse and Céline cross again in Vienna.

Now he’s a successful writer who remembers in his book the one day he spent with Céline. She was supposed to be the love of his life, but wasn’t. Once more, we witness the undoubtable chemistry between these two people that could never have enough of each other, even if they were alone in the planet.

Love is in small talks and philosophies; in simple walks and a cup of coffee. Neither distance nor time matters. Love lives in moments and simplicity, just like this movie.

10. 2046 (2004)

Time is everything. Things that happen at the right time can mean all to someone; and what happens at the wrong moment can destroy a person forever. 2046 is the last of a series following the love life of the novelist Chow Mo-Wan. He writes about a train that travels to the future, looking for the lost memories. Never forget that all fiction is based on reality. It’s a one of a kind story with hints of science fiction on top of the drama of life.

It’s hard to let go off people, and even harder if they were your impossible loves. Is there a better way to go over them than writing a novel? Wong Kar-Wai, the director, takes care of every detail that combines the past and the future of the man we follow in the movie. Chow Mo-Wan learns that when something happens at the wrong time, it can leave traces of bitterness behind.

9. Misery (1990)

You can’t go wrong with this movie. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her memorable portrait of a woman obsessed with the writer of her favorite novels that have Misery as the heroine. She goes as far as locking him up and breaking his feet to prevent him from walking out the door. And more suffering is yet to come.

The mood is of complete isolation, everything’s white outside in the cold. Paul Sheldon, the main character, has to change the original tragic ending he gave to the saga of Misery, if he wants to stay alive. But there’s no reasoning with the mentally disturbed.

Sometimes we identify with a story so much; that an inner part we didn’t know about ourselves emerges from a deep corner of our conscience. That’s fanaticism. The creator of that story becomes the author of both, fiction and reality, and the time comes to deal with the consequences. This is another Stephen King’s classic that made him rich and made us tremble.

67 Replies to “The 15 Best Movies About Writers”

barton fink?

Definitely.

Great film.

I was going to post this and you beat me to it! Which makes me happy that others love this movie as much as I do.

Synecdoche ???

Hey admin u missed Barton fink..

Where is Auther.Auther for Al Pacino

the Following??

Das La Maison.

I totally agree with Dans la maison

You can’t have a list like this and not include Barton Fink which is the best film about writers.

At risk of beating a dead horse, Barton Fink

#1 – The Quills with Geoffrey Rush playing Marquise de Sade

barton fink?????????????????????????????????

Author, Author, definitely.

Barton Fink is a real miss here. In my opinion, Fellini’s Casanova, Providence, Mishima: A life in Four Chapters, Naked Lunch could be in this list.

Naked Lunch for sure.

Barton Fink, totally, just watched it again last night… amazing !!

List with many holes…

what about “seven psychopaths”?

you missed the best undoubtedly: Barton Fink

Adaptation is by far, the best. Charlie Kaufmann is a true genius.

naked lunch

I like the films chosen, but boy is this article badly-written. Not the first time I’ve had this complaint on this site. 🙁

Barton Fink!!! the absolute best existential treatise on a writer.

that’s what I’m talking about !!

Leaving Las Vegas? A failed screenwriter drinks himself to death.

Malina (1991), Dead Poets Society (1989), Psychosis (2010).

No one is saying a standout favorite of mine, “Moulin Rouge”!!

A writer writes of a play within a play to get the girl, whom he loses anyway.

There’s a little freebie couplet for you ;^)

Manhattan , Ruby Sparks , Deconstructing Harry ,The Pillow Book , very poor list…

Great to see Sunset Boulevard at a deserved first-place, but you definitely missed Barton Fink (and I’m not even a fan of the Coen brothers).

Midnight in Paris is the pits

‘Sideways’ really shouldn’t be in this post because it has nothing to do with the Paul Giamatti character being a writer, but rather him experiencing sad times with everything else around his life.

Finding Forrester, staring Sean Connery The Dark Half, staring Timothy Hutton

Finding Forrester

Naked Lunch!

Wonder Boys? The Words

wonder boys is decent

That question mark on j.k. Rowling haha

“Breakfast of Champions”

hmmm, is that film any good?

barton fink? bullets over broadway? on the road?

secret window?

Room and a Half. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1395059/

Barton Fink, Synecdoche New York, Secret Window, Following…

Midnight in Paris instead of Bullets over Broadway? I can’t even…

As much as I love Bullets over Broadway, I’ve been charmed over by Midnight in Paris. Thumbs up, great thoughts !

It’s probably way too transgressive for most, but RWF’s Satansbraten comes to mind.

Limitless & The Words?

Definitely Seven Psychopaths and Barton Fink

[…] Read more: https://www.tasteofcinema.com///2015/the-15-best-movies-about-writers/#ixzz4TNv7WPaa […]

I would probably remove Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (I prefer Where the Buffalo Roam) and replace it with In the Mouth of Madness. I am also not terribly keen on The Shining, I find Nicholson’s hamming rather difficult to take seriously at almost any point. But a fine list overall.

Shakespeare in Love and no Nostalghia or Naked Lunch?

Thanks for including sunset boulevard but there’s another wilder flick that deserves to be on this list: lost weekend

“In a Lonely Place”?

Nocturnal Animals

New, but one of the essential “writers movies”

“Secret Window”

YES Barton Fink by the Coen Brothers! the mentally torturous process. Naked Lunch By David Cronenberg the physically torturous process Quills by Philip Kaufman Henry and June by Philip Kaufman ALSO: despite the late lamented Philip Seymour Hoffman, Toby Jones is a better Capote in the better film (though the terribly named ) Infamous

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50 Best Films About Writers, Ranked

Hollywood is famous for its treatment of writers. They are the low man on the totem pole, the person banned from the set, the guy who wrote the Great American novel drinking himself to death in Los Angeles, rewriting dumb scripts. It’s funny, as Hollywood — along with movies around the world — is obsessed with portraying “writers” on screen, which is a weird profession to lionize as writing is the least visually pleasing job of all.

There are a lot of bad movies about writers out there. At Flavorwire, we wanted to make the definitive list of the 50 Best Films About Writers of all time, with the requisite mix of biopics, book adaptations (what’s up Stephen King and John Irving), foreign films that actually feature female writers, po-mo meta surrealist studies of madness (very frequent), and the works of Woody Allen. (A thank you to writer Alexander Chee , whose lament about writers’ movies served as the inspiration.) Punch the keys and read this list:

Photo by Focus/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

50. Sylvia (2003), directed by Christine Jeffs

Sylvia Plath deserves a better biopic. As they didn’t get the rights to her poetry, Paltrow’s version of the doomed poetess is the most annoying girl in your class, the one who’s always reciting whole swaths of arcane poetry just to prove how smart she is. Daniel Craig, also, is far too short to believably have any of Ted Hughes’ physicality. The mood is right, and the scenery is beautiful, and the occasional Boston Brahmin accents are annoying, and if you are a girl who had a Plath phase, you may find this film to have a goofy camp appeal.

49. Finding Forrester (2000), directed by Gus Van Sant

Van Sant’s big budget follow-up to Good Will Hunting , this plays a bit like Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season (same young man/old man mentorship ideas) with all of the idiosyncrasy leeched out. Young Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) is a good basketball player and secretly a writing prodigy, and when he falls into the life of gone-to-seed writer and recluse William Forrester, a beautiful friendship is formed. This film is pure cheese, one of the infrequent films to feature a black protagonist* as a writer, and its most memorable moment is a writing scene — a writing scene! — that’s become a meme, with Sean Connery cheering the young writer on as he types on a typewriter in his inimitable burr, “Punch the keys for God’s sake! Yes, yeeeessss! You’re the man now, dog!”

*Due to the parameters, this list skews a lot on the side of Woody Allen films and biopics of various British writers and nearly every American writing era, save, oh, the Harlem Renaissance. Someone really could make the definitive film about Zora Neale Hurston. I’d watch it! There’s also a distinct lack of adaptations of great Black literature, too, which is a topic that critic Wesley Morris discusses in this great piece for The Boston Globe , and not much has changed since 2010.

48. Total Eclipse (1995), directed by Agnieszka Holland

Is there anything cuter when an attractive young actor follows up a breakout monster hit with a small indie movie? (Do you remember Robert Pattinson playing Salvador Dalí?) Well, unfortunately the windmills of my mind were inaccurate regarding this film — it was Leonardo DiCaprio, by then an Oscar-nominated, always edgy young actor, making another idiosyncratic choice before he ended up in Titantic . DiCaprio makes a good sadistic young teen poet Arthur Rimbaud, who falls in love with Tom Verlaine. Forbidden romance and tragedy ensues.

47. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), directed by Alan Rudolph

Jennifer Jason Leigh is downright uncanny as Dorothy Parker, the doyenne of the Algonquin Round Table. The rest of the film is beautiful and lushly put together… it just suffers from a fidelity to the characters at the expense of being a movie. Just like a movie about writers.

46. Deathtrap (1982), directed by Sidney Lumet

With his adaptation of Ira Levin’s play, Sidney Lumet brings an elegant touch to a story that starts with one older playwright, hungry for a hit, inviting his younger student to his fancy Long Island house for a visit to the country. The ensuing fun is diabolical.

Photo by Richard Sylvarnes/True Fiction/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

45. Henry Fool (1997), directed by Hal Hartley

Henry Fool is a wit and an unpublished novelist, and when he meets Simon Grim, he’s ready to show his garbageman friend about the world of literature. Inspired by Henry, Simon starts to work on the “great American poem,” and from that poem comes a whole river of absurdist comedy. Also: Parker Posey! And the second Henry Fool sequel, Ned Rifle , played the Toronto Film Festival earlier this year, with Aubrey Plaza adding her deadpan to this world.

44. Manhattan (1979), directed by Woody Allen

“It is … a breathtaking hymn to the idea of being in love in Manhattan, a place Allen loves. The opening shot is a stunner, looking West across Central Park at dawn while Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ does what it always does — makes us feel transcendent. The locations are like an anthology of Manhattan shrines: The characters visit the Guggenheim, Elaine’s, Zabar’s deli. They sit on a park bench at dawn beneath a towering bridge, and ride a carriage through Central Park, and row boats in the lagoon. They go to art movies and concerts and eat Chinese food in bed and play racquetball.” — Roger Ebert

43. Barfly (1987), directed by Barbet Schroeder

Charles Bukowski wrote the screenplay for this kinda autobiographical story about a dude who lives in bars and yet is also a very good writer. It features Mickey Rourke when he was at his Brando-iest and prettiest, and it’s all about authenticity regarding a life in bars versus a life in letters.

42. The Pillow Book (1996), directed by Peter Greenaway

The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon is one of the first “books” ever. It is a leading ur-text of humanity, and it’s a remarkably modern-feeling read. This crazy Greenaway film is about a model obsessed with calligraphy and poetry (particularly all over Ewan McGregor’s entire body), ulitizing Shonagon’s insights and life to create a bananas art film.

41. My Left Foot (1989), directed by Jim Sheridan

“Most famously, in [Daniel Day-Lewis’] first Oscar-winning role, as the Irish artist Christy Brown who had cerebral palsy in Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot , he spent almost the entire shoot in a wheelchair . ‘He’d call you by your film name, and you’d call him Christy. It was madness. You’d be feeding him, wheeling him around. During the entire film, I only saw him walking once,’ Sheridan’s daughter, Kirsten Sheridan, later recalled.” — Geoffrey MacNab, The Independent

Photo by John Clifford/Good Machine/Hbo/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

40. American Splendor (2003), directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor comics are a marvel that expanded what comics could do with their humdrum tales of Pekar’s American life. The resulting film adaptation was sweet, evanescent, and meta, with one of the first big leading roles for Paul Giammati as Pekar, who’d break the fourth wall and talk straight to the camera.

39. Swimming Pool (2003), directed by François Ozon

Charlotte Rampling goes off to a secluded French house in order to write her mystery novel, when a lovely French drifter shows up and wreaks some psychosexual havoc, as French drifters do. That’s the tag line, but you can never really trust a mystery novelist, can you?

38. The Front (1976), directed by Martin Ritt

Woody Allen takes on one of his few sole acting roles in this film about the Hollywood blacklist. Technically, Allen’s character, Howard Prince, isn’t quite a writer — he just signs his names to scripts from blacklisted artists — but with that action, he ends up as “the front” for a variety of writers. The Hollywood Blacklist era isn’t talked about as much as it should be, and this is one of the slim list of films that wrestles with something that, as much as we forget, happened, and it happened recently.

37. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), directed by Wes Anderson

“Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t.” This film about a depressed family of former child geniuses features one playwright, Margo Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow at her best), and a pitch-perfect parody of absurdist masculinity in Owen Wilson’s character. He’s a faux Cormac McCarthyish writer, photographed for fancy magazines in black-and-white, holding snakes aloft, wearing a cowboy hat, presupposing and friscalating all over the place. “The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. ‘Vámonos, amigos,” he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.”

36. Ruby Sparks (2012), directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

Perhaps known to you as the “anti-manic pixie dream girl movie,” which is a pretty shallow reading of it, Ruby Sparks is a dark commentary on relationships. With Paul Dano as a dweeby writer who realizes that he can literally write his perfect girlfriend into existence, Ruby Sparks shows the thrill of initial connection before wading into disturbing waters regarding the writer’s responsibility over their creation that they are also ostensibly in a loving relationship with. Whether or not they stuck the landing, it’s a provocative and smartly scripted work from Zoe Kazan, who also stars.

Photo by Snap/REX/Shutterstock

35. Impromptu (1991), directed by James Lapine

Judy Davis makes for a good writer, and in the delightful Impromptu , she’s wearing pants (!) in the 1800s (!!) because she’s playing the real-life writer Baroness Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, aka George Sand, a divorcee who has loads of glamorous affairs with men like Frederic Chopin (Hugh Grant) and lives a life beyond the rules for a lady of the time. She wore pants, she wrote under a male pseudonym, and she was a total wit. The film in her tribute is loads of fun.

34. Kill Your Darlings (2013), directed by John Krokidas

The Beat Generation! Basis of all books! Source of many films kind of insufferable and kind of flabby! But you know what? Krokidas creates some sort of magic here, with flipping Harry Potter himself (Daniel Radcliffe, who is a good actor) playing Allen Ginsberg. Perhaps it works because it’s a portrait of the artists as they met at Columbia, with Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac all sparking off each other. But the real spine of the plot comes from a murder, not the fact that these guys would become great artists. Plus: Dane DeHaan!

33. Contempt (1963), directed by Jean-Luc Godard

“A tragic love story in a wonderful setting!” the trailer chirps , and Contempt is one (of the many) French New Wave films to wrestle with the writing process and how to make art out of it. A novelist, estranged from his babe wife (Brigitte Bardot), is hired to make a proper script out of Homer’s The Odyssey for a massive film spectacular. Art versus commerce is the topic of the day, with the inherent drama of disintegrating marriages on top of it.

32. Prick Up Your Ears (1987), directed by Stephen Frears

This film put Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina on the map — playing playwright and writer Joe Orton and his boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell. Orton is younger, but life is more generous to him. His writing career takes off while Haliwell stews. It’s the story of a relationship that isn’t equal, and Orton’s writing is the catalyst for a series of unfortunate events.

31. Adult World (2013), directed by Scott Coffey

This film nails what it’s like to be a recently graduated shithead with visions of being the world’s next Great American Poet (you are kind of annoying and naive), and it’s also very funny in its portrayal of what it’s like to be the formerly Young and Hot Edgy American Poet, but now you are old (which is the perfect John Cusack role). It is wry, funny, and very sweet regarding what it’s like to want to create great art, but to have too little writing experience, or to be too burnt out, to get anything great on the page.

Photo by 20th Century Fox/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

30. Julia (1977), directed by Fred Zinnemann

Based on a book by Lillian Hellman, supposedly based on a true story, Julia has Jane Fonda as the faux Hellman, a struggling writer entangled with her friend (who fought the Nazis.) The writer/director relationship was fractious — regarding Hellman’s penchant for fabrications, Zinneman said: “[She’s] a n extremely talented, brilliant writer, but she was a phony character, I’m sorry to say. My relations with her were very guarded and ended in pure hatred .”

29. Poetic Justice (1993), directed by John Singleton

The follow-up to Singleton’s Boyz in Da Hood , this film had Janet Jackson as a shy and talented poetess (her poems were written by Maya Angelou) who, after the shooting death of her boyfriend, goes on a roadtrip to Oakland with her friends and eventual love interest Tupac Shakur. Receiving mixed reviews on its release, the film does have its cult following, and Kendrick Lamar’s single “Poetic Justice” from Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City sampled Jackson’s Oscar-nominated song from the film, “Again.”

28. Fellini’s Casanova (1976), directed by Federico Fellini

Besides being quite the lover, Casanova was also a writer, and who better to bring his surreal visions to life than Federico Fellini? This film is trippy as hell, based on a Casanova biography, and a freak show journey into sexual deviancy. Also, that’s an unrecognizable Donald Sutherland in the lead role.

27. Shakespeare In Love (1998), directed by John Madden

Tom Stoppard wrote this captivating film about how Shakespeare’s muse — Gwyneth Paltrow, wanting to act so hard she dressed up like a man — inspired him to write some of the greatest words of all time. It’s funny, witty, and you really root for Paltrow and Shakespeare to make it, after all, even if Ben Affleck’s walking around in tights somewhere.

26. The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), directed by Walter Salles

Before Che Guevara was “Che,” he was a young medical student traveling South America on his motorcycle with his best friend. The resulting journey was where his political consciousness blossomed, as he wrote about in his travel diaries, and Walter Salles’ film does a superb job of bringing this change to visual life. No wonder he eventually directed the long-in-the-works On the Road movie (but it’s still not that good).

Photo by Gravier Productions/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

25. Midnight in Paris (2011), directed by Woody Allen

Now that everyone’s gotten over the fact that this slight Allen picture has an unfuckwithable, porn-for-English-majors-and-aspiring-writers-alike premise, can we also admit that it features female characters who are mostly shrews, dopey muses, Gertrude Stein (a font of wisdom), and/or twenty years old and French (perfect!)? Or should we just enjoy Owen Wilson’s laconic surfer charm, which makes him a darn good substitute for the Allen character, neurosis-ing his way around the Left Bank and running into all his hero writers from the Lost Generation, hanging with the hilarious Hemingway and all sorts of chums, creating a Parisian magic that’s full of nostalgia and whimsy. Fine, so it’s half of a kind of wonderful movie, but it stranded Rachel McAdams and that should be unforgivable.

24. Iris (2001), directed by Richard Eyre

There is one problem with this classy Iris Murdoch biopic about vibrant young genius Iris Murdoch (Kate Winslet) and her slip into dementia in old age (beautifully embodied by Judi Dench) — as an introduction to Murdoch, it fails to illustrate that she was a rip-roaringly hilarious writer, too. But it is a lovely portrait of an artist, and a marriage, as it begins and as time takes its toll.

23. Before Sunset (2004), directed by Richard Linklater

Of course Ethan Hawke is playing a fucking writer. Of course. That’s like James Franco playing a writer in a movie. But in part two of Richard Linklater’s sublime film series (currently a trilogy, but we know/hope it will go on forever), Hawke’s Jesse comes back to Paris for a book reading at the sainted Shakespeare and Company. In fact, he had written a book about his magical encounter with Celine. When they meet again, some magic strikes, leading to one of the best final scenes in cinema. “Baby, you’re going to miss that plane.”

22. The Door in the Floor (2004), directed by Tod Williams

Based on the John Irving novel A Widow For One Year , The Door in the Floor takes a sliver of that sprawling story and puts it on screen. Jeff Bridges is a drunken children’s book writer, having affairs; when he hires an admiring local teenager and aspiring writer to work for him, the teen learns some lessons about life and writing. (Namely, maybe it’s better not to drink.)

21. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), directed by Terry Gilliam

Hunter S. Thompson’s druggy visions of America are catnip to the right sort of actor/director combination, but nobody does it better than Thompson’s real life pal Johnny Depp. Gilliam’s a perfect match for this material, making Thompson’s narrative into visual chaos, a perfect metaphor for 1960s America.

20. Misery (1990), directed by Rob Reiner

Can we come to the conclusion that Stephen King has a lot of angst around writing? Or that writing, for him, is a… horror? In this thriller, James Caan is a writer rescued and kidnapped by his biggest fan, played by Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for the role. She loves his work so much that she tortures and threatens him into writing a special book just for her. Bloody good havoc ensues, put together expertly by best screenwriter ever William Goldman and the sometimes-underrated eye of Rob Reiner.

19. Before Night Falls (2000), directed by Julian Schnabel

The second film by artist Julian Schnabel, this visually stunning biopic got an Academy Award nomination for Javier Bardem, who’s a revelation as the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. The writer was thrown in prison repeatedly for trumped-up charges in the ’70s (where we see Johnny Depp in his small cameo), because he was openly gay in a difficult political climate. It’s an infuriating, strange, and beautiful work, with some scenes that will linger.

18. Deconstructing Harry (1997), directed by Woody Allen

Another film about a writer featuring Judy Davis! But also that guy Woody Allen. This is a deep trip into the writer’s mind, with Allen on some Igmar Bergman shit, showing us scenes from Harry Block’s life, the important choices he’s made, the hell that he’s in, as he goes on a drive to get an award. Is it secretly a film about Philip Roth, where Roth goes to hell? Maybe, maybe not, but isn’t it funnier to think so?

17. The World According to Garp (1982), directed by George Roy Hill

Another John Irving book adaptation? Yes, of course. This one has Garp (Robin Williams), a struggling novelist, whose whole life changes once his formidable mother publishes a book. That book’s called Sexual Suspect , and it turns her into a feminist icon, with followers and everything. Garp, on the other hand, publishes a novel. But really, this film uses writing as a jumping-off point to explore gender roles and gender, as it was perceived in the early ’80s.

16. The Hours (2002), directed by Stephen Daldry

“The Hours? More like the weeks!” said Liz Lemon in a 30 Rock episode, and she’s half-right in this case. Nicole Kidman puts on the fake nose in order to play Virginia Woolf, prepared to walk into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets, and the scenes are intercut with visions of women who can be considered Woolf’s daughters: Julianne Moore as an uptight, possibly lesbian housewife; Meryl Streep as a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway throwing a party.

Photo by Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

15. Naked Lunch (1991), directed by David Cronenberg

“Joan Lee (the stalwart Judy Davis, one of only two women in the cast) is introduced injecting her chest with bug poison. ‘It’s a very literary high, it’s a Kafka high — you feel like a bug,’ she tells Bill [Burroughs]. To watch Davis idly kill roaches simply by breathing on them is to see the real Morticia Addams. Davis and [Peter] Weller are a pair of hollow-eyed cadavers — all the more so when, like the actual Burroughs, Bill Lee decides that it’s ‘time for our William Tell routine’ and, aiming for the glass on Joan’s head, undershoots it by several critical inches.” — From J. Hoberman’s Village Voice review

14. Starting Out in the Evening (2007), directed by Andrew Wagner

Frank Langella is a fine actor to play a writer, as he has an inner light that’s basically impossible to snuff out. In this adapation of Brian Morton’s great novel, he’s a 70-something nearly forgotten novelist, Leonard Schilling, and Lauren Ambrose is the ambitious grad student determined to bring Schilling back into the public conversation with his thesis. Something like May-December ensues, but it’s love as a thrillingly intellectual conversation that never ends.

13. Bright Star (2009), directed by Jane Campion

Jane Campion brings her inimitable eye to the story of John Keats and his love Fanny Brawne. They fall for each other, body and soul. There’s a section of the film where they send love letters to each other, and it may be one of the swooniest literary seductions on film. There’s magic in seeing the word-drunk romance of these two characters.

12. Young Adult (2011), directed by Jason Reitman

While this film got press for being about an unlikable character — which it is! Unapologetically! It’s great! — it’s also even better about the writing process; Charlize Theron’s Mavis is a successful ghostwriter for a teen series, and we see her process at work. Teen girls chatter in a Target, and she’s listening, and you can see her turning their minutia into dialogue and plot.

11. Certified Copy (2010), directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Perhaps Certified Copy is the ur-example of a movie that is about a writer stating what the thing is about, and the film echoing the shape of his words. In this case, it starts with a British writer giving a talk called “certified copy,” which says that authenticity is irrelevant in art since everything’s a copy… and regarding this writer’s mysterious relationship with Juliette Binoche, which waxes and wanes and playfully rearranges your mind over the course of the film, maybe that’s a copy too?

Photo by Columbia/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

10. A Man For All Seasons (1966), directed by Fred Zinnemann

Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia , was a deeply principled man. A humanist. A saint. In this Best Picture-winning theatrical adaptation, we watch how More’s principles — he refused to let Henry VIII annul yet another marriage — shaped the outcome of his life. He was a man who revealed great morality and ethics in the process, and this stately film pays fine tribute.

9. The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” A writer and a recovering alcoholic, Jack Torrance is on his last chance as the recently hired caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. But weird, Kubrickian shit keeps happening, and the mad visuals lead to one conclusion: this guy has a very bad case of writer’s block. The screenplay was co-written by Diane Johnson, the writer best known for the great book Le Divorce , and I’m sure she gave an authoritative perspective to Kubrick’s wild visions of writerly madness.

8. Providence (1977), directed by Alain Resnais

Do you want to know what a novelist’s mind feels like? This Resnais film does a good job of giving us a film that shows us a writer’s process. We meet aging literary lion Clive Langham, and little by little, over the course of the movie, we realize that all these scenes that make up his life — are the scenes that make up his novel. The result is beautiful and quite touching.

7. Sunset Boulevard (1950), directed by Billy Wilder

A classic of noir and Hollywood and pure, acid screenwriting, Wilder’s genius work depicts a faded silent screen star (“It’s the pictures that got small!”), played by Gloria Swanson, and her pas de deux with the unsuccessful screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who she draws into her web with promises of fame and fortune. But we start, of course, with Gillis’ body floating facedown in the pool, and Gillis’ voice on the soundtrack: “Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It’s about five o’clock in the morning. That’s the Homicide Squad — complete with detectives and newspapermen. A murder has been reported…”

6. My Brilliant Career (1979), directed by Gillian Armstrong

Australia and New Zealand seem to be the countries that produce the best female-directed stories about female writers who find freedom in their work. What’s in the water down there? This Judy Davis-starrer is set in 19th century Australia, and it’s about a young woman named Sybylla, torn between two men. But, spoiler alert: she chooses something else, and becomes a writer. The result makes your heart leap.

Photo by Ben Kaller/Columbia/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

5. Adaptation (2002), directed by Spike Jonze

This brilliant meta-comedy (something Americans are very good at when it comes to movies about writers) is about Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage, wonderful) attempting to adapt Susan Orlean’s real-life book The Orchid Thief. He finds himself fighting a wicked case of writer’s block and a slovenly twin brother named Donald. Neurosis ensues, and wild comedy that involves Orlean (Meryl Streep was nominated for an Oscar for her role) and the Florida orchid thief Laroche (Chris Cooper, who did win the Oscar). Perhaps the only movie that involves a New Yorker writer doing crazy hallucinogenic drugs while also being pinpoint accurate about what goes on in most of a writer’s day (procrastination, masturbation).

4. An Angel at My Table (1990), directed by Jane Campion

A biography of the late Janet Frame, a writer from New Zealand, this stunning early film from Jane Campion is filled with her trademark eye and empathy. In three segments, Janet grows up working class, has a difficult childhood marred by shyness, and is (erroneously) diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a mental hospital. For the eight years she’s inside, she’s subject to electric shock therapy. Yet even while she’s away, her short stories end up published and award-winning, something that Frame hears about at the point that she’s scheduled for a partial lobotomy. She was released and would go onto become a brilliant New Zealand writer with a full career and vivid, beautiful life.

3. Wonder Boys (2000), directed by Curtis Hanson

Taking apart a great groaning bear of a second novel by Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys has Michael Douglas as Grady Tripp, a college professor and novelist stuck, magnificently, on his second novel. It depicts the long lost weekend that develops regarding some lost Marilyn Monroe-related collectibles and a dog, with Tripp’s louche agent (Robert Downey Jr.) and a promising prodigy of a student (Tobey Maguire) at his side. Very funny, and maybe one of the only movies that gets the literary life in the hub of a college fairly accurate, and accurately grubby.

2. Barton Fink (1991), directed by the Coen Brothers

The Coen brothers are merciless, hilarious gods when it comes to movies about the life of the mind, and Barton Fink may be their best and sickest work about “writer’s block” as a metaphor for blackly comic hell. With John Turturro and Coen muse John Goodman, it’s about a New York playwright (played by Turturro) who comes to Los Angeles for a chance to write in the movies. The results are surreal visions of dreams you might’ve had about 1940s Hollywood.

Photo by Spillefimkompaniet/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

1. Reprise (2006), directed by Joachim Trier

Two young men, best friends, at a mailbox. They both have their manuscripts of their first novels in their hands. They drop them in the box with all the hope in the world. Phillip’s manuscript is accepted, and he’s instantly a literary sensation. Erik’s is rejected. From here, the story goes to places sad and surprising, as Phillip’s success doesn’t mean he can run away from his mental and emotional problems, and Erik searches, fruitlessly, for something like talent. Joachim Trier’s staggering debut is filmed with the zeal and joy of the French New Wave, and by intelligently interrogating why we create and what it does for us (the camera doing the same thing at the same time), it creates its own magic around storytelling, writers, and its collage-like portrait of the artist as a young man.

Movies About Writers: 20 Great Examples Of Authors In Cinema

We live in a world with advanced treatments like stem cells . It’s easy to forget that movies can be more than plain entertainment. Movies help us take our minds off the real world. They have a therapeutic aspect that’s hard to find in other media. And you can watch movies for free online at f movies .

Did you know that cinema therapy is real? Watching intriguing plots and elements help our psyche find inspiration and relief. Everyone has a favorite film that helped them through a hard time.

Watching movies about writers on Netflix is a great example. Writers go through a lot. Seeing them face and overcome their problems has a relieving effect.

What makes the best movies about writers?

Typical symbol of drama: a happy mask besides a sad one. It depicts what makes a good movie about writing.

Good movies about writers and writing have to get one thing right: drama. It doesn’t have to be a “tear fest” to be dramatic. Films about writers must help us get into the protagonist’s shoes.

A good writing movie, for one, must-have food for thought. “Write essays for me” services constantly receive orders for movie analysis. A movie about writing tends to be a common sight.

If you’re looking for good movies about writers on Netflix, evaluate protagonists and plots. Their hardships are the main attraction if you want to feel the real experience.

Best movies about writing: our 20 picks

Let’s dive into our 20 picks. We’ve chosen movies from different genres and ages. Our main criteria is what we already discussed. These movies about famous writers—or fictional ones—take you on a journey.

Every movie will teach you something. Let’s get started.

1. An Angel at My Table – Jane Campio n This 1990 biography of Janet Frame is among Jane Campion’s earliest work. It’s filled with empathy among its three main stages. You’ll see how Janet goes through a troublesome childhood. The film takes you through an erroneous schizophrenia diagnosis, leading to tortuous therapy. However, her work literally saves her, much to our heart’s content.

2. Adaptation – Spike Jonze Jonze’s 2002 amazing comedy has Charlie Kaufman as the main character. Played by Nicolas Cage, he’s working to adapt The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean’s. It deals with topics like writer’s block and drug usage. It’s a crazy tale—definitely one of the best roles by Cage.

3. Providence – Alain Resnais 1977’s Providence is a character study of a novelist’s mind. It’s an astonishing movie about writing at a psychological level. It’s an impressive fim detailing how real-life merges with the work of a writer.

4. Bright Star – Jane Campion If you’re a John Keats reader, this 2009 movie is for you. Jane Campion’s second film on this list is just as amazing as our first entry. Bright Star is more about the romance between Keats and Fanny Brawne. Honestly, it’s one of the sweetest films you’ll ever watch.

5. The Hours – Stephen Daldry Nicole Kidman is simply stunning in this 2002 title. Playing Virginia Woolf, it’s a slow-paced drama that’ll keep you hooked until it ends. It’s a powerful trip into Woolf’s mind as she prepares to meet her fate in the River Ouse.

6. Before Night Falls – Julian Schnabel Schnabel’s 2000 film about Reinaldo Arenas definitely earned its Academy Award nomination. It takes viewers into the shoes of the Cuban writer, but it’s not pretty. It’s a beautiful but infuriating movie about homophobia and political tensions in the 70’s.

7. Misery – Rob Reiner Of course, we can’t leave out this 1990 pioneer of the psychological thriller genre. If you haven’t seen it, you need to stop reading and do it. Kathy Bates kills this movie as the kidnapper of a famous writer. It’s a mind-blowing movie about writing and addiction that everyone should see at least once.

8. The Motorcycle Diaries – Walter Salles Somewhat similar to Schnable’s film, this one is also very political. However, it’s a great character study of Che Guevara before his uprising. It’s a retelling of his diary entries while he was still studying medicine. He wrote these as he travelled with his best friend around South America. It details how he grew his political ideals.

9. Shakespeare In Love – John Madden If you want light-hearted films about writers, this 1998 title is a must-watch. It details how Shakespeare got his inspiration for some of his greatest work. It’s hilarious while still winning over your heart.

10. The Shining – Stanley Kubrick We’re back with Stephen King now. Horror movies about writers aren’t too common. However, 1980’s The Shining more than makes up for it. It pictures the quick descent into madness for Jack Torrance. It quickly goes from a creepy movie about writer’s block to a spiral of frantic and horrific scenes, one after the other.

11. Reprise – Joachim Trier The 2006 film, Reprise, is a lovely story about success, struggle, and friendship. It takes unexpected twists and turns. You can’t really expect what’s about to throw at you. It’s also the perfect French new wave experience.

12. The World According To Garp – George Roy Hill Any film with Robin Williams is a great experience. This 1982 movie is one of the best films about writers if you’re looking for a twist. We’ll just say Garp is the main character. He’s a novelist. But, his mother is the one finding success. It’s also an interesting look into gender roles released almost four decades ago.

13. Midnight in Paris – Woody Allen Despite how you might feel about Allen, this 2011 film is great. It features Owen Wilson at its charmest. It’s also very nostalgic, and sometimes hilarious, in all the right ways. If you’re an aspiring writer, it might become one of your favorite movies.

14. Kill Your Darlings – John Krokidas Daniel Radcliffe spearheads this 2013 drama, which is a good sign. This film is interesting because it depicts incredibly successful artists. Yet, the plot is elsewhere. The main story follows a murder mystery. It’s perfect if you’re looking for twists and intricate plots.

15. The Royal Tenenbaums – Wes Anderson We have another film with Owen Wilson. Combined with Gwyneth Paltrow, they depict a depressed family. It’s hardly as sad as it sounds, though. Wilson’s character is an amazing parody of masculinity, and the film will make you smile often. The duo is simply perfect here.

16. The Pillow Book – Peter Greenaway This 1996 is actually about one of the oldest records of a “book.” It depicts a deep story about obsession, poetry, writing, and lust. It builds on Sei Shonagon’s (the original author) ideas to create one of the craziest art films ever.

17. Sylvia – Christine Jeffs Sylvia is one of the most interesting movies about writers. It’s basically the only true biopic, yet they failed to get her poetry’s rights. As is, it’s a beautiful film with a great mood. It might not be for everyone, but Plath readers should definitely give it a chance.

18. My Brilliant Career – Gillian Armstrong This 1979 film plays a surprising twist on the love triangle trope. The protagonist is a woman struggling to choose between two men. However, she goes for a much more promising third option. You just have to see the rest to find out more.

19. Sunset Boulevard – Billy Wilder We just had to include this 50’s film since noir and writers go hand-in-hand. It tells the tale of a faded star and an unsuccessful screenwriter, Joe Gillis. They end up together thanks to mere promises of stardom. That said, the film does begin with Gillis’ dead body. Why is it there? You’ll have to find out.

20. Certified Copy – Abbas Kiarostami If you enjoy pseudo-fourth-wall-breaking meta-commentary, then this film is for you. The film kicks off by telling us that authenticity in art is irrelevant. From there, it’s a unique experience you simply need to watch.

What can you learn from these films?

Watching a good movie about writing is similar to drama therapy . Instead of roleplaying, you’re seeing someone else do it. If immersion is great, you could feel like you’re seeing friends overcome problems.

There’s definitely a “feel good” factor with the best movies about writers and writing. The final lesson is usually the same. They teach you how perseverance gets you where you need to be. Even horror movies about writers shed light on important aspects.

What should you look for?

As you can see from our list, there isn’t a specific formula. A good movie about writing isn’t tied to age, plot device, or genre. However, you can follow a few guidelines to sort out through movies.

If you want to find the best movies about writers, you can look for the following:

● Good cast and director. ● Plots detailing hardships and inner conflict. ● Compelling stories you can relate to. ● A different film from what you’re used to.

In essence, look for films that might have you looking for a “Write essays for me” service.

Tagged with: Adaptation , An Angel at My Table , Before Night Falls , Bright Star , Certified Copy , Kill Your Darlings , Midnight in Paris , Misery , My Brilliant Career , Providence , Reprise , Shakespeare In Love , The Hours , The Motorcycle Diaries , The Royal Tennenbaums , The Shining , The World According to Garp

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‘Romancing the Stone’ and Its Screenwriter’s Tragic Tale

Diane Thomas was a waitress when she made headlines for the script sale of what would become a box office smash. But the Cinderella story had a sad ending.

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By Bob Mehr

Each day, before her waitressing shift began, Diane Thomas would plop herself onto the floor of her tiny Malibu studio apartment, in front of a low-slung desk, and begin typing. Throughout late 1978 and early 1979, she worked daily, hours on end, conjuring the tale of Joan Chase, a mousy romance novelist suddenly thrust into a life-or-death adventure.

“I wanted to write about a woman who became her own heroine,” Thomas would offer of her inspiration. “The notion that we can be whatever we imagine ourselves to be interested me.”

Forty years ago, Thomas’s story, “ Romancing the Stone ” — and its heroine, renamed Joan Wilder — reached big screens, becoming one of the top box office hits of 1984 and an enduring classic, owing to a perfectly measured blend of action, comedy and romance. “It’s still the most well-rounded script I’ve ever read,” Michael Douglas , the film’s producer and co-star, said in an interview. “In many ways, it was a reflection of Diane — she wasn’t quite as shy as Joan Wilder, but she poured a lot of herself into this story of a writer who experiences a metamorphosis.”

During a golden era of action-adventure pictures, the novice Thomas turned the genre on its head. “A woman being the impetus for that kind of movie hadn’t been done, certainly not in that way,” said Kathleen Turner, who played Wilder. “I mean, the girls in those types of movies were just that — they were always sidekicks or scenery.”

Thomas’s friends, like her fellow writer Betty Spence, said the sweep of the story — which moved from the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan to the raw jungles of South America — was the product of a fertile imagination. “Diane was a pure storyteller,” Spence said. “She could sit there and spin a tale out of nothing, and it would have a perfect beginning, middle and end.”

When Thomas sold her script in the summer of 1979, she went from minimum-wage worker to one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. It was the start of a meteoric career that would include a pair of major movie hits and multiple projects with Steven Spielberg. Yet “Romancing the Stone” would be the only film to ever bear a Thomas writing credit because her life was tragically cut short.

At the height of her success, in late 1985, Thomas, just 39, was killed in a car accident. As Spence would note later, Thomas “strove to make her life the stuff of fantasy” — and, for a little while, anyway, she succeeded.

LONG BEFORE DIANE THOMAS became part of Hollywood’s dream factory, her life had been shaped by it. Born in 1946 in northern Michigan, she attended the University of Southern California business school and worked for years in advertising. “That came out of the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies,” Thomas once told a journalist, “where advertising was always this glamorous profession.”

She eventually tired of writing ad copy. She went on to study with the Actors Studio sage Jack Garfein, write short sketches, perform with an improv troupe, attend grad school for clinical psychology and work at a halfway house. “What made Diane such an interesting writer,” Douglas said, “was that she’d done a lot of different things before she ever got to the movies.”

In her mid-30s, Thomas finally decided to channel her storytelling instincts into screenwriting. To pay the rent, she began waitressing at the Corral Beach Cantina, a Mexican cafe on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, while she developed “Romancing the Stone.”

She’d gleaned the title — a bit of jewelry industry jargon referring to the mythmaking surrounding precious gems — from an old boyfriend, but the premise was all hers: Joan, a romance writer is shaken out of her staid world after her sister is kidnapped in Colombia. She sets out to save her sibling while pursing the film’s titular stone, dodging a small army of villains, finding both herself and romance with a charming rogue, Jack Colton. “The best part for her was conjuring that character,” Spence said, “coming up with the man of her dreams.”

The screenwriter John Hill, a friend of Thomas’s, read her script and called his agent, Norman Kurland, raving about it. In a long career, Kurland had read thousands of spec scripts. “But Diane’s was unique,” he said, and he agreed to represent her. “Actually, I had one other experience that was similar, and that was a script sent to me by an ad copywriter from the Midwest, who turned out to be Larry Kasdan. And it was the screenplay for ‘The Bodyguard.’”

In August 1979, Kurland was about to shop the script when Sherry Lansing, an executive at Columbia Pictures, suggested he funnel the project to Douglas, who’d just brought his production company to the studio. Douglas had given up a successful TV career (as co-star of “The Streets of San Francisco”) to produce films, winning a best-picture Oscar for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and earning accolades for the political drama “The China Syndrome.”

Douglas was searching for a different kind of project, and was wowed by “Romancing” and the bravura of its first-time author. Thomas “was not cautious,” Douglas said at the time. “Unlike so many screenplays by people who have had material rejected, there was a total lack of fear to the writing.” He persuaded the Columbia studio head Frank Price to pre-empt the sales process and buy the script outright for a hefty $250,000 (roughly $1.1 million today). “People criticized me for paying so much for a first-time screenwriter,” Douglas said in an interview. “My feeling was, first time or 10th time, the script is the script, and hers was wonderful.”

Still, The Los Angeles Times noted that she had become “something of a symbol to the legion of would-be writers” waiting for their big breaks. Suddenly everyone in Hollywood was inundated with scripts from amateur writers who all thought they were the next Diane Thomas. Among the many inquiries Kurland received was a call from another service-industry worker with a screenplay. “Get it over here right away,” he told her, “this is my week for waitresses.” The script wasn’t any good. “Which just goes to show,” Kurland said, “how unusual Diane and ‘Romancing the Stone’ were.”

THE SALE HAD BEEN EASY , but bringing “Romancing the Stone” to the screen would prove to be a challenge. Douglas struggled to get the film off the ground for years while Thomas — along with other writers — continued to refine her script. (She would also contribute to another Douglas project, “Starman.”) Further complicating his effort was the 1981 release of a vaguely similar treasure-hunting adventure, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (“Romancing” would later occasionally be dismissed as a “Raiders” ripoff, even though Thomas had written her script years before.)

In 1983, “Romancing the Stone” fell apart at Columbia, but Douglas managed to revive the project at Fox, tapping Robert Zemeckis to direct. Zemeckis’s only credits were a pair of comedies that had underperformed, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Used Cars.” But, Douglas said, “I thought he would be a great match for the tone that Diane had set, given the tongue-in-cheek thing that Bob did so well.”

For the principal role of Joan Wilder, the studio suggested the up-and-comer Kathleen Turner, who’d made a memorable debut as the femme fatale in “Body Heat” (1981). Turner met with Thomas, who thought she was right for the part, but the actress still had to persuade Douglas and Zemeckis. “There was a question of whether I could play this wilting wallflower of a woman,” Turner said in an interview. “So I put on some sloppy old clothes, went in and stumbled around during the test, and that seemed to reassure them.”

After offering the Colton role to his friend Jack Nicholson, who passed, Douglas got further rejections from Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood — largely because the part was secondary to that of Wilder. Out of options, Douglas cast himself. “After all the better-known actors had turned us down, Fox was open to me doing it,” he recalled.

The cast — which included Douglas’s old pal, Danny DeVito, as a comic baddie — set out for Mexico in the summer of 1983 for an arduous shoot, plagued by apocalyptically bad weather and production mishaps. Rumors from the set were so bad that Zemeckis was fired from his next project, “Cocoon,” because that film’s producers were convinced that “Romancing the Stone” would bomb. (Ron Howard eventually directed “Cocoon,” which became a 1985 hit.) “We weren’t even sure we were going to be allowed to finish the film, honestly,” Turner said. After some last-minute reshoots the film wrapped that fall.

Expectations were decidedly low when “Romancing the Stone” arrived in theaters in the spring of 1984, but the picture would become the surprise hit of the season, earning $115 million on a budget of just $10 million and going on to become a Top 10 release in a year filled with iconic blockbusters (“Ghostbusters,” “Beverly Hills Cop”).

The unexpected success elevated the careers of everyone involved. Thomas was immediately tapped by Steven Spielberg to adapt Jeno Rejto’s 1939 novel, “The Blonde Hurricane,” and to script a remake of the 1943 fantasy “A Guy Named Joe.” (That remake was eventually released in 1989 as “Always,” with several writers listed in the credits, but not Thomas.). Thomas also found herself being courted by top directors like George Lucas and Sydney Pollack. “She was a hot writer,” Douglas said, “and I was very happy for her.”

Thomas was so in demand that she was unavailable when Fox prodded Douglas to turn out a quick sequel to “Romancing the Stone.” Instead, he hired Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner to pen the follow-up, “ The Jewel of the Nile ,” but Turner balked at their story. “They’d turned Joan into a figurehead,” she said, refusing to take part, and was promptly slapped with a $25 million breach of contract suit by Fox.

Douglas hired another team, Ken Levine and David Isaacs, to rewrite the script, but the story’s opening act still needed work. Thomas agreed to spend a long weekend with the new writers, helping strengthen the first 30 pages of the screenplay. “She’d created those characters and had an incredible feel for them,” Levine said, “which made it very easy to do the work.” (He added that much of what he and Isaacs wrote ended up getting thrown out during the film’s chaotic shoot in Morocco, though Thomas’s contributions remained intact.)

As a thank you for her time, Douglas offered to buy Thomas a new car. Spence urged Thomas to pick something practical, a Mercedes sedan — but she opted for a Porsche Carrera instead. “The last time I saw Diane,” Douglas said, “was when I took her out to the parking lot to show her the Porsche.”

That fall, Thomas was dating a young actor named Stephen Norman. On Oct. 21, 1985, Thomas, Norman and another friend, Ian Young, attended an evening writing workshop at Pepperdine University, then stopped off at a bar. Afterward, Norman got behind the wheel of Thomas’s Porsche and headed down Pacific Coast Highway. On a rain- slicked stretch near Topanga Canyon, the car spun out of control when Norman misjudged the accelerating power of the Porsche, striking a wooden power pole at 80 mph, and shearing it at the base. Norman survived with only minor injuries. Young was airlifted to U.C.L.A. Medical Center and died a short time later. Thomas, who had been in the back seat, was pronounced dead at the scene. Although Norman was not legally drunk, he was cited for gross negligence and was later convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of Thomas and Young, receiving five years’ probation. (Norman did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Thomas didn’t live to see the release of “Jewel of the Nile” a few weeks later. The sequel would become another hit, grossing nearly $100 million worldwide, though critics would note that the screenplay lacked the inventive spark Thomas had brought to the original.

In the wake of her death, Spielberg established a memorial writing award in Thomas’s honor at the University of California, Los Angeles, but “Romancing the Stone” would become her legacy. Over the years, another sequel, a remake and TV adaptation have all been discussed but never materialized. Meanwhile, several recent movies like “The Lost City,” “Argylle,” even “Wonder Woman,” have attempted to copy the premise of “Romancing” and recreate its alchemy with varying results. “When you try and imitate something, it’s never going to be as enticing as the original,” Turner said. “Diane broke ground with that film.”

Four decades on, the pain of Thomas’s passing lingers with Douglas. “Her death is still one of the biggest losses of my life,” he said. “Diane was a lovely woman and a great writer, who would’ve gone onto a wonderful, magical career. She would have been right up there with the best.”

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9 Surprising Facts About Truman Capote

Just wait until you read what was done with his ashes.

Although Capote died at the relatively young age of 59, he lived a life as vibrant as the stories he wrote. Ahead, we’ll be exploring nine surprising facts about Truman Capote that you might not even know as a fan. From his real name to what was done with his ashes, record how many of these facts you already knew.

More: Truman Capote Thought Answered Prayers Would Be His Defining Work. Instead, It Became His Downfall

He changed his name

“Truman Capote” has a literary ring to it, but he didn’t come into the world with that name. Instead, Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons, taking on the surname “Garcia Capote” after his stepfather adopted him in 1935.

He became friends with Harper Lee at a young age

Yes, Truman Capote and Harper Lee were good friends. They first met after Capote moved into Lee’s Louisiana neighborhood when he was 4. The duo remained friends for many years, though the relationship became strained when Capote became jealous of Lee’s early-career success with To Kill a Mockingbird .

Keep Reading: Harper Lee and Truman Capote Were Childhood Friends Until Jealously Tore Them Apart

He attended a military academy

Capote’s mother thought that she could toughen him up by sending him to military school, but the experience proved disastrous for the young writer as he was often picked on. He lasted at St. John’s Military Academy for just one year.

He repeated the 12 th grade

The author struggled in school and had to repeat the 12 th grade at the private Franklin School in Manhattan, now known as the Dwight School. Not one for homework, a teenaged Capote often spent his evenings out at clubs befriending socialites and artists.

His first job was at The New Yorker

Capote’s first job was at The New Yorker , where he was a copyboy. Although he tried to get his writing published in the magazine, he was ultimately unsuccessful and eventually quit to work on a novel full-time.

He befriended many powerful socialites—and then had a falling out

During the 1950s and ’60s, Capote was friends with a glamorous group of socialites dubbed “The Swans.” The powerful bunch included Vogue editor Barbara “Babe” Paley, who was married to the chief executive officer of CBS; Jackie Kennedy Onassis ’ younger sister Lee Radziwill, a Giorgio Armani PR exec who married a prince; actor and model Ann Woodward ; fashion icon Nancy “Slim” Keith who was always on the best dressed lists; actor C.Z. Guest, who was a Warhol muse; and an Italian noblewoman by the name of Marella Agnelli.

The friendships quickly fell apart after Capote published a chapter of his in-progress book, Answered Prayers , in Esquire , which aired out the Swans’ dark secrets. If you’re loving Feud: Capote vs. the Swans , you might already be familiar with the scandal.

He wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly Golightly

Audrey Hepburn did an excellent job playing Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s , but—perhaps surprisingly— she wasn’t Capote’s first choice . Capote hoped the part would go to Marilyn Monroe , but she turned the offer down.

He threw a huge ball at The Plaza Hotel

Capote appreciated a great party so much that he threw an extravagant masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966. Dubbed “The Black and White Ball,” it cost the writer $16,000 (or $150,000 today) to pull the whole event off.

His remains were auctioned off after he died

Capote’s ashes were auctioned off by Julien’s Auctions in 2016 , and somehow, this seems on-brand for the novelist. As the story goes, when Capote died in 1984, his remains were split between his companion Jack Dunphy and longtime friend Joanne Carson, ex-wife of Johnny Carson . Carson’s portion fetched over $43,000 at the auction, and, well, the rest is history.

Brittany is a freelance writer based in her hometown of New York City. She writes about everything from fashion and beauty to food and wellness. When she's not writing, she can often be found at her local library, playing with her cats, or exploring the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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A Remarkable Discovery of a Document Shatters One of Shakespeare's Biggest Mysteries

A secret parchment has resurfaced, rewriting the Bard’s sketchy family history.

In the annals of William Shakespeare ’s legacy, a twist has emerged that’s practically as dramatic as any of the Bard’s plays: the real “Shakespeare” behind a centuries-old family document has been revealed ... and it’s not the man we expected.

In 1757, a bricklayer found a religious document hidden in the rafters of the Shakespeare House in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Historians have long attributed the document, which was signed, “ J. Shakespeare ,” to William’s father, John.

But a new study in Shakespeare Quarterly, from scholars at the University of Bristol, claims John wasn’t actually the writer of the scrutinized document. Instead, the researchers say it was William’s relatively unknown younger sister, Joan Shakespeare Hart, who is mentioned by name in only seven surviving documents from her lifetime, study author Matthew Steggle said in a statement :

“Virginia Woolf wrote a famous essay, Shakespeare’s sister , about how a figure like her could never hope to be a writer or have her writing preserved, so she has become something of a symbol for all the lost voices of early modern women. There are hundreds of thousands of works surviving from her brother, and until now, none at all, of any description, from her.”

In the tucked-away document, which heavily cites an obscure 17 th century Italian religious tract called The Last Will and Testament of the Soul, the writer pledges to die a good Catholic death. If the writer was indeed John Shakespeare, who remained a devout Protestant until his death in 1601, it would have indicated a major shift in his beliefs and suggested a clandestine life during an era when secret allegiance to the Catholic Church in Elizabethan England could have been dangerous. For this reason, many experts have suspected the document to be forged.

But in the new study, Steggle used internet archives to track down early editions of The Last Will and Testament of the Soul in Italian and six other languages and concluded the document could have only been written after John Shakespeare’s death. That left Steggle with just one other “J. Shakespeare”: Joan.

Joan, who was five years younger than William, survived for 30 years after her brother’s death, and long resided in the family home where the document was found.

“Even 30 years ago, a researcher approaching a problem like this would have been based in a single big research library, using printed catalogues and even card catalogues to try to find copies of this text,” Steggle said in the statement. “But research libraries have now made many of their resources available digitally, so that it is possible to look across many different libraries in different countries at once, and what’s more, you can look through the whole text, not just at the title and other details.”

Steggle emphasized the importance of this approach in aligning the document’s quotes with the original timing of the composition of The Last Will and Testament of the Soul. Joan, then, who outlived her tradesman husband and had four children in the old Shakespeare family house, had to have been the secret Catholic supporter.

The mystery flourished for centuries, in part, because William Shakespeare himself was a secretive figure, Biography writes .

Shakespeare, who lived from 1564 to 1616, left behind no letters, no handwritten manuscripts, few contemporary accounts, and only six signatures, all spelled differently. It seems almost unbelievable to scholars and critics that the country boy from Stratford-upon-Avon who never attended university wrote 37,000 words for his plays and added roughly 300 words to the English vocabulary.

Yet, the scarcity of Shakespeare’s personal artifacts does little to dim the luster of his legacy, which stands in stark contrast to his modest, mysterious origins.

The early years of Shakespeare’s life are murky. According to Biography , he was born to a father, John, who managed a portfolio as a landowner, moneylender, local official, and glover and leather craftsman. Instead of pursuing higher education, Shakespeare’s knowledge was gleaned from life experiences, absorbing wisdom from his dad’s civic engagements and perhaps gaining insights from his son-in-law, who was a doctor.

The idea that Shakespeare kept his London-based professional life separate from his personal life in Stratford-upon-Avon plays into the recent findings regarding his sister, Joan. “This secretive attitude,” Biography writes, “may have been because much of his family were known Catholic sympathizers and chose to live quietly in Protestant Elizabethan England. In fact, some believe Shakespeare himself received Catholic communion on his death bed.”

Shakespeare wasn’t known to be loud and boisterous; instead, he carried an air of mystery, relishing the relative anonymity provided by Stratford life. Following his marriage to Anne Hathaway and the birth of their children, there’s a seven-year gap in his historical record. These are known as the “lost years.”

Speculation about William Shakespeare’s “lost years” varies widely; some suggest he may have been in hiding due to accusations of poaching, while more substantiated theories propose he was making a living as an actor and playwright in London. But despite this period of obscurity, Shakespeare’s reputation flourished through his poetry, sonnets, and plays.

As a prominent member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a renowned London acting company, Shakespeare invested in his craft, and his financial success allowed him to buy New Place, one of the largest houses in Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare’s theatrical endeavors didn’t stop there; in collaboration with fellow actors, he started the iconic Globe Theater, which became synonymous with his celebrated playwriting and solidified his legacy.

As Shakespeare grew his name in London’s theaters, he simultaneously established himself as a prominent figure in his hometown of Stratford. Acquiring the family estate in 1601 and subsequently purchasing 107 acres the following year, he strategically invested in additional properties. Experts suggest that the income from leasing these lands gave him the financial stability to pursue his writing.

Meanwhile, Joan resided in the Shakespeare family home amidst speculation and secrets. And its rafters served as a vault for her Italian-inspired religious writings—a hidden gem that’s still sparking scholarly intrigue, and revealing new layers to the Shakespeare legacy today.

Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland. 

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Biopics of Writers, Poets and Playwright

Biographical Films on Famous Writers/Authors, Playwright and Poets (research started in 2007 and work is still in progress)

• Movies or TV
• IMDb Rating
• In Theaters
• Release Year

1. Friedrich Schiller - Eine Dichterjugend (1923)

111 min | Biography, Comedy, Drama

Despite his wish to become a pastor, Friedrich Schiller is ordered to join a military school. There, he begins to write poetry...

Director: Curt Goetz | Stars: Theodor Loos , Hermann Vallentin , Isabel Heermann , Max Pategg

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (10 November 1759 – 9 May 1805) was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works he left as sketches. This relationship and these discussions led to a period now referred to as Weimar Classicism. They also worked together on Die Xenien, a collection of short satirical poems in which both Schiller and Goethe challenge opponents to their philosophical vision.

2. The Beloved Rogue (1927)

Not Rated | 99 min | Adventure, Drama, History

François Villon, in his lifetime the most renowned poet in France, is also a prankster, an occasional criminal, and an ardent patriot.

Director: Alan Crosland | Stars: John Barrymore , Conrad Veidt , Marceline Day , Lawson Butt

François Villon in fifteenth-century French, (c. 1431 – after 5 January 1463) was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison. The question "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?", taken from the Ballade des dames du temps jadis and translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as "Where are the snows of yesteryear?", is one of the most famous lines of translated secular poetry in the English-speaking world.

3. Voltaire (1933)

Passed | 72 min | Drama

Writer and philosopher Voltaire, loyal to his king, Louis XV of France, nonetheless writes scathingly of the king's disdain for the rights and needs of his people. Louis admires Voltaire ... See full summary  »

Director: John G. Adolfi | Stars: George Arliss , Doris Kenyon , Margaret Lindsay , Reginald Owen

François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), better known by the pen name VOLTAIRE, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade. Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form including plays, poetry, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform, despite strict censorship laws and harsh penalties for those who broke them. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day. Voltaire was one of several Enlightenment figures (along with Montesquieu, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Émilie du Châtelet) whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions.

4. The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)

Passed | 109 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

Elizabeth Barrett's tyrannical father has forbidden any of his family to marry. Nevertheless, Elizabeth falls in love with the poet Robert Browning.

Director: Sidney Franklin | Stars: Norma Shearer , Fredric March , Charles Laughton , Maureen O'Sullivan

Votes: 2,122

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both England and the United States during her lifetime. A collection of her last poems was published by her husband, Robert Browning, shortly after her death.

5. The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

Passed | 116 min | Biography, Drama

The biopic of the famous French muckraking writer and his involvement in fighting the injustice of the Dreyfus Affair.

Director: William Dieterle | Stars: Paul Muni , Gale Sondergaard , Joseph Schildkraut , Gloria Holden

Votes: 8,996

Émile François Zola (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse.

6. Gorky 1: The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938)

98 min | Biography, Drama

A drama reveals the great writer's inauspicious early years as an orphan raised by conniving relatives.

Director: Mark Donskoy | Stars: Aleksei Lyarsky , Varvara Massalitinova , Mikhail Troyanovskiy , Elizaveta Alekseeva

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March 1868 – 18 June 1936), also known as Maxim Gorky was a Russian, Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.

7. Gorky 2: My Apprenticeship (1939)

100 min | Biography, Drama

For the family really no money, Alexei began to make a living. Everything was limited to dirty chores, but while reading could end his depression. After hard working experience, he was ... See full summary  »

Director: Mark Donskoy | Stars: Aleksei Lyarsky , Irina Zarubina , Varvara Massalitinova , Yelizaveta Lilina

8. Gorky 3: My Universities (1940)

90 min | Biography, Drama

The last installment of Russian director Mark Donskoy 's Maxim Gorky trilogy. Having endured a painful youth in Gorky 1: The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938) and a torturous sojourn as a serf... See full summary  »

Director: Mark Donskoy | Stars: Nikolai Valbert , Stepan Kayukov , Nikolai Dorokhin , Nikolai Plotnikov

9. The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe (1942)

Approved | 67 min | Biography, Drama

Edgar Allan Poe led an unhappy childhood, broken only by the unceasing devotion of his foster mother, Mrs. Frances Allan, whose loving ministrations gave him courage to carry out his desire... See full summary  »

Director: Harry Lachman | Stars: Linda Darnell , Shepperd Strudwick , Virginia Gilmore , Jane Darwell

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement.

10. Jack London (1943)

Approved | 94 min | Adventure, Biography, War

Episodes in the adventurous life of the American novelist (1876-1916).

Director: Alfred Santell | Stars: Michael O'Shea , Susan Hayward , Osa Massen , Harry Davenport

John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney,[1] January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916)[2][3][4][5] was an American author, journalist, and social activist.

11. The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944)

Approved | 130 min | Adventure, Biography, Drama

The dramatized life of immortal humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, from his days as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River until his death in 1910 shortly after Halley's Comet returned.

Director: Irving Rapper | Stars: Fredric March , Alexis Smith , Donald Crisp , Alan Hale

Votes: 1,358

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."

12. Devotion (1946)

Passed | 107 min | Biography, Drama, Mystery

Genius authors Emily and Charlotte Brontë fall in love with their curate as they seek to get their work published.

Director: Curtis Bernhardt | Stars: Olivia de Havilland , Ida Lupino , Paul Henreid , Sydney Greenstreet

Votes: 1,013

The Brontës (were a 19th century literary family associated with Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte (born 21 April 1816), Emily (born 30 July 1818), and Anne (born 17 January 1820), are well known as a trio of sibling poets and novelists. They originally published their poems and novels under masculine pseudonyms, following the custom of the times practised by female writers. Their stories immediately attracted attention, although not always the best, for their passion and originality. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and other works were later to be accepted as masterpieces of literature.

13. Hans Christian Andersen (1952)

Approved | 112 min | Biography, Family, Musical

The opening scene of the movie describes it best: "Once upon a time there lived in Denmark a great storyteller named Hans Christian Andersen. This is not the story of his life, but a fairy tale about the great spinner of fairy tales."

Director: Charles Vidor | Stars: Danny Kaye , Farley Granger , Zizi Jeanmaire , Joseph Walsh

Votes: 4,211

Hans Christian Andersen, referred to using the initials H. C. Andersen in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia; April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875) was a Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "Thumbelina", "The Little Match Girl", and "The Ugly Duckling".

14. Beloved Infidel (1959)

Not Rated | 123 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

Toward the end of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald is writing for Hollywood studios to be able to afford the cost of an asylum for his wife. He is also struggling against alcoholism. Into his life comes the famous gossip columnist.

Director: Henry King | Stars: Gregory Peck , Deborah Kerr , Eddie Albert , Philip Ober

Votes: 1,181

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and his most famous, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

15. The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

Approved | 180 min | Biography, Drama, Family

During World War II, a teenage Jewish girl named Anne Frank and her family are forced into hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

Director: George Stevens | Stars: Millie Perkins , Shelley Winters , Joseph Schildkraut , Richard Beymer

Votes: 13,669 | Gross: $5.01M

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (12 June 1929 – early March 1945) is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.

16. The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960)

PG | 123 min | Biography, Drama, History

A chronicle of Oscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquis of Queensberry and the tragic turn his life takes because of it.

Director: Ken Hughes | Stars: Peter Finch , Yvonne Mitchell , James Mason , Nigel Patrick

Votes: 1,114

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.

17. The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)

G | 135 min | Adventure, Biography, Comedy

The story of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, and three of their stories.

Directors: Henry Levin , George Pal | Stars: Laurence Harvey , Claire Bloom , Karlheinz Böhm , Walter Slezak

Votes: 2,153 | Gross: $14.17M

The Brothers Grimm (German: Die Brüder Grimm or Die Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob Grimm (January 4, 1785 – September 20, 1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (February 24, 1786 – December 16, 1859), were German academics, linguists and cultural researchers who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular.

18. The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

Not Rated | 79 min | Biography, Drama, History

The life of the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, from childhood to death, his spiritual journey, artistic endeavors and inner conflicts within the cultural and historical context of Armenia, hailed as revolutionary by Mikhail Vartanov.

Director: Sergei Parajanov | Stars: Sofiko Chiaureli , Melkon Alekyan , Vilen Galstyan , Gogi Gegechkori

Votes: 13,475

Sayat-Nova (14 June 1712, Tiflis – died 22 September 1795, Haghpat), was an Armenian poet, musician and ashik who had compositions in a number of languages. His adopted name Sayat Nova meant "Master of Songs" in Persian.

19. The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (1974)

PG | 89 min | Drama, Horror

Poe's fiance, Lenore, falls into a coma and is taken for dead. She is rescued at the last possible moment from being buried alive, but the experience has driven her insane. On the advice of... See full summary  »

Director: Mohy Quandour | Stars: Robert Walker Jr. , Cesar Romero , Tom Drake , Carol Ohmart

20. F. Scott Fitzgerald and 'the Last of the Belles' (1974 TV Movie)

Not Rated | 98 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

A semi-fictional account of how writer F. Scott Fitzgerald met his wife while he was in the army and stationed in Alabama in 1919.

Director: George Schaefer | Stars: Richard Chamberlain , Blythe Danner , Susan Sarandon , David Huffman

21. F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1975 TV Movie)

100 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

The story of author F. Scott Fitzgerald's two stays in Hollywood to write for films, once in 1927 at the height of his acclaim, and again in 1937 when he arrived with little money, enormous expenses and an ill wife.

Director: Anthony Page | Stars: Jason Miller , Tuesday Weld , Julia Foster , Dolores Sutton

22. The Belle of Amherst (1976 TV Movie)

Not Rated | 90 min | Biography, Drama

Portrait of 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson based on her poems, letters and notes. This is a taped broadcast of a live one-woman performance.

Director: Charles S. Dubin | Star: Julie Harris

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

23. Julia (1977)

PG | 117 min | Drama

At the behest of an old and dear friend, playwright Lillian Hellman undertakes a dangerous mission to smuggle funds into Nazi Germany.

Director: Fred Zinnemann | Stars: Jane Fonda , Vanessa Redgrave , Jason Robards , Maximilian Schell

Votes: 10,394

Lillian Florence “Lily” Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes. She was romantically involved for 30 years with mystery and crime writer Dashiell Hammett (and was the inspiration for his character Nora Charles), and was also a long-time friend and literary executor of author Dorothy Parker.

24. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977)

Not Rated | 98 min | Drama

Stephen Dedalus is a young man growing up in Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century. His search for knowledge and understanding, and the decline of his family's circumstances, ... See full summary  »

Director: Joseph Strick | Stars: Bosco Hogan , T.P. McKenna , John Gielgud , Rosaleen Linehan

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark novel which perfected his stream of consciousness technique and combined nearly every literary device available in a modern re-telling of The Odyssey. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.

25. Stevie (1978)

PG | 102 min | Biography, Drama

This biographical film has Glenda Jackson portraying a British poet with emotional problems.

Director: Robert Enders | Stars: Glenda Jackson , Mona Washbourne , Alec McCowen , Trevor Howard

Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971) was an English poet and novelist.

26. Molière (1978)

260 min | Biography, Drama, History

Who was Moliere? He is known everywhere as one of the world's greatest playwrights. But who was he? Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622, the son of a prosperous tapestry maker. His mother ... See full summary  »

Director: Ariane Mnouchkine | Stars: Philippe Caubère , Marie-Françoise Audollent , Frédéric Ladonne , Odile Cointepas

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, (January 15, 1622 – February 17, 1673) was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature.[1] Among Molière's best-known works are Le Misanthrope (The Misanthrope), L'École des femmes (The School for Wives), Tartuffe ou L'Imposteur, (Tartuffe or the Hypocrite), L'Avare (The Miser), Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman).

27. My Brilliant Career (1979)

G | 100 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

A proud young woman in early 20th century Australia must choose between marriage and independence.

Director: Gillian Armstrong | Stars: Judy Davis , Sam Neill , Wendy Hughes , Robert Grubb

Votes: 4,790

Miles Franklin (born "Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin"; 14 October 1879 – 19 September 1954) was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her autobiographical novel, My Brilliant Career, published in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936. She was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers' organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of a major literary award known as the Miles Franklin Award.

28. Agatha (1979)

PG | 105 min | Drama, Mystery, Thriller

December 1926, Agatha Christie 's husband asks for a divorce. She leaves her car and goes missing 11 days. She books into a hotel as Mrs. Neele. Fiction: A US reporter looks for her and investigates.

Director: Michael Apted | Stars: Dustin Hoffman , Vanessa Redgrave , Timothy Dalton , Helen Morse

Votes: 3,538 | Gross: $7.50M

Agatha Christie, DBE, (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976), was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 80 detective novels—especially those featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple—and her successful West End theatre plays.

29. The Brontë Sisters (1979)

Not Rated | 120 min | Biography, Drama, History

In a small presbytery in Yorkshire, living under the watchful eyes of their aunt and father, a strict Anglican pastor, the Bronte sisters write their first works and quickly become literary sensations.

Director: André Téchiné | Stars: Isabelle Adjani , Marie-France Pisier , Isabelle Huppert , Pascal Greggory

Votes: 1,211

30. Céleste (1980)

107 min | Biography, Drama, History

In 1914, with men gone to war, Marcel Proust hired Céleste Albaret as his attendant. More than eight years later, she was at his side when he died. During this entire time, she only entered... See full summary  »

Director: Percy Adlon | Stars: Eva Mattes , Jürgen Arndt , Norbert Wartha , Wolf Euba

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental 'À la recherche du temps perdu' (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.

31. Heart Beat (1980)

R | 110 min | Drama

The life and friendship among the icons of the Beat Generation: Neal Cassady, Carolyn Cassady, and Jack Kerouac.

Director: John Byrum | Stars: Nick Nolte , Sissy Spacek , John Heard , Ray Sharkey

Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

32. Priest of Love (1981)

R | 125 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

Following the banning and burning of his novel, "The Rainbow", D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, move to the United States, and then to Mexico. When Lawrence contracts tuberculosis, they ... See full summary  »

Director: Christopher Miles | Stars: Ian McKellen , Janet Suzman , Ava Gardner , Penelope Keith

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. Lawrence is now valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature.

33. Hammett (1982)

PG | 97 min | Crime, Drama, Mystery

Fictional account of real-life mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, and his involvement in the investigation of a beautiful Chinese cabaret actress' mysterious disappearance in San Francisco.

Director: Wim Wenders | Stars: Frederic Forrest , Peter Boyle , Marilu Henner , Roy Kinnear

Votes: 3,674 | Gross: $0.04M

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse).

34. Cross Creek (1983)

PG | 127 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

In the 1930s, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moves to Florida's backwaters to write in peace. She feels bothered by affectionate men, editor and confused neighbors, but soon she connects and writes The Yearling, a classic of American literature.

Director: Martin Ritt | Stars: Mary Steenburgen , Rip Torn , Peter Coyote , Dana Hill

Votes: 2,021 | Gross: $0.20M

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie, also known as The Yearling. The book was written long before the concept of young-adult fiction, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.

35. James Joyce's Women (1985)

R | 88 min | Drama

In this tribute to James Joyce, Fionnula Flanagan gives a tour-de-force performance as a half-dozen or so women in Joyce's real and fictional worlds. When she portrays his wife Nora ... See full summary  »

Director: Michael Pearce | Stars: Fionnula Flanagan , Chris O'Neill , James E. O'Grady , Tony Lyons

Votes: 178 | Gross: $0.38M

36. Oscar (1985)

120 min | Biography, Drama, History

Biography of Irish writer Oscar Wilde.

Stars: Michael Gambon , Robin McCallum , Tim Hardy , Karl Howman

37. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

R | 120 min | Biography, Drama

A fictionalized account in four chapters of the life of celebrated Japanese writer Yukio Mishima .

Director: Paul Schrader | Stars: Ken Ogata , Masayuki Shionoya , Hiroshi Mikami , Junya Fukuda

Votes: 13,691 | Gross: $0.44M

Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫 Mishima Yukio?) was the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡 公威 Hiraoka Kimitake?, January 14, 1925–November 25, 1970), a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor and film director, also remembered for his ritual suicide by seppuku after a failed coup d'état. Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mishima was internationally famous and is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century, whose avant-garde work displayed a blending of modern and traditional aesthetics that broke cultural boundaries, with a focus on sexuality, death, and political change.

38. Shadowlands (1986 TV Movie)

92 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

Noted author and scholar finds love, then must endure its loss...

Director: Norman Stone | Stars: Joss Ackland , Claire Bloom , David Waller , Rupert Baderman

Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a British novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist. He is well known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.

39. Meteor & Shadow (1985)

Not Rated | 101 min | Biography, Drama

The rise and fall of the Greek poet Napoleon Lapathiotis.

Director: Takis Spetsiotis | Stars: Takis Moshos , Yiorgos Kendros , Michail Marmarinos , Giannis Zavradinos

Napoleon Lapathiotis (Ναπολέων Λαπαθιώτης; 31 October 1888 – 7 January 1944) was a Greek poet. A native of Athens, he began writing and publishing poetry when he was eleven. In 1907, along with others, he established the Igiso (Ἡγησώ, from the Attic Greek name Hēgēso) magazine, in which he published his works. In 1909, he graduated from the law school of the University of Athens. His first book of poems was published in 1939.

40. Dreamchild (1985)

PG | 94 min | Biography, Comedy, Drama

Ian Holm is children's author Lewis Carroll in this poignant fantasy-drama set in 1930s New York and populated by the fabulous special effects creatures of Muppet master Jim Henson.

Director: Gavin Millar | Stars: Coral Browne , Ian Holm , Peter Gallagher , Caris Corfman

Votes: 1,745 | Gross: $1.22M

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand.

41. Out of Africa (1985)

PG | 161 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

In 20th-century colonial Kenya, a Danish baroness/plantation owner has a passionate love affair with a free-spirited big-game hunter.

Director: Sydney Pollack | Stars: Meryl Streep , Robert Redford , Klaus Maria Brandauer , Michael Kitchen

Votes: 86,145 | Gross: $87.10M

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in both Danish and in English. Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Prior to the release of the first film, she was noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark. Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described as "a mistake" that Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s.

42. Coming Through (1988 TV Movie)

Not Rated | 80 min | Drama, Romance

Celebrated actor and actress Sir Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet) and Dame Helen Mirren (Prime Suspect) star in this movie by award-winning playwright Alan Plater about one of the great love ... See full summary  »

Director: Peter Barber-Fleming | Stars: Kenneth Branagh , Helen Mirren , Alison Steadman , Philip Martin Brown

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.

43. Poslednyaya doroga (1986)

101 min | Biography, Drama, History

About the death of Aleksandr Pushkin, the leading poet and writer of Russia, who was shot on a duel and died when he was 37.

Director: Leonid Menaker | Stars: Aleksandr Kalyagin , Vadim Medvedev , Irina Kupchenko , Yelena Karadzhova

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (6 June 1799 – 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1837) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers. He also wrote historical fiction.

44. Gothic (1986)

R | 87 min | Drama, Fantasy, Horror

The Shelleys visit Lord Byron and compete to write a horror story.

Director: Ken Russell | Stars: Gabriel Byrne , Julian Sands , Natasha Richardson , Myriam Cyr

Votes: 8,840 | Gross: $0.92M

Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.

45. Barfly (1987)

R | 100 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance

Based on the life of successful poet Charles Bukowski and his exploits in Hollywood during the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Director: Barbet Schroeder | Stars: Mickey Rourke , Faye Dunaway , Alice Krige , Jack Nance

Votes: 21,923 | Gross: $3.22M

Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a "laureate of American lowlife".

46. Waiting for the Moon (1987)

PG | 88 min | Drama

Sundance prizewinner. Fictionalized portrait of one of history's great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, ... See full summary  »

Director: Jill Godmilow | Stars: Linda Hunt , Linda Bassett , Jacques Boudet , Andrew McCarthy

Votes: 214 | Gross: $0.75M

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.

47. Kangaroo (1986)

R | 108 min | Drama

A mild-mannered English conscientious objector moves to what he feels will be the relative calm of Australia after World War I, but gets caught in the middle of violent battles between the rising trade unions and fascist groups.

Director: Tim Burstall | Stars: Colin Friels , Judy Davis , John Walton , Julie Nihill

Votes: 279 | Gross: $0.43M

48. Haunted Summer (1988)

R | 106 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

In 1816, authors Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley get together for some philosophical discussions, but the situation soon deteriorates into mind games, drugs and sex.

Director: Ivan Passer | Stars: Philip Anglim , Laura Dern , Alice Krige , Eric Stoltz

Votes: 586 | Gross: $0.01M

Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.

49. Rowing with the Wind (1988)

R | 105 min | Drama, Horror, Mystery

Lord Byron, poet Percy Shelley, his future wife, Mary Shelley (writing Frankenstein) and others spend the summer of 1816 together.

Director: Gonzalo Suárez | Stars: Hugh Grant , Lizzy McInnerny , Valentine Pelka , Elizabeth Hurley

Votes: 1,136

50. Old Gringo (1989)

R | 119 min | Adventure, History, Romance

When school teacher Harriet Winslow goes to Mexico to teach, she is kidnapped by Gen. Tomas Arroyo and his revolutionaries. An aging American, Ambrose "Old Gringo" Bierce also in Mexico, ... See full summary  »

Director: Luis Puenzo | Stars: Jane Fonda , Gregory Peck , Jimmy Smits , Patricio Contreras

Votes: 2,104 | Gross: $3.57M

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 – after December 26, 1913) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist. Today, he is best known for his short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and his satirical lexicon, The Devil's Dictionary. The sardonic view of human nature that informed his work – along with his vehemence as a critic, with his motto "nothing matters" – earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce."

51. My Left Foot (1989)

R | 103 min | Biography, Drama

Christy Brown , born with cerebral palsy, learns to paint and write with his only controllable limb - his left foot.

Director: Jim Sheridan | Stars: Daniel Day-Lewis , Brenda Fricker , Alison Whelan , Kirsten Sheridan

Votes: 79,624 | Gross: $14.74M

Christy Brown (5 June 1932 – 7 September 1981) was an Irish author, painter and poet who suffered from cerebral palsy.

52. Goldeneye (1989 TV Movie)

105 min | Biography

Fact-based biography of James Bond author, Ian Fleming. The film focuses on his wartime exploits and romantic adventures which ultimately led to his creation of the super-spy.

Director: Don Boyd | Stars: Charles Dance , Phyllis Logan , Patrick Ryecart , Marsha Fitzalan

Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer. Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, which are one of the best-selling series of related novels of all time having sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Fleming also wrote the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two works of non-fiction. Fleming is reputed to have been the designer of Operation Mincemeat and Operation Goldeneye, the former of which was successfully carried out during the Second World War. In 2008, The Times ranked Fleming fourteenth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

53. Henry & June (1990)

NC-17 | 136 min | Biography, Drama

Anaïs Nin meets American writer Henry Miller in Paris in 1931. She keeps a diary of her sexual awakening, which includes Henry and his wife June.

Director: Philip Kaufman | Stars: Fred Ward , Uma Thurman , Maria de Medeiros , Richard E. Grant

Votes: 14,160 | Gross: $11.57M

Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis. Anaïs Nin (born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature and short stories. A great deal of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously.

54. American Playhouse (1980–1994) Episode: Zora Is My Name! (1990)

90 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance

A celebration of the life of Zora Neale Hurston, who was born at the turn of the 20th Century and grew to be an important voice with her written portrayals of Black American life in the ... See full summary  »

Director: Neema Barnette | Stars: Louis Gossett Jr. , Oscar Brown Jr. , Olu Dara , Guy Davis

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891– January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

55. I, the Worst of All (1990)

R | 105 min | Biography, Drama, History

This fact-based film examines the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Assumpta Serna), a Roman Catholic nun from Mexico City who, in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition, established herself... See full summary  »

Director: María Luisa Bemberg | Stars: Assumpta Serna , Dominique Sanda , Héctor Alterio , Lautaro Murúa

Votes: 719 | Gross: $0.05M

Sor (Sister) Juana Inés de la Cruz (12 November 1648 – 17 April 1695), fully Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, was a self-taught scholar and poet of the Baroque school, and nun of New Spain. Although she lived in a colonial era when Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire, she is considered today a Mexican writer, and stands at the beginning of the history of Mexican literature in the Spanish language.

56. The Dreamer of Oz (1990 TV Movie)

100 min | Biography, Drama, Family

The film is the biography of Frank Baum, the children's book author and creator of the fantasy world Oz.

Director: Jack Bender | Stars: John Ritter , Annette O'Toole , Rue McClanahan , Charles Haid

Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919) was an American author of children's books, best known for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He wrote thirteen novel sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a host of other works (55 novels in total, plus four "lost" novels), 82 short stories, over 200 poems, an unknown number of scripts,[1] and many miscellaneous writings), and made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen. His works predicted such century-later commonplaces as television, laptop computers (The Master Key), wireless telephones (Tik-Tok of Oz), women in high risk, action-heavy occupations (Mary Louise in the Country), and the ubiquity of advertising on clothing (Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work).

57. An Angel at My Table (1990)

R | 158 min | Biography, Drama

Janet Frame was a brilliant child who, as a teen, was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Explore Janet's discovery of the world and her life in Europe as her books are published to acclaim.

Director: Jane Campion | Stars: Kerry Fox , Alexia Keogh , Karen Fergusson , Iris Churn

Votes: 8,661 | Gross: $1.05M

Janet Paterson Frame, ONZ, CBE (28 August 1924 - 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author. She wrote eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, an edition of juvenile fiction, and three volumes of autobiography during her lifetime. Since her death, a twelfth novel, a second volume of poetry, and a handful of short stories have been released. Frame's celebrity is informed by her dramatic personal history as well as her literary career. Following years of psychiatric hospitalisation, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was canceled when, just days before the procedure, her debut publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize. These dramatic personal experiences feature prominently in Frame's autobiographical trilogy and director Jane Campion's popular film adaptation of the texts, with recognisably autobiographical elements further resurfacing in many of her fictional publications. Characterised by scholar Simone Oettli as a writer who simultaneously sought fame and anonymity, Frame eschewed the dominant New Zealand literary realism of the post-war era, combining prose, poetry, and modernist elements with a magical realist style, garnering numerous local literary prizes despite mixed critical and public reception.

58. Quiet Days in Clichy (1990)

120 min | Drama

Expatriate Henry Miller indulges in a variety of sexual escapades while struggling to establish himself as a serious writer in Paris.

Director: Claude Chabrol | Stars: Andrew McCarthy , Nigel Havers , Barbara De Rossi , Stéphanie Tchou-Cotta

Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.

59. Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1990 TV Movie)

Not Rated | 100 min | Adventure, Biography, War

Ian Fleming's life (1908-64) as a journalist and a naval intelligence officer was a lot like the womanizing James Bond, about whom he would later write 12 spy novels.

Director: Ferdinand Fairfax | Stars: Jason Connery , Kristin Scott Thomas , Joss Ackland , Patricia Hodge

60. Kafka (1991)

PG-13 | 98 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Kafka works during the day at an insurance company, where events lead him to discover a mysterious underground society with strange suppressive goals.

Director: Steven Soderbergh | Stars: Jeremy Irons , Theresa Russell , Joel Grey , Ian Holm

Votes: 10,554 | Gross: $1.06M

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a culturally influential German-language novelist. Contemporary critics and academics, such as Vladimir Nabokov,[2] regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century. The term "Kafkaesque" has become part of the English language.

61. Becoming Colette (1991)

R | 97 min | Biography, Drama

The story of a girl who become the toast of Paris high-society. Through her marriage to one of France's most notorious degenerates, Colette's eyes are opened to every form of sexual depravity - shameless adventures that stir her.

Director: Danny Huston | Stars: Klaus Maria Brandauer , Mathilda May , Virginia Madsen , Paul Rhys

Votes: 281 | Gross: $0.22M

Colette (pronounced: [kɔ.lɛt]) was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954). She is best known for her novel 'Gigi', upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.

62. Impromptu (1991)

PG-13 | 107 min | Biography, Comedy, Music

In 1830s France, pianist/composer Frédéric Chopin is pursued romantically by the determined, individualistic woman who uses the name George Sand .

Director: James Lapine | Stars: Judy Davis , Hugh Grant , Mandy Patinkin , Bernadette Peters

Votes: 5,502 | Gross: $4.08M

Amantine (also "Amandine") Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness (French: baronne) Dudevant (Paris, 1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pseudonym George Sand (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ sɑ̃d]), was a French novelist and memoirist.

63. O Dia do Desespero (1992)

75 min | Biography, Drama

Portrait of the last days of the life of Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco.

Director: Manoel de Oliveira | Stars: Teresa Madruga , Mário Barroso , Luís Miguel Cintra , Diogo Dória

Camilo Ferreira Botelho Castelo-Branco,1st Viscount de Correia Botelho (March 16, 1825 – June 1, 1890), was a prolific Portuguese writer of the 19th century, having authored over 260 books (mainly novels, plays and essays). His writing is, overall, considered original in that it combines the dramatic and sentimental spirit of Romanticism with a highly personal combination of sarcasm, bitterness and dark humour. He is also celebrated for his peculiar wit and anecdotal character, as well as for his turbulent (and ultimately tragical) life.

64. En compagnie d'Antonin Artaud (1993)

Unrated | 90 min | Biography, Drama

May, 1946, in Paris young poet Jacques Prevel meets Antonin Artaud, the actor, artist and writer just released from a mental asylum. Over ten months, we follow the mad Artaud from his cruel... See full summary  »

Director: Gérard Mordillat | Stars: Sami Frey , Marc Barbé , Julie Jézéquel , Valérie Jeannet

Antonin Artaud (September 4, 1896, in Marseille – March 4, 1948 in Paris) was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director. Antonin is a diminutive form of Antoine "little Anthony", and was among a list of names which Artaud used throughout his writing career.

65. This Boy's Life (1993)

R | 115 min | Biography, Drama

The story about the relationship between a rebellious 1950s teenager and his abusive stepfather, based on the memoirs of writer and literature Professor Tobias Wolff.

Director: Michael Caton-Jones | Stars: Robert De Niro , Leonardo DiCaprio , Ellen Barkin , Jonah Blechman

Votes: 58,232 | Gross: $4.10M

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American author. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989), and his short stories. He has also written two novels.

66. Zelda (1993 TV Movie)

Biography, Drama

Famous 1920s modernist US writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his eccentric Flapper socialite wife Zelda Sayre's relationship began quite passionately, but he slowly fell into alcoholism and she was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Director: Pat O'Connor | Stars: Natasha Richardson , Timothy Hutton , Rutanya Alda , Sylvie Boucher

67. Shadowlands (1993)

PG | 131 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

C.S. Lewis , a world-renowned Christian theologian, writer and professor, leads a passionless life until he meets spirited poet Joy Gresham from the U.S.

Director: Richard Attenborough | Stars: Anthony Hopkins , Debra Winger , Julian Fellowes , Roddy Maude-Roxby

Votes: 20,408 | Gross: $25.84M

68. The Postman (1994)

PG | 108 min | Biography, Comedy, Drama

A simple Italian postman learns to love poetry while delivering mail to a famous poet, and then uses this to woo local beauty Beatrice.

Directors: Michael Radford , Massimo Troisi | Stars: Massimo Troisi , Philippe Noiret , Maria Grazia Cucinotta , Renato Scarpa

Votes: 38,943 | Gross: $21.85M

Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda. Neruda wrote in a variety of styles such as erotically charged love poems as in his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope.

69. Fritänkaren (1994 Video)

Not Rated | 276 min | Biography, Drama

A 274-minute documentary portrait of the life of playwright August Strindberg. The topic of the movie is inextricable from its method of production: for two years, beginning in 1992, Watkins created the film in a communal collaboration.

Director: Peter Watkins | Stars: Anders Mattsson , Lena Settervall , Roland Borgström , Ingela Berger

Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and essayist. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques

70. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994)

R | 125 min | Biography, Drama

Dorothy Parker remembers the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of friends whose barbed wit, like hers, was fueled by alcohol and flirted with despair.

Director: Alan Rudolph | Stars: Jennifer Jason Leigh , Campbell Scott , Matthew Broderick , Peter Gallagher

Votes: 4,878 | Gross: $2.14M

Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, short story writer, and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles.

71. Tom & Viv (1994)

PG-13 | 115 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

In 1915, Tom and Viv elope, but her gynecological and emotional problems disrupt their honeymoon. Her father is angry because Tom's poetry doesn't bring in enough to live, but her mother is happy Viv has found a tender and discreet husband.

Director: Brian Gilbert | Stars: Willem Dafoe , Miranda Richardson , Rosemary Harris , Tim Dutton

Votes: 1,863 | Gross: $0.54M

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a poet, playwright, and literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.

72. Postcards from America (1994)

Not Rated | 92 min | Drama

In the midst of the AIDS crisis, a young man from the suburbs moves to the big city of New York and ends up working as a hustler.

Director: Steve McLean | Stars: James Lyons , Michael Tighe , Olmo Tighe , Michael Imperioli

Votes: 258 | Gross: $0.08M

David Wojnarowicz (September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.

73. Carrington (1995)

R | 121 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

The platonic relationship between artist Dora Carrington (Dame Emma Thompson) and writer Lytton Strachey (Jonathan Pryce) in the early twentieth century.

Director: Christopher Hampton | Stars: Emma Thompson , Jonathan Pryce , Steven Waddington , Samuel West

Votes: 5,764 | Gross: $3.24M

Giles Lytton Strachey (1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His 1921 biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

74. Total Eclipse (1995)

R | 111 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

Young, wild poet Arthur Rimbaud and his mentor Paul Verlaine engage in a fierce, forbidden romance while feeling the effects of a hellish artistic lifestyle.

Director: Agnieszka Holland | Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio , David Thewlis , Romane Bohringer , Dominique Blanc

Votes: 16,750 | Gross: $0.34M

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent movement, Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music and art. He was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, traveling extensively on three continents before his death from cancer less than a month after his 37th birthday. Paul-Marie Verlaine (30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

75. Indecent Acts (1995 TV Movie)

51 min | Biography

Director: Will Parry | Stars: John Sessions , Corin Redgrave , Neil Titley , Jennifer Burgess

76. Saint-Ex (1996)

PG | 82 min | Biography, Drama, Fantasy

Poetic biography of author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Director: Anand Tucker | Stars: Bruno Ganz , Miranda Richardson , Janet McTeer , Ken Stott

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944) was a French writer and aviator. He is best remembered for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his books about aviation adventures, including Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.

77. Hamsun (1996)

Not Rated | 159 min | Biography, Drama, War

Norwegian Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun's controversial support for the Nazi regime during World War II and its consequences for the Hamsun family after the war.

Director: Jan Troell | Stars: Max von Sydow , Ghita Nørby , Anette Hoff , Gard B. Eidsvold

Votes: 1,715

Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 – February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul.

78. I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

The story of Valerie Solanas, a '60s radical who preached misandry in her "Scum" manifesto. She wrote a screenplay for a film that she wanted Andy Warhol to produce, but after he repeatedly ignored her, she shot him.

Director: Mary Harron | Stars: Lili Taylor , Jared Harris , Martha Plimpton , Lothaire Bluteau

Votes: 7,108 | Gross: $1.81M

Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist writer, best known for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968. She wrote the SCUM Manifesto which encouraged male gendercide and the creation of an all-female society.

79. The Whole Wide World (1996)

PG | 111 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

In 1933 Texas, a schoolteacher and aspiring writer meets a pulp fiction writer, and a relationship soon develops between the two, but it is doomed by his slavishly devotion to his ailing mother and insistence on his freedom.

Director: Dan Ireland | Stars: Vincent D'Onofrio , Renée Zellweger , Ann Wedgeworth , Harve Presnell

Votes: 4,017 | Gross: $0.14M

Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. Best known for his character Conan the Barbarian, he is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. This is actually a very lovely movie indeed. Everybody has heard of the pulp fiction stories of Conan the Barbarian but only hard core fans do know the story behind its writer Robert E. Howard, who created this fantasy hero in 1932. Unfortunately he died at the age of only 30. In his short very productive life he enjoyed literary success but had also, though inspiring and romantic, a not quite fulfilling love affaire with Novalyne Price Ellis. The movie is historically and biographically correct. Very prettily filmed and characterisations seem to be truthful with accents and all. I definitely learned something new and enjoyed the skilful and atmospheric moviemaking.

80. Nerolio (1996)

Unrated | 77 min | Drama

This film depicts three episodes in the life of the highly eccentric, unabashedly gay Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Director: Aurelio Grimaldi | Stars: Marco Cavicchioli , Lucia Sardo , Vincenzo Crivello , Piera Degli Esposti

Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922 – November 2, 1975) was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure. He demonstrated a unique and extraordinary cultural versatility, becoming a highly controversial figure in the process.

81. Saint-Exupéry: La dernière mission (1995 TV Movie)

104 min | Biography, Drama

Life and times of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, famous French pilot and even more famous writer who disappeared on a routine reconnaissance flight during WW2.

Director: Robert Enrico | Stars: Bernard Giraudeau , Maria de Medeiros , Frédéric van den Driessche , Jean-Paul Comart

82. Death in Granada (1996)

R | 114 min | Biography, Drama, Mystery

A journalist starts an investigation into the disappearance of famed poet and political agitator, Garcia Lorca, who disappeared in the early days of the Spanish Civil War in the the 1930's.

Director: Marcos Zurinaga | Stars: Andy Garcia , Esai Morales , Naim Thomas , Gonzalo Penche

Votes: 1,012 | Gross: $0.23M

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936) was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads during the Spanish Civil War. In 2008, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into Lorca's death. The Garcia Lorca family eventually dropped objections to the excavation of a potential gravesite near Alfacar. However, no human remains were found.

83. Beaumarchais the Scoundrel (1996)

116 min | Adventure, Comedy, History

The life story of the titular Beaumarchais, playwright and adventurer, who gets himself into numerous different scrapes and romantic encounters in 18th Century France.

Director: Édouard Molinaro | Stars: Fabrice Luchini , Manuel Blanc , Sandrine Kiberlain , Michel Aumont

Votes: 1,464 | Gross: $0.63M

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (4 January 1732 – 18 May 1799) was a watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, arms dealer, and revolutionary (both French and American). He was best known, however, for his theatrical works, especially the three Figaro plays.

84. The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997)

R | 92 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

In 1946 Denver, an aspiring writer who enjoys irresponsible adventures with his friend writes a letter about his life before and after the suicide attempt by his sad, commitment-seeking girlfriend.

Director: Stephen Kay | Stars: Thomas Jane , Keanu Reeves , Adrien Brody , John Doe

Votes: 2,440 | Gross: $0.05M

Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, perhaps best known for being characterized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.

85. Wilde (1997)

R | 118 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

The turmoil in poet/playwright Oscar Wilde's life after he discovers his homosexuality.

Director: Brian Gilbert | Stars: Stephen Fry , Jude Law , Vanessa Redgrave , Jennifer Ehle

Votes: 18,105 | Gross: $2.16M

86. The Gambler (1997)

R | 97 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Sir Michael Gambon) must write a novel in twenty-seven days in a deal to pay off his gambling debts, and feverishly dictates the novel "The Gambler".

Director: Károly Makk | Stars: Michael Gambon , Jodhi May , Polly Walker , Dominic West

Votes: 446 | Gross: $0.01M

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

87. Shakespeare in Love (1998)

R | 123 min | Comedy, Drama, History

The world's greatest ever playwright, William Shakespeare , is young, out of ideas and short of cash, but meets his ideal woman and is inspired to write one of his most famous plays.

Director: John Madden | Stars: Gwyneth Paltrow , Joseph Fiennes , Geoffrey Rush , Tom Wilkinson

Votes: 234,073 | Gross: $100.32M

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616)[nb 1] was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.

88. The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999 TV Movie)

TV-MA | 104 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

The rather eccentric (especially in her thinking) author of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" becomes involved with a much younger, and married man, to the dismay of those close to her.

Director: Christopher Menaul | Stars: Helen Mirren , Eric Stoltz , Julie Delpy , Peter Fonda

Votes: 1,648

Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982), was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.

89. Marcel Proust's Time Regained (1999)

169 min | Drama, Romance, War

A lush, elegant epic taking us on a time-swirling trip down the infinitely complex labyrinth that is Marcel Proust's memory lane.

Director: Raúl Ruiz | Stars: Catherine Deneuve , Emmanuelle Béart , Vincent Perez , John Malkovich

Votes: 2,828 | Gross: $0.46M

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.

90. Angela's Ashes (1999)

R | 145 min | Biography, Drama

An Irish Catholic family returns to 1930s Limerick after a child's death in America. The unemployed I.R.A. veteran father struggles with poverty, prejudice and alcoholism as the family endures harsh slum conditions.

Director: Alan Parker | Stars: Emily Watson , Robert Carlyle , Joe Breen , Ciaran Owens

Votes: 23,209 | Gross: $13.04M

Francis "Frank" McCourt (August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, best known as the author of Angela’s Ashes, an award-winning, tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood.

91. Balzac: A Passionate Life (1999 TV Movie)

PG-13 | 240 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

A man who created great literature from the adventures of his own life--and the women at the heart of it. Although gruff, unsophisticated, and far from handsome, Balzac exerts an irresistible fascination on women.

Director: Josée Dayan | Stars: Gérard Depardieu , Jeanne Moreau , Fanny Ardant , Virna Lisi

Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists.

92. Die Braut (1999)

112 min | Biography, Drama

The relationship between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German writer, and Christiane Vulpius, a village girl, is one of the instantaneous and fiery passion. They lived together for ... See full summary  »

Director: Egon Günther | Stars: Veronica Ferres , Herbert Knaup , Sibylle Canonica , Franziska Herold

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature.

93. Children of the Century (1999)

135 min | Biography, Drama, Romance

A story of doomed passion between two genius writers of the 19th century - novelist George Sand and poet Alfred de Musset.

Director: Diane Kurys | Stars: Juliette Binoche , Benoît Magimel , Stefano Dionisi , Robin Renucci

Votes: 2,016 | Gross: $0.05M

Amantine (also "Amandine") Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness (French: baronne) Dudevant (Paris, 1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pseudonym George Sand as a French novelist and memoirist. Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, autobiographical) from 1836.

94. Dash and Lilly (1999 TV Movie)

100 min | Drama

Biographical look at the bombastic love affair that writers Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman shared in 1940 and 50's Hollywood. Refusing to marry, but deeply in love, the two engaged in... See full summary  »

Director: Kathy Bates | Stars: Sam Shepard , Judy Davis , Bebe Neuwirth , Laurence Luckinbill

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse). Lillian Florence “Lily” Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes. She was romantically involved for 30 years with mystery and crime writer Dashiell Hammett (and was the inspiration for his character Nora Charles), and was also a long-time friend and literary executor of author Dorothy Parker.

95. Isn't She Great (2000)

R | 95 min | Biography, Comedy, Drama

Bette Midler and Nathan Lane star in this comedy about Jacqueline Susann, the ambitious woman of dubious talent who wrote Valley of the Dolls, a best-selling novel that became a sensation.

Director: Andrew Bergman | Stars: Bette Midler , Nathan Lane , Stockard Channing , David Hyde Pierce

Votes: 2,556 | Gross: $2.96M

Jacqueline Susann (August 20, 1918 – September 21, 1974) was an American author known for her best-selling novels. Her most notable work was Valley of the Dolls, a book that broke sales records and spawned an Oscar-nominated 1967 film and a short-lived TV series.

96. Nora (2000)

R | 106 min | Biography, Drama

Dublin, 1904, James Joyce chats up Nora Barnacle, a hotel maid recently come from Galway. She enchants him with her frank, uninhibited manner, and before long, he's convinced her to come with him to Trieste.

Director: Pat Murphy | Stars: Ewan McGregor , Susan Lynch , Andrew Scott , Vinnie McCabe

Votes: 1,840 | Gross: $0.01M

97. Quills (2000)

R | 124 min | Biography, Drama

In a Napoleonic era insane asylum, an inmate, the irrepressible Marquis De Sade, fights a battle of wills against a tyrannically prudish doctor.

Director: Philip Kaufman | Stars: Geoffrey Rush , Kate Winslet , Joaquin Phoenix , Michael Caine

Votes: 56,676 | Gross: $7.06M

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814) was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts; in his lifetime some were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously and Sade denied being their author. He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law. Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and in an insane asylum for about 32 years of his life; eleven years in Paris (10 of which were spent in the Bastille) a month in Conciergerie, two years in a fortress, a year in Madelonnettes, three years in Bicêtre, a year in Sainte-Pélagie, and 13 years in the Charenton asylum. During the French Revolution he was an elected delegate to the National Convention. Many of his works were written in prison.

98. Beat (2000)

R | 93 min | Drama

Two murders that shaped the lives of several college students who went on to become some of the most influential writers of the Beat Generation.

Director: Gary Walkow | Stars: Courtney Love , Kiefer Sutherland , Lisa Sheridan , Patricia Llaca

Votes: 1,613

William Seward Burroughs II (also known by his pen name William Lee; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who affected popular culture as well as literature. He is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century." Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. Burroughs also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

99. The Basketball Diaries (1995)

R | 102 min | Biography, Crime, Drama

A teenager finds his dreams of becoming a basketball star threatened after he free falls into the harrowing world of drug addiction.

Director: Scott Kalvert | Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio , Lorraine Bracco , Marilyn Sokol , James Madio

Votes: 120,810 | Gross: $2.42M

James Dennis "Jim" Carroll (August 1, 1949 – September 11, 2009) was an author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician.

100. Girl, Interrupted (1999)

R | 127 min | Biography, Drama

A directionless teenager, Susanna, is rushed to Claymoore, a mental institution, after a supposed suicide attempt. There, she befriends a group of troubled women who deeply influence her life.

Director: James Mangold | Stars: Winona Ryder , Angelina Jolie , Clea DuVall , Brittany Murphy

Votes: 210,712 | Gross: $28.87M

Susanna Kaysen (born November 11, 1948) is an American author.

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The best ‘andor’ writer is co-writing ‘star wars: dawn of the jedi’.

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James Mangold’s Star Wars movie, Dawn of the Jedi, is already a unique concept for the universe, set 25,000 years ago and tracing the origins of the Force. But now it sounds exciting for a different reason.

That would be the announcement that Beau Willimon is co-writing Dawn of the Jedi. Yes, I know, “who?” but you will understand when you realize what he’s responsible for. That’s not just that he wrote episodes of Andor, the beloved, grounded Star Wars series halfway through its run on Disney Plus, it’s what he wrote in Andor. Namely, he wrote three specific episodes, the prison arc, Narkina 6, Nobody’s Listening and One Way Out.

Here's a refresher on that for you, if you wanted to relieve the glorious finale of that arc.

But in addition to that, he was also responsible for Stellan Skarsgård’s monologue as Luthen Rael (also in One Way Out). That speech:

" Calm, Kindness, Kinship, Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I made my mind a sunless place. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago, from which there’s only one conclusion. I’m damned for what I do.

My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight. They’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What’s my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?

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So you’ll stay with me Lonni. I need all the heroes I can get."

And here’s him actually performing that:

So yes, this man has written some of the best scenes and best lines in modern Star Wars history, and they’ve got him working on this movie. Andor can’t last forever, but the more Willimon is involved in the universe, the better it’s going to be. That much is clear by now.

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