25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

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Given that most of us are in home, here is a list of movies made from magazine stories.

Adaptation (2002)

Based on Orchid Fever by Susan Orlean (The New Yorker, 1995)

Generally speaking, orchids seem to drive people crazy. The people who love orchids love them madly, but the passion for orchids is not necessarily a passion for beauty. Something about the form of an orchid makes it seem almost more like a creature than a flower. Many orchids are strange-looking, and others have bizarre shapes and jarring color combinations, and all orchids are rather ugly when they aren’t in flower. Laroche told me that many species are so plain that when he shows them to people they invariably ask him what they will look like when they bloom, and he has to explain that they already are blooming. Orchids have adapted to almost every environment on earth. They can be mutated, crossbred, and cloned. They can take the form of complex architectural structures or of garish, glamorous, luscious flowers. Not surprisingly, orchids have all sorts of sexual associations; few other flowers are as plainly erotic in appearance or effect. Even other creatures find orchids alluring. Some orchids are shaped exactly like the insect that pollinates them; the insect is drawn inside thinking it has found its mate.

The complete article

Longreads — Catherine Cusick

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How do 11 people go to jail for one murder?

“How did a stabbing by one young man lead to 11 convictions? The answer is one of the most controversial principles in English law.”

But concerns about the dual injustice of joint enterprise – both in overcharging individuals for their roles in crimes, and in the racially disproportionate way the law is applied – have dogged joint enterprise for years, as reports by the House of Commons justice select committee noted in 2012 and 2014. Lucy Powell, MP for Manchester Central, believes that these fears have been proven right once again in the case of Hafidah’s murder.

The complete article

Harry Stopes — The Guardian

I Was a 9-Year-Old Playboy Bunny

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A nice weekend read from Longreads.

As a child, my intuition told me my body possessed power. But over time, the world convinced me that this power was not mine to control. That my central worth was contained in the perfect arch of my back, the just-so curve of my hips, the discrete cock of my neck and my silent, wide-open mouth. There’s a price for crossing the line between sexuality and sexualization, a debt little girls can never afford.

The complete article

Shannon Lell — Longreads

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Candy

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This needull is a very interesting profile on Candy Barr, an American stripper, burlesque dancer in the mid-20th century. “At age 16, Barr appeared in one of the most famous and widely circulated of the early underground pornographic movies, Smart Alec (1951). Because of the widespread “underground” distribution and popularity of this short hardcore 8mm movie, which is no more than 15 minutes long, she has been called “the first porn star.” – Wikipedia

She reached for another cigarette and said, “I started to tell you a story earlier. About something that scared me for years. It was one night when I was babysitting, I was dead tired from washing bed sheets all afternoon and trying to study and the baby was crying. I walked over and put my hand on the baby’s nose. That’s all there was to it, a moment of darkness, but just for a moment I knew I was capable of killing. I thought about that many times in prison. Women who had killed or harmed children were horribly ostracized in prison. I could understand why they struck out at me, but those poor women—didn’t they understand how those women hurt inside? Couldn’t they tell by the depth of their tears? Didn’t they understand that brief moment of darkness?”

The complete article

Gary Cartwright — Texas Monthly

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What it’s like to lose Short-term Memory

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A very interesting longread. Only when you face certain disabilities, you realize what it is to live with them. Your body and mind probably adapt to the new situation. Today’s needull is a first person experience of someone who lost her short-term memory.

If short-term memory is damaged as mine was, it works more like this: I put the water on to boil. I heat up the oil in the sauté pan. I chop the onions and then wonder for what it was that I chopped the onions. What might it be? I wash my hands, because I might as well—my hands are covered in onion juice, and my eyes are tearing. I return to the stove, where the oil is now scorching hot. I wonder what on earth it was I was cooking, why the sauté pan was left this way. I turn off the heat under the oil. I sigh and go upstairs. I forget everything I just did like a trail of dust in wind. Two hours later, after a nap, I return to the kitchen to a pile of chopped onions on the chopping block. The pan is cool but scorched. And I again wonder why. But mostly, my eyes turn to an empty stockpot on the stove, the burner turned on high. There is nothing in the stockpot, not even water. This happened over and over again in the months following my stroke. So I stopped cooking for a year.

The complete article

Christine H. Lee — Longreads

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