from wikipedia:
Attempted film adaptations
Early in his career, J. D. Salinger expressed a willingness to have his work adapted for the screen.[34] However, in 1949, a critically panned film version of his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was released; renamed My Foolish Heart and taking great liberties with Salinger's story, the film is widely considered to be among the reasons that Salinger has refused to allow any subsequent movie adaptations of his work.[35] The enduring popularity of The Catcher in the Rye, however, has resulted in repeated attempts to secure the novel's screen rights.
When The Catcher in the Rye was first released, many offers were made to adapt it for the screen; among them was Sam Goldwyn, producer of My Foolish Heart.[35] In a letter written in the early fifties, Salinger spoke of mounting a play in which he would play the role of Holden Caulfield opposite Margaret O'Brien, and, if he couldn’t play the part himself, to “forget about it." Almost fifty years later, the writer Joyce Maynard definitively concluded, "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger."[36]
Salinger told Maynard in the seventies that Jerry Lewis "tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden,"[36] despite Lewis not having read the novel until he was in his thirties.[30] Celebrities ranging from Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have since made efforts to make a film adaptation.[37] In an interview with Premiere magazine, John Cusack commented that his one regret about turning twenty-one was that he had become too old to play Holden Caulfield. Writer-director Billy Wilder recounted his abortive attempts to snare the novel's rights, saying,
“ Of course I read The Catcher in the Rye....Wonderful book. I loved it. I pursued it. I wanted to make a picture out of it. And then one day a young man came to the office of Leland Hayward, my agent, in New York, and said, 'Please tell Mr. Leland Hayward to lay off. He’s very, very insensitive.' And he walked out. That was the entire speech. I never saw him. That was J. D. Salinger and that was Catcher in the Rye.[38] ”
In 1961, Salinger denied Elia Kazan permission to direct a stage adaptation of Catcher for Broadway.[39] More recently, Salinger's agents received bids for the Catcher movie rights from Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg,[40] neither of which was even passed on to Salinger for consideration.
In the 1993 movie Six Degrees of Separation [41] Paul ( Will Smith) interpreted a modern Holden Caufield. Paul reads a line underlined in a copy of Catcher in the Rye: "My brother's in Hollywood being a prostitute."[42] "What a phony slob ...(his father) was."[43] "People never notice anything." [44] "'Like hell it' I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like to take aim at it. 'This is a people shooting hat,'...'I shoot people in this hat.'"[45]. And Paul goes on from there to talk about "the death of the imagination."[46]
In 2003, the BBC television program The Big Read featured The Catcher in the Rye, intercutting discussions of the novel with "a series of short films that featured an actor playing Salinger's adolescent antihero, Holden Caulfield."[39] The show defended its unlicensed adaptation of the novel by claiming to be a "literary review," and no major charges were filed.
According to a speculative article in The Guardian in May 2006, there are rumors that director Terrence Malick has been linked to a possible screen adaptation of the novel.[47]
The book was awesome, hopefully there will be a movie soon. JD salinger hates movies, so there probably wont be a movie while he still alive.
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