Naturally, I watch TV because it’s entertaining, it brings me joy, books take too long to read, etc. but I believe that it can also be instructive. If I’d never seen the episode of Punky Brewster where Cherie got trapped in the refrigerator while playing hide-and-seek, I may have never learned how dangerous that seemingly innocuous appliance really is. But TV can also save your life in ways that aren’t so obvious. Besides being better than refrigerators. Most learned people think that reality television shows like Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise are harming our society and that even the reality programs that aren’t celebrating idiocy and low culture are creating a sense of entitlement in the nation’s youth and promoting ruthlessness or egotism. But what if these learned people have it all wrong and reality television is actually what’s going to allow our civilization to survive? I usually just mindlessly watch the weird shows on networks like Animal Planet and TLC but recently I’ve been starting to think that some of these shows might be able to help us navigate a post-apocalyptic future (which—let’s just face it—may ironically be brought about by these very shows).

Francis Lawrence keeps himself busy, and it shows when you look at his untrusty IMDB page. The director’s name has been tied to a lot of projects in the past few years – Survivor, Sgt. Rock, Houdini, and more — but many of those films aren’t ones Lawrence will be making. In my interview with the director, we spent some time discussing what may be next for him, either Houdini or Unbroken, and why certain projects didn’t come together. First off, Lawrence won’t be adapting Survivor, which he backed away from over two years ago. Not because the project died while he was working on it, but over a tonal issue:

Today is Chuck Palahniuk‘s 49th birthday, which means that the writer and member of the Lost Generation gets to blow out some candle, eat some cake, and mail a few plastic lobsters to people. It also means that we get to take a look at the novels he’s written that still need to be made into movies. For those that don’t read our site on the weekends at all (because kites don’t fly themselves), we normally run this column every Saturday, but seeing how it’s a special occasion and seeing as how we don’t care much for rules, we figured it was a great time to comb through the Fight Club and Choke author’s stuff to celebrate it a bit. To that end, here are 9 Chuck Palahniuk books that are ripe for the movie picking.

Studios have been afraid for too long. It’s time to put Palahniuk’s long, strange trip into the heart of American commercialism and religion on the big screen.