Based on an Advice Book

Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.

—Roger Ebert reviews Think Like a Man

Hollywood knows how to make commercially successful movies out of unpromising source material: Adaptation Decay. Sometimes their source material is not only non-fiction but isn't even a narrative. That doesn't seem to deter Hollywood from making romantic comedies out of advice books. Normally the plot will center on a character following, overtly or otherwise, the advice in the book, but there are In Name Only exceptions, such as Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex ^[1].

Examples of Based on an Advice Book include:

• Woody Allen's movie of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) is an unusual example in that it's a series of seven disconnected sketches. Even so, they have almost nothing to do with the book.
• Mean Girls is based on "Queen Bees & Wannabees" by Rosalind Wiseman, a guide for parents of adolescent girls.
• The 1960 comedy School For Scoundrels (and by extension the 2006 remake) was based on Stephen Potter's satirical advice book The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating and its sequels Lifemanship and One-Upmanship.
• On the day he died, John Belushi signed on to be in the film adaptation of The Joy Of Sex. He was high on cocaine at the time.
• 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter. Although that's not really an advice book; it's a comedy book, parts of which parody advice books.
• How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying
• Sex And The Single Girl was named after the book by Helen Gurley Brown and starred Natalie Wood as a heavily fictionalized version of Brown.
• It, a 1927 romantic comedy starring Clara Bow which spawned the term "It Girl", was based on Elinor Glyn's advice guide about how to have great sex appeal.
• Both The Fast and the Furious and Live Free or Die Hard were based on magazine articles, as was Saturday Night Fever.
• He's Just Not That Into You was based on an advice book based on a stand-up comedy bit
• For a video game example, the Brain Age games are Minigame Games based on Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain, by Dr. Ryuta Kawashima.
• Parodied in Telltale's Sam and Max Freelance Police games, where almost every episode is claimed to be based on some sort of pamphlet that has nothing to do with the actual plot. This is a running gag from the original comics as well.
• The 2007 German movie Warum Männer nicht zuhören und Frauen schlecht einparken is based upon an advice book of the same name, a bestseller in Germany at that time. (It was written by Australians, so it has an original English title: Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps)
• Yes Man, sort of: the book it was based on is a memoir, but a sort of self-help memoir.
• Anime example: Health and Physical Education for 30-Year-Olds, a sex and dating guide targeted at lonely Otaku in their 30s.
• The film Think Like a Man is based on Steve Harvey's relationship advice book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.

1. ↑ But Were Afraid To Ask