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Overlooked Series for TV or Movie Adaptation
The Game of Thrones book series is nihilistic nonsensical bilge. But it makes for “good” television because that sort of mess seems to be popular in today’s culture, what with all the sex, sorcery, and savagery. As an actual story though? It’s terrible. Which is probably why George R.R. Martin could never finish it – it had no real logical “out”, no escape from its cycles of violence and revenge, save what the HBO writers could force together. Until HBO picked it up, though, it was unlikely fare for Hollywood treatment – Hollywood typically shies away from overly long fantasy cycles simply because such things are very expensive to cast and produce well, to say nothing of finding good writers to translate novels into scripts you can actually film. For all the awfulness of its story, I do give full credit to HBO for the solid work they put into the project over nearly a decade – one can deplore the story but still admire the brilliant and extremely skilled craftwork involved in telling it, and (more importantly) sticking with it at that high level for so long. Would that The Hobbit had been given that same dedication.
And now it seems we are to receive another attempt at telling the story of Dune. I am not excited at the prospect. The David Lynch film of the 80s was terrible. The SciFi Channel’s miniseries of 20 years ago was much better. But why Dune? Why yet another attempt? If Hollywood is looking for that next “big epic”, surely there are other and better stories to tell? Dune, the first book, is interesting, but has its weaknesses, while the rest of the series gets rather strange. Haven’t other authors written better and more compelling fantasy or science-fiction epics? Or must we continually return to just a few “classics”, like Amazon is trying to do with its pending Tolkien series? I would like to propose a few other authors and series that Hollywood should consider instead, and would invite you to make your own suggestions as well.
Jack Vance – Lyonesse – You have all the vying factions and warring kingdoms, spies, betrayals, magic, pending doom, adventures, and quests that people loved in GoT, but series is more tightly told, not predicated on the nonsense of centuries of cultural and technological stasis, and its story arcs and overall narrative have definite beginnings, middles, and ends. The characters are also far more human, and thus more clever, and more fallible at the same time. Vance is not afraid to kill off characters, but does not do so because the Plot Wheel® demands it. Vance’s other works, from his Dying Earth stories to his science fiction, would also make good candidates – they are character driven tales in vivid worlds, but the worlds are ultimately only backdrops for the people in them.
Susan Cooper – The Dark Is Rising – Yes this is a children’s series, and yes Hollywood did, in its Harry-Potter enthusiasms, already put out a film, but it was dreadful (almost Lynch-Dune dreadful at that), and we should put it aside and start over. The series is a modern blending with ancient Anglo-Celtic mythology, and as such is very richly told.
Cornelia Funke – Inkheart – Like with Susan Cooper, Hollywood tried this one and blew it once already, in no small part because they could not decide whether it was a children’s story with some mature hints, or a more mature story as witnessed by a child, and of course they Americanized it. Andrew Klavan’s Another Kingdom series deals with some similar concepts as Funke, so if you enjoyed Klavan you would find this series familiar in some respects. Inkheart is a story series about our own world intersecting with a very rich and complicated parallel magical world, through the eyes of a young woman growing up in both.
What would you like to see made? What authors or series have been either unfairly overlooked, or badly mangled and worth another shot?
Or are there series (say, like Dune) that you think ought to be put out to pasture just on principle at this point?
Published in Entertainment
Take out the ewoks (as so many would like to do) and you may be right.
They actually tried doing a show that was a modern retelling of the David/Saul story. I believe it was called Kings. It didn’t get much viewership, though, and was cancelled.
Joseph Heller’s take on David in his book God Knows is one of my favorite pieces of literature. So funny. So sad. So true.
But, Heller is hard to make into a movie, even though I think they did a decent job back in the day with Catch-22.
Tough to make a whiny rapist with leprosy all that sympathetic.
Rapist! On the other hand, . . . Victim of Discrimination! On the other hand, . . . Complete jerk!
The Disny Star Wars trilogy was a princess movie.
Yes, but Rey was pretty.
Okay, off topic because I’m complaining about one that did get made. Ender’s Game. I thought it was horrendous, particularly compressing the twelve years from the book down into three months, thereby taking it from something that was believable to something completely ridiculous.
Here’s the part that kills me. At about the same time this came out, another movie came out, called Boyhood. It’s claim to fame was that they spent twelve years shooting it. But they spent those twelve years telling the story of people getting twelve years older, when they could have spent the time telling a story that needed twelve years to tell, namely Ender’s Game.
I would have split it into two parts; recruitment up through the end of Battle School; and then Command School and the epilogue. And they would have had time to do it justice. And Ender could have been younger and smaller than the others, instead of being a full head taller than the kid bullying him.
God Knows is one of my favorites. I haven’t seen my copy in years, but there is a passage in it where David reflects on Solomon and his judgement where he directed the baby be cut in half in 1 Kings 3: “He wasn’t being wise. The schmuck was trying to be fair.”
Late to this party, and didn’t see a few books worthy of mention:
Zelazny’s Lord of Light. My all-time favorite stand-alone sci-fi novel.
David Drake’s RCN series that starts with With The Lightnings. Very Patrick O’Brian-ish, but in space in the far future. The good guys are very democratic/British, and the bad guys are very totalitarian/French. Fitting. (:
Roadmarks, Jack of Shadows … Zelazny provided quite a bit of good material.
Better ≠ good. They were both bad movies.
A story for our times, now that I think about it. Heaven forbid people believe a sinner can become better.
I was a teenager when I read it. But I remember the protagonist as a steadfast jerk who nevertheless does noble deeds. It’s as if human beings are complicated or something.
I read it as a teenager, too. I think it was my first experience with the concept of the anti-hero. If I recall, most of his “noble deeds” are kind of done accidentally when not reluctantly. He refused to believe that what was happening wasn’t a dream. I’m not certain he ever really reformed. In the second trilogy he was better behaved, but he wasn’t really the central character of that one.
Really? Who was? Saltheart Foamfollower?
Great. Now I have to read it again.
Negative. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is worth it.
Speaking of which, some of those books could easily translate into quality sci-fi flicks. Specifically Moon and Cat. Cat is basically a comedy, it could be played in a number of ways.
I can give you that one. But he wrote a lot of crap in the late 60s and 70s.
Moon would make a great movie. Of course, that’s what I thought about Troopers too.
For that matter, I’d love to see a series of movies made out of most of the Heinlein Juvies. Time for the Stars, Have Space Suit, double star, Tunnel in the Sky. I’ve reread most of them over the past couple years, and they hold up as story telling.
I agree with all of that – the fact that Troopers turned out to be a standardly-weird Verhoeven flick doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be done well. As a campy, over the top sci-fi movie, Troopers was great – but some of the context from the books, etc, was a bit lost in how it was presented.
Granted, these are movies. They are, by design, created to get people to buy tickets – as many as possible. Unless you’ve got a green light to lose money, I’m always going to assume whatever might have been the initial intentions of the writers and filmmakers gets somewhat lost in the reality of at least breaking even on the capital investment.
Tunnel in the Sky, especially. For those who don’t know the story, it’s about a group of high school students sent to a far-away planet for a survival training experience. But something goes wrong with the plan to retrieve them, and it looks like they are stuck there indefinitely.
The book came out about the same time as Lord of the Flies, but offers a very different view of humanity and society.
In the Heinlein book, the group comprises girls as well as boys, and is also multiracial.
Could make a very good movie.
Concur.
First Heinlein book I ever read, in about 4th grade.
Linden Avery was the viewpoint character in the second trilogy, if I recall.
Thats right, she was.
As for the rape, it happened right after he first got to the Land and he didn’t believe it was real, so maybe that’s sort of a defense?
Or, as Aaron suggested above, we don’t have to defend it but could see the rape as an evil act by a conflicted guy who later tries to accept responsibility and make amends as best he can in his twisted, crippled way?
I imagine we could shorten him with CGI now, but it occurs to me that a person could shoot several completely different movies over a single multi-year span with the same actors – and they could be released on any number of staggered schedules.
That person would have to plan and secure capital, then execute, all up front, and only then sell their product on a rather long time scale, during which the market evolves. It would only work with a proven vehicle, like LotR or HP.
It just so happens that I have a script for a trans-friendly reality show-styled medieval wizard school called Pigworts where a bunch of plucky non-gender conforming kids grow up while fighting a guy To Be Named Later who has a small army of Nazmentors and a sidekick who looks like Mike Pence. I’ll post the kickstarter link in a little while.
We watch movies all the time where a character is portrayed by two or three actors at different age points because kids change so fast. I don’t know that the extremity of the time compression is obvious to the film goer unless they know the book, which gives a much fuller perspective on the strategic events surrounding Ender’s career. Movies can get away with a lot because, unlike a book, we tend to consume it in one go and only stop to chew on it if something wrong grabs our attention. Or if we are overly invested in the product.
The story and lead characters were recognizable. I enjoyed the movie, the weightless scrimmaging was fun. I wouldn’t mind if they did something loosely based on Speaker for the Dead. Obviously, the audiences for the two films would be very different.
Watch out for the stobor.
@barfly @knotwisethepoet I really liked Blade Runner 2049. Nobody watched it just like the original Blade Runner upon release. But the folks I know who have watched it all enjoyed it, if that’s worth anything. I think I’ve seen all of Denis Villeneuve movies and I’ve liked them all to varying degrees. Another reason for me to be hopeful for Dune. And film technology is actually good now to showcase Dune.