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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
A story in which the villain is the United Nations? And the heroes are Lunar libertarians who bomb the UN into submission? Those are two ideas that would horrify most Hollywood people.
What about a dark British mini-series about the world of Fahrenheit 451?
Hated the book. Hated the movie. What a trudge. Made to read it in the public schools because book burning is what right wing haters do and we have to inoculate the next generation against such regressive practices. Now the same niche of deciders are rampaging through history annihilating anything that might give a snowflake pause.
Maybe Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric” or “The Veldt”. The novels never seemed to be quite the same caliber. I liked the one with the butterfly, “A Sound of Thunder”. Time travel done right.
Oh, wait, I almost forgot! Svetz!!!! “Flight of the Horse”, Rainbow Mars, it’s an evergreen riff that could still be going long after we’re all dead! Larry Niven, phone your office!
Never been a Bradbury fan. I find his prose dense and unreadable.
In High School I took an American Lit class specifically because there was to be a unit on Science Fiction. Turned out I knew more about the subject than the teacher did. To get out of the reading assignment (The Martian Chronicles) I talked her into letting me do a “guest lecture” instead. I believe it went reasonable well, although 40-plus years later the only thing I remember is one of the questions I was asked, which was what did I think of the book they’d been assigned to read. I recall a few moments of panic and making eye contact with the teacher for a few seconds before I hemmed and hawed and gave a reasonably politically correct answer.
It is in English and written by a living author. Next question?
I think I said something about Bradbury not being one of my favorites but it’s one of his better books, or something suitably non-committal like that.
A friend of mine and I tried to buy the screen rights to Harsh Mistress in 1975. At the price the publisher asked, we couldn’t afford it ourselves; we needed a studio to pick up half the tab. (This is pretty normal for film deals; even if you happened to have a spare $100,000 or so in 1975 dollars, lost underneath the seat cushions on the couch, splitting that 100K with a buying partner like Warners or Paramount, though only a first step, is a literal buy-in for them that begins to put an engagement ring on an eventual production deal for the film.)
We couldn’t find that partner. It wasn’t political, exactly, just their honest, jaded Seventies judgment that a story based on guys in space suits firing laser beams at each other sounded twenty-plus years out of date. I don’t know if they revisited that verdict after May 1977.
I was thinking that, as well.
Did you see it in a theater, LC? I think I would have enjoyed it if I watched it at home where I could control the volume. But in the theater, it was literally painful. I’ve never seen another movie where the loud parts were so loud I had to put my fingers in my ears.
Here’s something I wrote last June about surveillance TV in film and TV history:
One such “Outer Limits” show was “O.B.I.T.”, broadcast on November 4, 1963, only two and a half weeks before American history would abruptly and grimly jump its tracks. The director, Gerd Oswald, and the cinematographer, Conrad Hall, came from the world of feature films and by 1963 TV standards were top Hollywood talent. (It’s well worth seeing but some spoilers are ahead if you’d like to see it first before reading them.) Even when the polarities of social power are reversed, the truth in a show should survive for another generation. What happens when it doesn’t, or can’t?
Like better episodes of “The Twilight Zone”, the writer of O.B.I.T., Meyer Dolinsky, had a lot to say about the darker impulses of human nature without hitting you over the head with its message. A strange outbreak of murders and suicides among top scientists at Cypress Hills, a secret Federal defense laboratory, has triggered an official investigation. (Okay, this is a fifty-six-year-old fantasy. The Senator is the good guy. Got it?) We discover that O.B.I.T. is the name of a viewing machine: it reverts to the earliest dreams of television, as being able to form sender-less, camera-less remote images of anyone in the world. This strange technology was secretly given to us by outer space aliens who cynically knew that it was deeply destructive. The temptation to use the device to spy on co-workers, rivals, and spouses proves irresistible. By the end of the story, O.B.I.T. machines are said to be impounded by responsible agencies of the Federal government. Here’s a detail I found realistic: By then, its secret snooping abilities had spread not only to the handful of security agencies who wanted the technique investigated but to the corporations that built O.B.I.T. consoles under contract to the government and even to the leadership of universities that refined and perfected them. Everyone but the public was in on it.
Here’s the conclusion. See if you can watch it without thinking of today’s cyber-monopolies:
There are times I have thought that it would be wonderful if Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books were turned into a TV show. But seeing how frequently Hollywood gets these things wrong, I would rather that they left it alone.
Miles is such a miserable excuse for a human being, the concern is that they would just create one more blisteringly bad example in a vast sea of blisteringly bad examples. He’s almost as bad as Marvel’s big bad, Tony Stark. (Why did you think Thanos gave him such lavish praise?)
I watched it in a theater. And yeah I remember the scene in the water was very loud. I agree there are some movies that I wish could control the volume, where there is such a stark difference between super loud action scenes and very quiet talking scenes.
Same with commercials. You are watching Jeopardy and you feel happy that you know your Greek mythology and then the t.v. is blaring at you about a new treatment for some unpleasant bowel thing.
The Firestar series by Michael Flynn. But Hollywood and the big streaming services would only butcher it deliberately, to bury the ideas, as was done with Starship Troopers.
I’m guardedly hopeful after reading a little about Villeneuve’s Dune project. I’ll put Blade Runner 2049 on the list.
This gets into a thorny issue for conservatives who would like to see our ideas treated by some degree of respect.
First, we should say right off that sometimes our ideas are understood; CBS’s Les Moonves, for example, was dumped overboard during #metoo despite a relatively trivial “rap sheet” because he was an unabashed champion of male-oriented shows like CSI and Hawaii Five-0, and went out of his way to tell his executives to keep their hands off CSI:NY and Blue Bloods. Philip Anschutz, producer of the Narnia series, was “our” billionaire, as was Rupert Murdoch.
There’s a natural urge to see a genuinely conservative studio, even though most of us will ruefully agree that we’d be better off with popular, entertaining films and shows with some of our thinking, not a monolithic, no-enemies-to-the-right set of heavy handed propaganda pieces. More “We Were Soldiers” and less “Lady Ghostbusters 2016”, sure, we can agree on that.
I’m afraid I don’t understand. What do you mean by Miles being a miserable excuse for a human being?