Hey gang, a quick update.

• As you saw the Magic Guild generator is done.  So now I’m planning my next move – though I need to clear up a few things formatting my next book and the like so I’ll take a week or two before starting anything.
• Way With Worlds continues of course.  For those who wondered, I actually do have a stopping point in mind – essentially revisiting all my past relevant columns, expanding them, and then adding anything new I want to write.  This of course could take well over a year to do.
• Considering implementing the mailing list idea, though that one didn’t get a lot of enthusiasm.  I’ll revisit it in a few weeks as my time is really taken up.

That’s about it for me.  How are you doing?

– Steve

Hey gang, if you’d like to contribute to Muse Hack – or really any one of the Crossroads Alpha alliance sites, be sure to drop by our site and give me a buzz.  We’re looking for people!

Comics Bulletin Is Looking For . . .

• Writers – We’re looking for reviewers and writers..
• Site Personnel – People experienced in site “traffic control” – posting, editing, and more to help behind the scenes.

Indie Haven Is Looking For . . .

• Contributing writer- I need someone willing to write written content for the website. We’re always in need of reviewers, but also people who can write features, news posts and Op/Eds if they are willing. Previous journalism experience welcome, but not required.
• Livestreamers- I’m looking for people willing to play games while doing commentary for our TwitchTV stream. Some video editing and writing skills will be required. Part of the job will entail editing those streams and putting them up on YouTube then posting those vids as posts on our site.

MuseHack Is Looking For . . .

• Contributing writer – Looking for writers who want to focus on geeks, fans, otaku and how they use their interests in career and community building. We’re interested in both general and specific subjects, and are especially interested if one wants to take on a specific focus.
• News Gatherers – I’m looking for someone who can compile relevant news articles into weekly and monthly updates, focusing on news related to.

Seventh Sanctum Is Looking For . . .

• Contributing writers – We need writers who can write on creativity – art, fiction, and more. Prefer themed columns.
• Link Gatherers – We want to publish gatherings of amusing and artistic links relevant to the audience. Light commitment, but we prefer updates every week to every few days.

– Steven Savage

The year 1977 was a banner year for Hollywood.  Several iconic films were released that year, including Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Saturday Night Fever.  Star Wars alone dominated, giving way to an appetite for science fiction.  Meanwhile, Saturday Night Fever tapped into the disco fever of the 70s.  Not to be left out, car chase fans got their iconic film, Smokey and the Bandit.

The plot of Smokey and the Bandit is simple.  Bandit, played by Burt Reynolds, and the Snowman, played by Jerry Reed, need to get a truckload of Coors beer from Texas to Georgia.  At the time, Coors beer wasn’t available east of Texas due to an arrangement between Coors and Anhauser-Busch.  Hauling a cargo of the beer was essentially bootlegging and, well, illegal.  To distract the police during the cargo run, Bandit takes an advance on the payment to get a Trans Am to use to flush out roadblocks, giving the Snowman and his dog, Fred, open highway.

Along the way, an unexpected complication jumps into Bandit’s car.  Carrie, played by Sally Field, left her fiancé at the altar and wants out of the county.  Adding to the complexity, Carrie’s ex is the son of the Smokey, one Sheriff Buford T. Justice, played by Jackie Gleason.  Sheriff Justice didn’t take the jilting of his son well, and starts his chase, completely unaware that there is a truck full of illegal beer involved.  Most of the police are unaware of the beer in Snowman’s truck; Bandit becomes enough of a distraction that Snowman can keep the hammer down and speed with impunity.

Car chase movies exist solely for the automotive stunts.  Plots don’t have to be elaborate, and Smokey and the Bandit‘s is more than enough for the vehicular carnage that ensues.  The pull for these movies is in the chase; everything else is secondary.  To be fair, all the main characters in Smokey and the Bandit have a motive for what they’re doing.  Bandit and the Snowman want to win the $80 000 bet; Carrie is running away from a wedding she knows is wrong for her; and Sheriff Justice wants to stop and arrest the man who kidnapped his son’s bride.

Two more theatrical sequels followed, the first following the fallout of Bandit and Carrie breaking up, the second with Sheriff Justice trying and failing to adjust to a life of retirement.  Smokey and the Bandit 2 held together well enough, going back to the core of the car chase.  Smokey and the Bandit 3, however, went far overboard in the writing.  Jackie Gleason pulled off the role, but the rest fell short.

Fast-forwarding, we reach the year 1994.  The 500-channel universe hasn’t yet arrived, but both Bruce Springsteen and “Weird Al” Yankovic had commented on the number of hours to be filled; the former with “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)” in 1992, the latter with “I Can’t Watch This” in 1993 with the line, “I hooked up 80 channels, and each one stunk”.  While The Real World had started on MTV in 1992, the reality show explosion would go off in 2000 with the debut of Survivor on CBS.  The airwaves and cable channels had to find programming somewhere, and syndication was hitting its stride.  Universal Television responded to the need with its Action Pack, a number of movies meant for syndication.  The Action Pack included Hercules: The Legendary Journeys*, TekWar, based on the novels by William Shatner, the Midnight Run films, based on the movie starring Robert DeNiro, and the Bandit movies, based on Smokey and the Bandit.

Four Bandit movies were made, with Hal Needham, creator and director of Smokey and the Bandit, as the executive producer and director.  With Burt Reynolds working on the final season of Evening Shade, a new actor was needed.  Brian Bloom, who would go on to play Pike in the adaptation of The A-Team, got the role.  A few changes were made with the supporting cast.  The Snowman and Carrie weren’t around; instead, Lynn Denton, son of the governor, was introduced as the Bandit’s best friend, and each movie had its own romantic interest.  While the movies did have chase sequences, the focus turned to Bandit and his endeavors and complications.  Bandit: Bandit Goes Country has him returning to his hometown to clear up long-standing feuds and meet up with an old girlfriend.  Bandit: Bandit Bandit has him tracking down an imposter of himself who had stolen a prototype alternate fuel car.  Bandit: Beauty and the Bandit has him helping a woman, played by Kathy Ireland**, on the run from both mobsters, federal agents, and a bounty hunter.  Bandit: Bandit’s Silver Angel sees him stepping forward to help a circus owned by his late uncle.

The Bandit movies wound up in an odd position.  For low budget TV movies, they were watchable and fun.  However, by carrying the Bandit name, comparisons to the original would happen, and a theatrical release where cars could be abused and junked has the edge over a series of TV movies where repairs eat into the budget.  At the same time, without the link to Smokey and the Bandit, the movies might get ignored or, worse, be thought of as a rip-off of the original work.  Television adaptations also have a different flow thanks to the need for commercial breaks.  A theatrical release can keep building to a big ending, adding ebbs to let the audience catch a breather.  On TV, the requirement for advertisements means that, every ten to fifteen minutes, the movie needs to have a mini-cliffhanger to ensure viewers return after the ad.  Viewing a TV show or a made-for-TV movie on DVD, with no commercial, can become choppy as a result.

Overall, the Bandit movies are fun for what they are, low-budget TV movies.  Brian Bloom’s Bandit is clearly the same as Burt Reynold’s, a man who gets by on charm and can wind up over his head as a result.  With Hal Needham on board as producer and director, the TV movies could keep to the core of the originals and move away from the car chase without losing the identity.

Next week, the February adaptational news round up.

* And, later, the Hercules spin-off, Xena: Warrior Princess.
** Kathy’s southern accent is far more easy to listen to than her squeaky voice in Alien from LA.

Whew, sorry for the slow update.  Got over my illness, but still had a busy week.  So what’s up?

The Magical Guild Generator is done, and you can use it here.

For those of you not familiar with what inspired it, “Fairy Tail,” it’s an anime I’ve seen that a Sanctum user mentioned – specifically they wanted names of Guilds for wizards based on the series.  In general I think a “band of magical people” generator is a good idea, so I decided to make a Guild generator for Wizards, but also generalize it a bit more to have a diverse set of naming patters.

The end result?  I’d say pretty good.  The names are usable in the majority of cases, and sometimes it gets really inspired stuff.  I think I managed to use both the source material well and make a general generator.

There were also a few insights into language in this case – and for you language buffs, they were:

1. That many names do have a kind of alternating generic/specific pattern – something I explored before, but see prominently here.A guild named Witch Spell or Triton Potion would sound almost “too magical” but something named Witch Gear, Triton Gate, Wolf Spell, or Raven Potion sound find.  “Contextual” language is something for me to explore further.
2. Some terms for people – Queen, Watchman, etc. also act as descriptors/definers, and not just as titles.  Thus you may have a guild like King Triton.
3. I never realized how many names for groups there are – and how important it is to realize some groups are defined by using their number as part of their name.  I mean, there was the Jackson Five – not a guild of magicians by the way – and I believe some Sentai team names had their number as part of their title.  In fact that was part of my Sentai team namer, and again I see now how this is a pattern.

Now that you can go churn out Wizard guilds to your heart’s content, what’s next?  Well I still have the list of what people requested, and a few personal things I want to try.  But with skills re-primed, I think I want to do one of the writing-related requests, like plot twists or writing prompts.

Now I’m formatting a book – and of course always working on Way With Worlds, so as usual there’s no date.  But I admit I’ve got some ideas . . .

– Steven Savage

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum and at MuseHack]

Last column, I looked at writing magic and technology for your setting – and noted that in many ways for the sake of world building they could be treated the same.  I still believe that, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out the differences as well.  Or perhaps  I should say “areas of variance,” as it gets complicated, but more on that shortly.

I believe it’s important to loo at differences, as in too many cases creating the magic and/or technology for a setting treats them as the same for all the wrong reason – as opposed to the right ones.  Technology easily becomes hand-woven neutron particle miracle rays, a mythology with lab tools and circuit boards.  Magic can get systematized or explained in such a way it either is technology, or is really just magic wearing technologies clothes and wandering around looking out of place.

So, having suggested that you have to look at them as similar for the sake of worldbuilding, I now want to deal with when you have to look at them differently.  Yes, this may produce writing whiplash, but who said worldbuilding was going to be boring and straightforward?  I certainly didn’t promise that.

Think of it as general and specifics.  In general, they’re the ways people change and affect the world.  In specifics, well . . . (more…)

The silver screen has been the pinnacle of Hollywood since the early days of Hollywood.  Movies occupy the top rung of the creative hierarchy, towering over television.  Actors work hard to get their big break, looking to move from TV to the big screen.  For adaptations, movies are both a blessing and a curse.  A film adaptation means that an author has reached enough of an audience that a studio has noticed.  On the downside, few books survive the process of being adapted.

Over the past fifty to sixty years, the average length of a book has grown over the past 50 years, with doorstoppers common today.  There are exceptions, naturally; each book of The Lord of the Rings was far longer than the other fantasy novels of the time.  At the same time, The Lord of the Rings became the template for modern fantasy works, leading to series such as The Wheel of Time and A Game of Thrones.  With the increased length comes more detail, more plot points, more action, all of which makes it difficult to put into a feature film.

Typically, a theatrically released movie is from ninety minutes to two hours long, with a few going under to eighty-five or over to three hours.  Any shorter, and the audience starts wondering about the cost of seeing something so short.  Longer, and audience fatigue sets in unless the film is kept tight so that the viewers don’t notice the passage of time.  The time limit means that something from the original work has to give.  Usually, the decision is to remove scenes that will confuse the audience or that don’t add to the plot.  Such partial adaptations can work; Blade Runner, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, and Jurassic Park all kept to the core story while still excising elements that detracted from the plot.  However, if the wrong elements are removed, or the story is so intertwined that removing elements causes the story to fall flat, movies can fail.  The Dragonlance animated film is a good example; with a ninety minute running time, the movie felt shallow, missing concepts that made the original work breathe.

The problem grows if the original work is part of a series that isn’t yet complete.  While Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was successful both as a movie and as an adaptation, some parts of the story that became important in later book were removed for the sake of fitting the movie into a decent running time.  With Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the studio decided to split the book into two movies to avoid rushing the story in just one.  Likewise, The Hobbit became three movies in part to give the plot the time it needed to unfold.

With short stories and novellas, the problem doesn’t quite go away.  A short story may not have enough plot to last even ninety minutes, requiring padding.  A good example is the Ian Fleming story, “The Living Daylights”.  The story has 007 protecting a Soviet defector from a sniper.  In the movie, The Living Daylights, the original story takes up about twenty minutes of screen time, leaving over one hundred minutes to be filled.

The answer, though, isn’t to stop adapting books.  Given the risk aversion in Hollywood, not adapting anything is off the table.  One solution is to take into account book length.  Going back to James Bond, the movie versions of both Dr. No and Casino Royale stayed close to the original works, with little to no scenes added or removed.  Longer books could be broken into parts, though if the first movie fails at the box office, the rest of the story won’t be filmed.

Another solution is to take a hard look at adapting the work for television.  Whether the work becomes a regular series or a mini-series, the adaptation isn’t as dependant on the vagueries of the international market.  With mini-series, the full novel will be shown in a short span, long enough to get the immediate ratings, but not long enough for the network or cable channel to end the adaptation early.  In a regular series, the adaptation will have the time it needs to build the world and establish characters, but poor ratings could kill the show before the work has been fully aired.  However, cable channels aren’t as beholden to the Neilsens as the broadcast networks are.  Dexter, True Blood, and A Game of Thrones all thrived as series, with each book becoming a season in the series.

Reducing the size of novels is a non-starter.  As mentioned earlier, The Lord of the Rings became not only a classic but also a template for writers inspired by it.  It is rare to find a stand-alone fantasy novel that isn’t a tie-in to a property such as Dungeons & Dragons.  Science fiction does have them, but given the time and effort needed for worldbuilding, recycling the work becomes tempting when looking at building a new universe from scratch.  There’s also the readers’ reaction; the price of books has crossed a point where buyers are expecting not just a good story, but a long one to match the cover price.  A short book just doesn’t have the physical weight that readers want.

In short, the glamour of the movies needs to be balanced with the idea that two hours just isn’t enough time to do justice to today’s works.

Next week, Smokey and the Bandit.