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.
Dinosaurs have long been a source of fascination. For many people, their first foray into science was as a young child pouring over anything about dinosaurs, leading some into careers in paleontology. Only fossils remain from the reign of the dinosaurs, but that keeps scientists and the curious intrigued enough to try to discover much about Earth’s prehistoric past.
In late 1990, Michael Crichton released his science fiction novel, Jurassic Park. At the heart of the story was the idea, “What if someone recreated dinosaurs?” He worked out the details, who could afford the cloning equipment, why would dinosaurs be cloned and brought back, the legal issues in opening a theme park featuring wild animals.
In the novel, the CEO of the fictional InGen, John Hammond, created the titular park on the fictional Isla Nublar as a theme park where people could visit and see the returned dinosaurs in a somewhat natural habitat. The park’s investors, through their lawyer, needed assurances by academics that the park was accurate and safe. Hammond brings on board Doctor Alan Grant, a paleontologist, while the investors’ lawyer brings in Doctor Ian Malcolm, a chaos therorist. Dr. Grant brings along grad student Ellie Sattler, a paleobotantist, along.
During the tour of the main facilities, Hammond shows how the dinosaurs were recreated, replacing damaged genetic code with DNA from reptiles, birds, and amphibians. The new DNA was then modified so that only females were viable and that the creatures required regular doses of lysine to survive. However, among the more benign species like Triceratops were carnivores like Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus Rex.
For the tour of Jurassic Park, Hammond sends along his grandchildren, Lex and Tim. Tim, like many boys his age, is dino-crazy and is looking forward to the tour. During the tour, Velociraptor eggs are found, something that shouldn’t occur in an all female population. Dr. Malcolm also points out that a flock of Procompsognathi have a normal distribution of heights instead of the expected uniform height he’d expected from cloned creatures.
Elsewhere, a tropical storm forms and moves in on Isla Nublar. Dennis Nedry, a subcontractor with financial problems, takes advantage of the storm to steal genetic samples for InGen’s competitor, and sabotages the park’s computer systems to help in his escape. The sabotage disrupts all security, including the electric fences keeping the dinosaurs apart from not just each other but from the tours. For the herbivores, this isn’t a problem. For T. rex, it now has a larger range to hunt, and the tour group, in two electric trucks that are also out of power, had stopped near the dinosaur’s paddock.
Things get worse. Grant and the children get separated as the T. rex and its child attack. Malcolm is critically injured. The park’s power returns, but is soon again lost as only the auxiliary power was restored. With the loss of auxiliary power, the Velociraptors, quarentined due to intelligence and visciousness, escape. The ship that had left Isla Nublar for the mainland has Velociraptor stowaways, not the formerly quarentined ones, but wild ones.
The movie adaptation of Jurassic Park follows the plot for the most part. Given the length of the novel, some scenes in it had to go to keep the movie’s running time under ten hours, let alone the two hours, seven minutes it did have There were changes made, though. In the novel, Lex’s role is to be The Load, screaming anytime a dinosaur appeared. Her brother, Tim, not only was well-read on dinosaurs but also was a hacker. The hacking ability was transfered over to Lex for the movie. The fate of Hammond is different as well; he gets to escape the island in the adaptation. Helping to ease the transition from book to movie was having Michael Crichton on board as a scriptwriter. He was able to remove elements from the novel that let the movie still hold together without dragging out the film. Some elements removed, such as the Pteranodon aviary, returned in Jurassic Park III. Other elements, such as what happened to Malcolm, were added. The novel never went into details on whether he survived his injuries or died from them. The movie, Malcolm is seen in the helicopter, awake and alert, allowing him to return for The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
The core of the novel, the warning about hubris, the dangers of reintroducing an extinct species, the folly of trying to control nature, remains intact. The movie did not back away from showing the consequences of trying to play God. Even with precautions in place – the lysine requirement, the electric fences, the all-female population – dinosaurs ran amok and multiplied. People died from one man’s folly.
Some time back, I mentioned that there would be times when I would run into the adaptation before the original. This in one of those cases; I saw the movie when it first came out, but only read the book recently. The differences were startling, not only in the scenes that weren’t filmed or were used for Jurassic Park III, but the roles. As mentioned, Lex’s role expanded in the movie, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In the book, Lex was very much the damsel in distress, needing Dr. Grant’s assistance. In the movie, she took on dimensions, and the interplay with her brother felt more natural. Once she adjusted to the events, she took charge of her brother, particularly in the park’s kitchen.
Overall, the movie is faithful to the original work. Not all of Jurassic Park was adapted, but what was came through. The core of the story remained in one piece, keeping the thriller aspect of the novel front and centre without losing the message.
Next week, the problem with movies.
It’s a new year, it’s a new review. To ease back into reviewing, let’s look at somewhat lighter fare.
In 1984, the idea of a pre-packaged campaign world for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was still new. TSR had a house settings, The World of Greyhawk, based on Gary Gygax’s home campaign. The idea first came from Tracy and Laura Hickman, who wrote two modules for TSR hoping to be paid for them after Tracy lost his job; instead, he was hired. He worked with several people at the company, including Margaret Weis, decided to create a new setting, one not seen before, one where TSR could tie together a campaign setting, a series of modules, and a tie-in novel trilogy. The result was Dragonlance.
To make Krynn, the world where the Dragonlance campaign would be set, different, the creators removed all divine magic from the world’s recent history. The result of the removal would mean that classes that depended on powers granted by deities – clerics, paladins, and druids – would be severely hampered at the start. The first modules, the name for published adventures, focused on the return of the gods of Krynn and set up the epic battle between Good and Evil. The modules’ events were mirrored by the first Dragonlance trilogy, written by Weis and Hickman.
The novels and the modules were based on the playtest campaign, where TSR staffers took the roles of the main characters – Tanis Half-Elven, Caramon and Raistlin Majere, Goldmoon, Flint, Tasslehoff, Tika, Laurana – and the results noted. Some changes occurred. Tasslehoff, one of the halfling-like race of kender, had managed to pick up a ring of invisibility; the writers realized that the combination would get a little to close to a certain hobbit for Legal’s comfort. The first novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, hit the New York Times bestseller list.* The novel did two things; it let players, including the Dungeon Master, get a feel for both the world and the plotlinem; and, it served as an introduction to AD&D to people who had never played but were curious.
A lot of the success of Dragonlance came from the characters. All of them were flawed in some way, and not all of them were good.** There was friction within the group, characters made poor decisions that came from their motives and goals, yet the fellowship could still come together to thwart evil. The setting expanded, in game material, in novels and short stories, in video games, and in comics. When D&D went to its third edition with new owner Wizards of the Coast, Margaret Weis Productions licensed and released a compatible version of Krynn.
In 2008, Paramount licensed the rights to make an animated Dragonlance feature from WotC. The movie, based on Dragons of Autumn Twilight, was to be the first of a trilogy based on the original Chronicles. With Kiefer Sutherland as Raistlin and Lucy Lawless as Goldmoon, the production team went for star power to draw in viewers while filling the rest of the cast with experienced voice actors***. The animation team made sure that the characters resembled their likenesses from the Larry Elmore covers. However, the movie had some issues. The animation, a mix of 2D and 3D techniques, clashed. The main characters were 2D, but had to fight such three-dimensional monsters as draconians and dragons. The 2D animation also became choppy in parts, jumping without a in-between work. The differences were jarring. The visuals for several spells also didn’t match the what the original descriptions in the Player’s Handbook. In particular, Fireball doesn’t smash into targets; it explodes instead. The Fireball spell as cast by Fizban resembled the lower level spell, Flaming Sphere.
Another problem was the running time; ninety minutes was just not long enough to cover Dragons of Autumn Twilight properly. The novel spent time with world-building, setting up the intricate balance between the different races and nations, introducing the elements that made Krynn a different campaign setting. One character’s death was moved to a different part of the story after the passage through Mount Nevermind, the home of the tinker gnomes, was removed entirely. The death becomes far more dramatic, though. Insufficient running time is an ongoing problem for novels depicting epics. Books can pack in a lot of information in their pages; it takes skill to be able to figure out what can and cannot be removed, and is much easier when there is no Book 2, 3, or, in the case of A Game of Thrones, 7. Blade Runner and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World both managed to extract the core story from the original works. Unfortunately, Dragons of Autumn Twilight became shallower with the removal of material.
A third issue came from the rating. Dragons of Autumn Twilight is a swords and sorcery tale. Swords and axes mean bloody corpses, and blunt weapons like maces and staves aren’t much better. The movie received a PG-13 rating because of the “fantasy action violence”, and while charred, featureless corpses were allowed, blood was reduced, to the point where swords were clean even after striking goblins. Fortunately, the draconians could be stabbed; on death, the creatures turned to stone. Still, to avoid the R rating, the blood needed to be cleaned up some.
With Dragons of Autumn Twilight not faring well, it appears that the next two books, Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning will not be adapted, at least as animated features. Cindi Rice, the co-executive producer, estimated that a live-action adaptation of the book would cost around US$75 million. While that is far less than many of the blockbusters that failed in 2013, Dragonlance doesn’t have the namespace among the general public that would get studios to take the risk to finance the adaptation.
The animated Dragons of Autumn Twilight comes out as a “nice try”. Ignoring the animation issues, the running time was the biggest drawback, not giving viewers the time to properly experience the setting or the story.
Next week, the adaptational news round up.
* TSR’s publishing arm did well with fiction and was willing to take risks that other publishers wouldn’t. The Edgar-winning novel, Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb, was first published by TSR after McCrumb passed her manuscript along to Margaret Weis.
** Or even Good; Raistlin, in particular, started with a Neutral alignment and shifted to Evil over the course of the novels.
*** This isn’t to say that the leads weren’t inexperienced. Both Sutherland and Lawless had a number of voice acting prior to Dragons of Autumn Twilight, though they weren’t primarily known for such work.
Another year has come to an end. Adaptations show no sign of slowing down. What did we learn from 2013?
The cracks are starting to show in the big blockbuster adaptation. Several fizzled on release, including the high-profile The Lone Ranger, followed by R.I.P.D. At the same time, Pacific Rim underperformed and Marvel’s Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World drew in crowds both domestic and international. Hunger Games: Catching Fire broke records, but City of Bones and The Host both floundered. The Host wasn’t a big budget film, made for only* US$40 million, but it barely made a profit and only because of international audiences.
The difference suceeding and failing is the international market. Domestic returns might cover the cost of making the film, but international audiences will make or break the budget. The Chinese market is as critical to a movie’s success as the American. Producers now have to factor in the tastes of Chinese audiences, and, so far, this has led to lowest common denominator. Adding to the complexity is that the Chinese movie-going public isn’t interested in original characters; they want to see established properties. Marvel and DC have a huge advantage, and Marvel has been cashing in on it. Both comic companies have numerous iconic characters.
Over at DC, it appears that the company and its parent, Warner, are trying to cash in as well. Man of Steel, while it didn’t bring in Iron Man 3 numbers, was successful. The main problem with the movie was being a shades of grey movie featuring a four-colour character. Warner appears to not be able to do anything that isn’t Batman, a shades of grey character who has done well in numerous shades of grey movies. But the big problem at Warner seems to be a lack of communication both internal and external.
Meanwhile, The Lone Ranger is outside the pop culture memory. The last two appearances of the Lone Ranger were the 1981 The Legend of the Lone Ranger and the 2003 TV pilot, The Lone Ranger, on the WB network. Both movies were not well received, with Legend having issues beyond just the film itself**. R.I.P.D. was based on a comic book published by Dark Horse, something the general audience most likely didn’t realize.
The trend of turning Young Adult books into movie series may be waning. City of Bones, as mentioned above, barely turned a profit, resulting in the release date of the next part of The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes, to be pushed back to 2015. The problem that both City of Bones and The Host have is that neither are household words like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, or Twilight, all of which were bestsellers long before a studio thought about adapting them. The Host was relying on name recognition. Adapted from a book by Stephanie Meyer, who wrote the Twilight series, the studio was hoping that fans of Twilight would flock to The Host. Numbers show otherwise. Twilight hit a chord with its audience, who enjoyed the romance between a shell of a girl and a sparkly vampire. The Host didn’t reach the same level of intense fandom. Internationally, name recognition of an author depends on whether the body of work has been translated. The quality of writing can also change during translation.
Over on the small screen, several adaptations keep going. A Game of Thrones is still a draw for HBO, and AMC has The Walking Dead filling that role. The now-ended Breaking Bad will have Better Call Saul spun off and will be remade in Columbia as Metástasis. MTV will produce a Swords of Shannara series, further turning the “M” into an artifact. ABC’s Agents of SHIELD started strong, but ran into early problems. Joss Whedon returning to help plus the tie-in to Thor: The Dark World may be helping it. ABC, being owned by Disney, may have the patience to keep the show going for the full season, in part to help the Marvel movies. Television may be in a good position to pick up the pieces when the blockbuster bubble bursts.
The international market was key in the success or failure of movie adaptations. Adaptations featuring a character recognized globally succeeded. Those that didn’t either squeaked by or outright bombed.
Next week, looking forward to 2014.
* The numbers get weird in Hollywood. The benchmark for a blockbuster in 2013 seems to be at least US$150 million, with the bigger ones starting at US$200 million. Keep in mind that Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was made for $100 million.
** What may not have helped the box office is the public battle between the studio and Clayton Moore, who played the first Lone Ranger on TV, over his right to wear the Lone Ranger’s costume in personal appearances.
Well with the site rewritten, the numbers back, a new year starting, and some time off I decided to write a brand new, in-depth generator to finally solidify the mojo that’s come back. So I chose something that seemed both easy and popular, the Magical Legend Pony Namer, which seemed simple and fun, and of course played into the most unexpected fandom ever to dominate the internet and the insanely long-lived collector enthusiasm.
Actually it works pretty well, but what was stunning – and indeed obsession-making – is it taught me about language patterns I’d missed. This is actually going to help out in future generators. Without boring you (because I could go on) here’s what I learned, mostly thanks to the incredibly extensive online resources I found.
Lesson One. There’s a continuity between descriptive terms and objects – but it’s not that some objects can also define things (like the word “silver”) but objects at times define objects (the words “Pasta Salad” have an object defining another object). So there’s a little more complexity than I realized here, and I think future (and revised) generators will be better for noticing this.
Lesson Two. Names have a level of formality about the – or a lack. The level of formality affects how you associate names, words, titles, and concepts and the difference between a formal name and a nickname. This is reasonably easy to classify, actually.
So I learned something. I just didn’t expect to. I’ll now leave you to the names.
– Steven Savage
Just a quick announcement – I re-added/re-engineered the ability to select how many results you get from the generators. I also figured out a way to make it work and scale on different devices, which was a surprising pain in the backside, frankly.
So let me know if everything is working OK!
– Steve
Hello everyone, and here’s the latest update.
Thanks to everyone who took the poll on my plans to add some content and community to the Sanctum. Before I get to that however I do want to address the issue of removing the option to decide how many entries to generate. A lot of people wanted it back.
I had waffled on this because removing the option didn’t seem to make much impact and it kept things simple. But in the poll, someone gave a me case of why they needed to modify how many entries they got. That was the real convincer for me. So I’ve mulled over some ways to work that into the current layout, and I think I have an idea, so I’m going to work to put the choose-your-amount option back in, though I think I’ll have it default to maximum.
That kind of feedback is really helpful. I need to know how people use the site. So in the future if you want a change or have a new idea, spell it out in detail, it helps a lot!
So now what the poll told me!
First of all, people are in general behind adding a content/blog/library section. But it’s not everyone’s primary interest – more of a secondary (20% of people were neutral, 8% didn’t like it or really disliked it, 55% were for “pretty good” and 17% were really enthused). That tells me that it’s a decent idea, and one I’ll do for various advantages, but its appeal is mostly secondary to the larger audience. Right now I plan to add one, but I probably won’t trick it out with any bells or whistles right now – though as I’m going to be doing some really weird stuff to make it work, that may be secondary.
Secondly, I got some good suggestions from the polls period – and not just on the number selections. So I think I’ll do some of these now and them! Also frankly it’s kind of fun.
Third, yes, I am going to be making more generators. Now that I got the site rewritten and have my mojo back, I plan to add new ones over time. I’ve got about one to three I want to do now more for fun – and one silly one turned out to be a fascinating exploration of language structure I want to finish.
Fourth, I got other good ideas for the site I may give a shot, mostly usability tweaks. Stay tuned 😉
Finally, for those asking for a mobile version of the site, the site is optimized to work across devices, though a vertical cell phone profile is a bit hinky. I am looking into making it into an app (though the generators based on other media wouldn’t be there), but that’s more later 2014 if I try it – a friend is experimenting with such things and we may team up.
– Steven Savage
[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]
So you want to build a nice detailed setting. You are ready to keep a record of everything so you review and expand your work. You’re ready to dive into this and put your world to pen, keyboard, map, and file.
This raises the question of just how you record everything.
If you’ve ever visited a fan wiki or purchased one of those “world of . . .” books that attempts to distill a novel or series of novels into a record of that universe, you know there is a lot of data. It can be a little daunting because when you want to create your setting in detail, really get into it, and you’re basically creating one of those. On your own. Along with writing your story or stories. It’s a bit daunting
What’s the best way to do it?
Well, that’s actually several questions. So let’s get to them. (more…)
Slight change of plans. Turns out, the planned “So You Want to Adapt a Story” is far more involved than I expected. That will come next week. Enjoy the round up of adaptational news in the meantime.
What could have been: Hayao Miyazaki wanted to make a Pippi Longstocking movie in 1971.
Concept art for the work has come out. The only thing stopping the adaptation was Astrid Lindgren, Pippi’s creator, saying no. Studio Ghibli just didn’t have the world renown in 1971 that it has today.
2014, the Year of the Bomb?
Of the fourteen potential major failures coming in 2014, twelve are adaptations and remakes. Of note, Edge of Tomorrow is based on the Japanese light novel, All You Need Is Kill. If Divergent and The Maze Runner both do poorly, this could signal the beginning of the end of Young Adult novels being adapted. Guardians of the Galaxy is a wild card. Marvel is taking a huge risk, but, as Steve put it, what has Marvel got to lose?
Sin City sequel and TV series on the way.
The Weinstein Company is getting Robert Rodrigues and Frank Miller to create Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is expected out August 29 next year, with a TV series to start afterwards. Meanwhile, the company is also working on a ten part miniseries based on the theatrical adaptation of the Stephen King novel, The Mist.
Two versions of 50 Shades of Grey adaptation to be released.
The first will be rated R. The second will go for the dreaded NC-17 rating. The problem with NC-17 movies is that there are few theatres willing to screen them. 50 Shades might be an exception, but there could be issues when someone who was expecting the R version sees the more explicit NC-17. The producer also said that she doesn’t want the film to be seen as “mommy porn”, which will be a neat trick considering that the original book is exactly that. Filming has started, with Vancouver, BC, standing in for Vancouver, Washington.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone to be adapted.
The first of a trilogy by Laini Taylor, the YA novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone is being adapted by Universal. The novel originally came out in 2011; the adaptation has no release date yet.
Cats may be next Broadway musical adapted to film.
Andrew Lloyd Webber confirmed that Universal is working on the adaptation. Cats itself is an adaptation of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot. Main challenge is convincing the audience that people dressed as cats and signing is worth seeing, but the stage version also had that issue.
Veronica Mars due out March 14, 2014.
After a very successful Kickstarter campaign that saw the movie funded in under twelve hours, Veronica Mars will hit the theatres next March. Most of the core cast has returned for the movie.
Also out March 14, 2014, Need for Speed.
Electronic Arts teamed up with Dreamworks for the adaptation. The video game series focuses on street racing, and includes police pursuit as part of the challenge. Each game in the series has a different focus, giving a bit of room for the movie to work with.
Warner Bros/DC may have a low-budget series of movies.
Three lesser known titles, Suicide Squad, Team 7, and Deathstroke may get lower budget movies, in the range of $20-40 million. The lower budget may reduce audience expectations and allow for a decent return. DC just needs to avoid looking desperate compared to Marvel’s approach.
MTV to adapt Shannara.
MTV’s network decay continues, but this time, it’s not a reality series. The former music network will be adapting Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, hoping to jump on the fantasy bandwagon led by A Game of Thrones. The advantage with Shannara is that twenty-five books have been written, so there’s no chance of the TV series catching up and overtaking. Brooks himself is involved in the project.
Heathers to run Off Broadway.
The 1989 movie, Heathers, has been adapted as a musical slated to run Off Broadway beginning March 17, 2014. The original was a dark comedy starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, where the two took revenge on a clique of mean girls all named Heather.
NBC to air Rosemary’s Baby miniseries.
NBC continues to ride the adaptation train with the announcement of the four-hour Rosemary’s Baby miniseries. The miniseries will go back to the original book of the same name by Ira Levin.
The Sound of Music Live! a sign of things to come?
Still on NBC here. The live musical broadcast garnered ratings for the struggling network, leading to the confirmation that there will be another musical for next November. Which one has yet to be decided. The Sound of Music Live! may have brought in an audience in part from novelty and in part for the potential train-wreck it could have been.
Sony takes a page from Marvel Studios.
Sony announced that they will be producing two Spider-Man spin-offs, Venom and The Sinister Six. Both movies will focus on Spidey’s rogues gallery. No dates for either production start or release were given.
Animated Anne Frank in the works.
The Diary of Anne Frank is being turned into an animated feature, with the blessing of the Anne Frank Fonds Basel, the foundation created by Frank’s father. Ari Folman, director of Waltz with Bashir will direct and will have full access to the foundation’s archives.
The Naked Gun to be rebooted.
Paramount is looking to reboot The Naked Gun, with Ed Helms to fill Leslie Nielsen’s role of Sergeant Frank Drebin, Detective-Lieutenant, Police Squad. David Zucker, one of the original creators, is on board.
Disney to create series based on animated villains.
Descendants will look at the lives of the teenaged offspring of Disney villains. The live-action work will premier in 2015.
Next week, “So You Want to Adapt a Story”.
Reaching back a bit, I reviewed The Muppets, the reboot/sequel to The Muppet Movie. However, The Muppet Movie itself was an adaptation, of sorts.
In 1976, The Muppet Show debuted as a variety show sketch comedy program. Each week, a different guest star would appear and get caught up in the antics and running gags of the Muppets. While the range of guest stars were more theatrical and British in the first season, as the series went on, more and more stars appeared. Mark Hamill reprised the role of Luke Skywalker for one episode while also playing himself shortly after filming The Empire Strikes Back. There was no fourth wall, and the show was seen, in-universe, as bad vaudeville. The Muppet Show was family entertainment, not the “family, but really only suitable for the under-five set” but “something for everyone in the family, from brightly colour puppets to double entendres to high art”. The series ended in 1981, with Roger Moore as the last guest star.
During the run, Muppetmania caught hold. Naturally, when there’s a mania, people want to exploit it. The need was there, so Henson Associates and ITC Films released The Muppet Movie in 1979. The movie told, approximately*, how the Muppets first came together, from Kermit’s early life in a swamp to running Muppet Theatre. The writers, Jack Burns and Jerry Juhl, were also the writes for The Muppet Show, and the core cast of performers came from the same spot.
The movie delivered. Favourite characters appeared, Miss Piggy was head over heels in love with Kermit who wasn’t as thrilled about her, Fozzie told bad jokes, Gonzo was weird, and Animal was Animal. Instead of a special guest star, there were cameos. Of note, The Muppet Movie was the last film Edgar Bergen appeared in; he passed away shortly after his scene was shot. Bergen was one of Jim Henson’s inspirations. The fourth wall didn’t exist. When the Electric Mayhem catch up to Kermit and friends, they explained that they used the script to find them. As for the running gags, there were several, from “Lost? Try Hare Krishna,” to “‘That’s just a myth! Myth!’ ‘Yeth’?”
The years since The Muppet Movie was made has added some new twists on the gags in the film. Gonzo’s desire to become a movie star by going to Bombay isn’t that odd now that Bollywood has become better known to North American audiences. Still, it’s not the easy way. The movie, though, really hasn’t aged. The Muppets picked up on a few ideas in The Muppet Movie and continued with them, including Gonzo’s old plumbing business.
As an adaptation, The Muppet Movie works. The form of The Muppet Show, a vaudeville theatre show, wouldn’t work for a movie, but showing how the Muppets got together, approximately, while keeping true to the nature of the characters, the show, and the overall tone more than made up the difference. The core writers and performers understood what the audiences would be expecting, and delivered without being predictable.
Next week, riffing off the It’s A Wonderful Life sequel.
* “Well, it’s sort of approximately how it happened.” – Kermit.
