22 May 2008
Books, movies
Lisa and I were bemoaning the great novels out there that haven't been made into movies. People bitch and bitch about themovienotbeingasgoodasthebook, but that's always been a dead arguement for me. A movie is different from the book. Period. Anyway, I think I started with how great Chabon's books would be on film or maybe she brought up the McCarthy she's read and wanted to see.
There are a surplus of good-to-great directors out there, a surplus of actors, and a surplus of script writers, so these fictions should be rich territory to mine for film. The sad truth is that the system hinders development when it should be facilitating it. Production companies buy the rights and sit on them. Executives haggle over scripts and dumb down rewrites. Directors demand expensive techniques. Studios demand blockbusters. What we need is some sort of low-budget, Playhouse 90 sort of system. That series showed weekly live and filmed dramas often adapted from books, each running 90 minutes. George Clooney did something similar in 2000 with a live broadcast of Fail Safe.
This would be a wonderful series to revive, but it'd probably end up on HBO or some other cable channel we don't subscribe to.
[ updated 24 May 2008, Chabon's birthday ]
Just heard Garrison Keillor talk about Chabon on the writer's almanac and decided to read a little about him. Surprise, the Coen's are adapting The Yiddish Policemen's Union for film.
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