See, I'm against the "short story -> movie" because it tends to give Hollywood *too* much leeway into satisfying their collective "desire to change stories to appeal to a broader fanbase". By the time they finish with a simple concept, it bears even less relationship to the original work than the epic novel -> epic movie does.
Consider "I, Robot" and "The Lawnmower Man" as prime examples that come to mind right now. There are many others. The lack of dialog gives too much room to "write your own" and as soon as you do that, some subsequent writer or editor or even the director and actors at production time will change things again, and the drift away from the original is unrecoverable.
Trouble is, the mini-series never *quite* gets enough money to go through enough writing and editing sessions to make the conversion work, and a series has even less time and money - as with something like B5 and Firefly, the creator (who needs to be ONLY ONE, not a committee) has to have the concrete vision in his head of exactly how it should be paced, preferably with storyboards converted to story-reels (per the Disney animation technique) to know that it's going to work before they even get a director and start shopping around for a studio...and again, that takes serious money up front that in today's risk-averted Hollywood (and the market as a whole) is hard to come by.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-01-15 06:34 pm (UTC)Consider "I, Robot" and "The Lawnmower Man" as prime examples that come to mind right now. There are many others. The lack of dialog gives too much room to "write your own" and as soon as you do that, some subsequent writer or editor or even the director and actors at production time will change things again, and the drift away from the original is unrecoverable.
Trouble is, the mini-series never *quite* gets enough money to go through enough writing and editing sessions to make the conversion work, and a series has even less time and money - as with something like B5 and Firefly, the creator (who needs to be ONLY ONE, not a committee) has to have the concrete vision in his head of exactly how it should be paced, preferably with storyboards converted to story-reels (per the Disney animation technique) to know that it's going to work before they even get a director and start shopping around for a studio...and again, that takes serious money up front that in today's risk-averted Hollywood (and the market as a whole) is hard to come by.