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Burrough's Martian Tales Optioned
shagrat writes "One of my favorite series of books has been
optioned by Paramount. It would be produced by
those that created 'The Mummy'. I'm not sure how
that makes me feel."
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I have a tendendcy to trust CNN reports for accuracy, but they refer to ERB as an English author. He was as American as applie pie and All Story magazine. Get yer facts straight, man.
All that aside, I've dreamed of seeing the John Carter series on the screen since I was a schoolboy, reading all twelve books in sequence, purchased through the Science Fiction Book Club. I knew even then that such a project would be far too expensive to ever be realized successfully (and having seen what happened to other ERB books that were filmed in the 1970s; remember "The Land/People that Time Forgot" and "At the Earth's Core?"). But now that CGI effects have made such large-scale fantasies technically possible, and the boxoffice success of similar films makes them financially feasible, I can see "A Princess of Mars" being turned into a pretty good Saturday Afternoon popcorn matinee hit, just as the Mummy films were.
I hope they don't make the entire series, though, since the books were very uneven in quality. The series was so popular that Burroughs was under a lot of pressure from the publisher to grind them out very quickly over the years and some of them are really quite poor, hitting the low point with the last one, which was supposedly completed by Burrough's son after his death and based on some very sketchy notes.
Well, the writings themselves pretty much HAVE to be (the first book was written in 1912, according to the article).
The article mentions:
Danton Burroughs, grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs and a director of the rights holding company[...]
I wonder exactly what "rights" the "holding company" has? Perhaps they've Trademarked the characters? That would (as I understand it) mean that verbatim copies of the original stories are public domain, but "derivative works" using any of the trademarked characters or settings would need to license them (which, to me, emphasizes the bogosity of Disney's "Mickey Mouse Must Be Protected By Eternal Copyright Or The World Will End(tm)" arguments - since I'm pretty sure they maintain Trademark rights to Mickey and co., the only thing really at issue is free distribution of some of their really old works...)
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Nothing Burroughs wrote is in the public domain. His family has maintained control over all of his estate and renews the copyrights on all of his works whenever they are due to expire. He was so successful during his lifetime that an entire industry evolved out of the Tarzan series, and his family owns a lot of Los Angeles Real Estate. That's how the city of Tarzana, California came to be incorporated; it was originally the Burroughs family estate. ERB was almost a corporation unto himself!
Aside from the people who point out that it's not necessarily under public domain, the article mentions:
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
and renews the copyrights on all of his works whenever they are due to expire
This is now nonsensical as copyrights are no longer "renewed." The only way to get extensions is to to buy numerous congresspeople and get law passed. However, in 1963, the failure to renew several of his copyrights did place major works into the public domain. As he's been dead for 52 years, any item copyrighted in 1923 or earlier has also expired.
The balance is public domain by Australian law, and is available at Gutenberg Australia
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
If they actually make A Princess of Mars into a movie, it will be worth seeing. Edgar Rice Burroughs deserves to be known for more than Tarzan. His Martian Tales are great adventure novels.
For those who haven't read A Princess of Mars, it goes a bit like this...
John Carter is a calvary captain of the former Confederacy, prospecting in the hills of Arizona in 1866. A strange force draws him across the "trackless immensity of space" to Mars.
He first falls in with a warrior tribe of green Martians. They capture a lovely woman of the more human-like red Martians, with whom Carter falls in love. A rollicking adventure ensues, complete with radium-powered propulsion-ray personal hovercraft, arena combat, princesses and ransoms, treachery and last-minute heroics and a cliff-hanger ending to leave you weeping...
Burroughs spins a fine yarn,and his tech and storylines are already so cinematic that adaptation shouldn't be too difficult. The only thing that they probably will change is that generally the characters wear jeweled harnesses and not much else.
Burroughs used to live in my hometown: Parma, Idaho. Population 2000. Here's an article from the Argus Observer (the remaining Parma newspaper died a few years ago).
Tarzan author lived in Parma
Dawn Eden, Argus Observer, July 10, 2000
The Online News & Information Network for the Western Treasure Valley Argus Observer
For more than the past century, famous people have come and gone from Idaho. One man few people know resided in Parma for a short time was Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of "Tarzan."
Burroughs was born in Chicago Sept. 1, 1875, and first came to Idaho in the late 1800s, joining
his brothers in working at Sweetser Ranch, located west of American Falls.
Inside the Old Fort Boise replica in Parma, a historical display about Burroughs describe how he
mended fences and drove cattle at the ranch, before returning to Chicago a year later to finish
school.
After bouncing between Idaho and Chicago, and marrying Emma Hulbert, a childhood neighbor in
Chicago in 1900, Burroughs returned to Idaho for the third, and last time, in 1903.
He was invited by his brothers to rejoin them in Idaho. His brothers, Harry, George and Frank,
along with a man named Louis Sweetser, had reorganized the Yale Dredging Co. into the
Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Co.
It was written when Burroughs arrived in Idaho for the last time, his brothers were operating a gold dredge in the Stanley Basin and on the Snake River in Parma.
Parma historian, the late Lucille Peterson, once wrote that prior to Burroughs' move from
Stanley to Parma in 1903, the Parma residents began making plans for a "village government."
Peterson wrote that during the town election in April 1904, several nominations appeared on the ballot, one of whom was Burroughs, and he won by one vote 49 to 48. He served about one month.
It was published in the "Edgar Rice Burroughs Amateur Press Association" fanzine that Burroughs "had run as an independent but had still managed to secure enough votes to edge his way in.
"Burroughs recalled, I button-holed every voter that I met, told him that I was running for
office and that I did not want to be embarrassed by not getting a single vote and asking him as a personal favor to cast his vote for me, with the result that enough of them tried to save me from embarrassment to cause my election.'"
Peterson wrote she agreed that Burroughs' decision to run as an independent was probably how he got the votes. Parma, she told one of the contributing authors of the "Edgar Rice Burroughs
Amateur Press Association" fanzine, was at that time an intensely political town with two competing newspapers one Democrat and one Republican. An Independent offered an extra choice to members of both parties.
Burroughs served with the Parma town government only a short time, and after the dredging company went bankrupt, he left Idaho for the last time, moving to Utah for a job as a railroad policeman.
He eventually ended up in California where he spent the rest of his life writing.
Burroughs began his writing career when he was in his mid 30s while he was proofreading advertising for "pulp magazines" in California. It was written that his "eyes strayed to an adjoining column of the magazine, a bit of fiction, and he quickly decided that he could write imaginary tales more appealing than that one."
It was at that time he wrote, "Under the Moons of Stars," and mailed it to an All Story magazine editor, who sent Burroughs $4 for a six-part series.
In 1912, Burroughs began writing "Tarzan of the Apes." When he wrote "Tarzan," All Story
Magazine purchased it for $7, and two years later it was published as a book.
The first "Tarzan" movie was released in 1918.
The story of Tarzan begins with his parents, "John Clayton," Lord Greystroke of England, and his wife, the former "Hon. Alice Rutherford." Lady Alice was pregnant when the ship, carrying the couple to her husband's mission in Africa, sinks and the couple ends up on the coast.
Their son was born in 1888, and she passed away about a year later.
Lord Greystroke died a short time later.
Upon his parents' death, the child, named John Clayton after his father, is adopted by a gray ape named "Kala." Kala's mate, "Tublat," is jealous of the child and makes his life as miserable as he can.
By the time Tarzan, named so by Kala, is 10 years old, he has the strength of a man in his
prime, but he is far more agile.
He teaches himself to read and print in English, and when he is in his late teens, he encounters Caucasians.
Tarzan is returned to civilization by the Frenchman Paul d'Arnot, and eventually marries an American, Jane Porter.
Before Burroughs died March 19, 1950, at the age of 74, he wrote more than 20 books about Tarzan. All together, he was the author of more than 80 adventure stories.
During the years he lived in Idaho, Burroughs was not a writer, but when he became one in later years, he did not forget this region of the country and used characters and locales from the area in his stories.
In an article Peterson wrote about Burroughs, she quotes him as once saying he had not learned a single rule for writing fiction. "I wrote stories which I feel would entertain me, knowing that there are millions of people just like me.
The Old Fort Boise replica in Parma is home to the Tarzan' author Edgar Rice Burroughs
historical display. About six years ago, the display was created with the history of the
author's life in Parma. The display also contains old Tarzan' magazines and books about the famed character Burroughs created.
Copyright 2000 Wick Communications, Inc.
apparently the movie will be called John Carter of Mars.r s
there's a countdown to the movie at http://www.countingdown.com/movies/johncarterofma
As I recall, around the time this story was written, Radium with the Spiffy New Thing. As I recall from my readings of the "Blahblahblah of Mars" series many, many years ago, I seem to recall that science-fictiony stuff throughout was "Radium powered", from guns that shot radium bullets to Radium-powered lights. In the "Real World", at the same time, Radium turned into a health(!) fad. The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices has bits and pieces related to this, including a box from the time labelled as containing Radium Suppositories (No joke!)
The website above has a couple of pictures of other Radium related "health" things, as well as a bunch of other rather mind-boggling things...
I hope the filmmakers KEEP the absurd "Radium" stuff in the movie, frankly (as well as any other "early-1900's sci-fi" elements of style) rather than doing something screwy to make it more "modern"...
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