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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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Yeah, you know, another GREAT movie with the Rock in it...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
I love those books, download them from Project Gutenberg and read them on your palm!
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
well if it's by the Mummy people, I'm sure they'll leave the plot untouched. AND it's almost guaranteed to have a-list actors like the Rock and Brendan Frasier in it!!! good!
I was certain these books were in the public domain. You can download them off project gutenberg. Why is a studio paying good money to 'option' them? Perhaps they'd pay me for my permission to option Hamlet.....
//Jacks told Daily Variety that three of the best-known books (which include "Gods of Mars" and "The Warlord of Mars") are likely to be made into films of a scope "akin to 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'Star Wars,' but were impossible to make before, because CGI (computer technology) wasn't there."//
So, bearing this statement in mind, are there any stories out there which still cannot be effectively made into movies due to lack of technology?
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Sometimes these movies just don't turn out. Why not make a movie based on website? Can you imagine what a movie about Slashdot or NerdTreeHouse would look like? I want movies based on websites! Are you with me?
it depends on what sort of movie you're looking for. If you want a tongue-in-cheek adventure movie, perhaps these are the producers for you. if you want something harder-edged, maybe not. on the other hand, one's previous work in the film industry isn't always a good indicator about what one can/will do.
--
fight global cooling
The Burroughs books are pure space opera. Of course the people who did 'The Mummy' can do them justice, they're pretty fluffy already. I think this will be really impressive if it really comes to the screen.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
XML causes global warming.
You can see bits of Burroughs' influence in just about any science fiction film today. I am really excited about the possibility of seeing this stuff on the big screen, especially if it maintains the settings of the books.
I don't see any reason why the producers of "The Mummy" would be a bad choice. "The Mummy" was very much in the vein of pulp sci-fi and the old movies that arose from it. In fact, he'd probably make a super John Carter.
Who do you think WILL play John Carter?
More like more great fantasy and scifi books turned horrible movies. Pretty soon everyone will be trying to ride the (much deserved) succes of LotR and the crap will start to show up.
I sure hope that isn't the case with Martian Tales, but i wouldn't be surprised if it was.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Sometimes treatments get made. Sometimes scripts get written. Sometimes the projects go into "pre-production," which I suspect is Hollywoodese for "We're trying to line up the funding!"
I am pretty sure I remember the ERB Mars books being optioned about twenty years back . . . vague recollections from Starlog, which seemed to specialize in drool-spewing stories about upcoming movies.
Perhaps my title isn't totally accurate. An actual option may not have been involved. I do know that Bob Clampett, creator of "Beany and Cecil" and one of the deranged guys behind the Warner Bros. cartoons, made animated-pencil-sketch segments of ERB Mars characters.
I saw stills of some of these . . . a guy riding a six-legged beastie (thark?). Kind of stylish and simple, not the lurid Frazetta type art that people seem to envision when ERB stories are mentioned.
So. Don't get your hopes up. Even if it gets made, don't get your hopes up. It could be turned into kiddie toy fodder.
My advice: Go hunt up the books. It is about time they were reprinted anyway.
Stefan
Clampett's work on the project happened a LONG time ago. I'm sure a Google search would turn something up, but I think it was the late 1940s.
Stefan
No wonder people dislike sci-fi so much when crap like this gets made into a movie. I mean seriously, its horrendously outdated adventure crap so its just going to be a big special effects extravaganza with no plot. Here we go with another "Scoprion King" or "Tomb Raider"
I'm an old ERB fan myself, but let's not forget that he is the author of Tarzan. Frankly, I'm surprised that it's taken Hollywood this long to option up the Barsoom tales. As for the studios "ruining" the stories, well, they sorta ruined Tarzan too, but the end result was, in the long run, still very entertaining.
:)
We're not exactly talking great literature here. Yes, I'm a fan, but I don't delude myself. These are entertaining young-adult action-adventure stories, and as such, the creators of The Mummy seem like a perfectly good choice.
As for Deja Thoris' "nekkid bosoms", well, consider the Tarzan movies, and don't get your hopes up. If they found an exuse to cover Jane's breasts, they'll probably find an excuse to cover Deja Thoris' too. No biggie, if these are popular and produce spinoffs, eventually, a modern Bo Derek will step up to the plate and offer her hooters for the role.
Only if Kenny from South Park plays JonKatz.
"Oh my G-d! They killed Katz! You HEROES!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
they'll put brendan frasier in as Deja Thoris
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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It was awesome; he could have been bigger than Brad Pitt. Lord knows he looks better and is BUILT better.
The hell you say! Brad Pitt is way better looking, and his muscles are... wait, why do I know this... OH GOD! I'M GAY!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
..is by cramming the words through your eyes into your brain
Until we can cheaply send a whole bunch of actors into orbit, I can't see the "Smoke Ring" or "Integral Trees" movies being made. You could try to pull of the trees with CGI, and try to do the zero-G a few minutes a time in a thoroughly blue-screened Vomet Comet, but I'll bet the result would suck.
Crap, looks like someone already got Burrough's Martian Tales. They signed and now we're going to lose our funding. Unless... Okay get this how about "William S. Burroughs's Tales of Martians?" We can get the option cheap. It'll interest sci-fi geeks, get in the arthouse crowd, and bring in the perverts. Lets get cracking on this. Props: I want to see a penis shaped raygun by next week. Writers: Get me a screenplay and then hire some temps to cut out sections and paste them on a whiteboard while wearing blindfolds. Make sure the final version has someone playing a flute with his ass.
Fake name, production manager.
Project Gutenberg has all of Burrough's works available in electronic format.
Princess of Mars
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Maybe the estate of Edgar Rice Burrough's hasn't had the senator fron Disney plugging their case until now. (Can't lose the mouse!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I don't see anyone else commenting on the 1979 miniseries of the Martian Chronicles. I remember watching it at the time, and I wasn't terribly impressed. I haven't read the books, though. Does anyone else remember the miniseries?
Thankyou VERY much indeed!
**>>BELCH
Okay then, Brad Pitt. . . with some white makeup.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.