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Burrough's Martian Tales Optioned

Posted by Hemos on from the do-it-and-do-it-well dept.

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."

15 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. How do you option public domain? by wahay · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.....

    1. Re:How do you option public domain? by Dr.Dubious+DDQ · · Score: 3, Informative
      I was certain these books were in the public domain.

      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...)

      --
      Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
    2. Re:How do you option public domain? by Bourbonium · · Score: 4, Informative

      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!

    3. Re:How do you option public domain? by SandSpider · · Score: 3, Informative
      Why is a studio paying good money to 'option' them?

      Aside from the people who point out that it's not necessarily under public domain, the article mentions:
      For almost a decade, Disney spent millions developing the "Mars" books as both a live-action and animation franchise[...]



      Jacks acknowledged that there "is a complicated legal situation and significant rights (still) need to be acquired.



      =Brian
      --
      There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
  2. Current technology by Kargan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    //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
    1. Re:Current technology by 56ker · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah the story of my life - no technology exists to make it interesting enough for people to actually want to go to see a film about it.

      --


      Video Game cheats, hints a
  3. it should make you feel good by elmegil · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  4. English author? by Bourbonium · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Optioned long ago by animator Bob Clampett! by StefanJ · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Remember, folks, that options don't always pan out.

    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

  6. aahhh! by apachetoolbox · · Score: 4, Funny
    Studio brass obviously take comfort in knowing Jacks and Daniels are on the job -- the duo made Universal's wildly successful "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" movies...
    Jack Daniels was the cause of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, that explains a lot...

  7. From the author of Tarzan! by Xtifr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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. :)

    1. Re:From the author of Tarzan! by Angst+Badger · · Score: 3, Insightful
      As for the studios "ruining" the stories...

      Well, exactly. Besides, the movie doesn't really have any impact on the book. Frank Herbert's Dune series is just as fabulous after the equally horrid David Lynch and Sci-Fi channel butcherings of it as it was before. Heinlein's Starship Troopers is still a remarkable book despite Paul Verhoeven's (only tangentially related) film version.

      Frankly, I think it's a little silly to even compare movies and books. Talking about the movie version of a book is a bit like hoping for the sculpture version of Beethoven's Fifth. The relationship is tenuous at best.

      --
      Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
  8. Great adventure story by rhea · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Slightly, but not totally, OffTopic - Radium by Dr.Dubious+DDQ · · Score: 3, Informative
    complete with radium-powered propulsion-ray personal hovercraft[...]

    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"...

    --
    Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
  10. Re:Brendan Fraser - Re:got to be good by dimator · · Score: 3, Funny

    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))"