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."

Comments

How do you option public domain?

[wahay]

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.....

Re:How do you option public domain?

[Bourbonium]

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!

English author?

[Bourbonium]

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.

Re:Current technology

[56ker]

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.

aahhh!

[apachetoolbox]

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...