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Le Guin Peeved About Earthsea Miniseries
Several readers have written in with unhappy opinions on the Legend of Earthsea miniseries just aired on the Sci-Fi channel. Ursula Le Guin has also chimed in, with a short but highly critical blurb on her website, and now this dissection on Slate.com.
Since when does the Authors opinion count!?
One of my sisters likes telling the store of how they had discussed a book in class in great detail. The teacher going to great depths about how the story originated, etc. Later the teacher was able to get the author of the story to appear before the class, where she dismissed every 'insight' into the story as being completely wrong and misinformed.
I'm not a big Le Guin fan, and I looked at The Legend of Earthsea simply as a diversion.
The mini-series was not awful, but it certainly wasn't very good, either. The actors were so understated as to be boring; the only reason I cared about Tinar is because she was cute. ;) As for the main character, he was a stereotypical pretty boy; his sidekick Vetch was the traditional pudgy geek. The best character was a dragon, who figures in about three minutes of screen time.
Le Guin should be upset, but not surprised. Publishers, TV execs, and movie makers have always twisted ideas to their own ends; even examples such as Jackson's LOTR do not prevent "the powers that be" from dumbing down artistic vision for mass audiences.
So why do creative people let their worlds be perverted by publishers and movie makers? Because you can't make money if your work doesn't get printed and sold. It's a myth that people will pay artists through online contributions; it just doesn't happen.
All about me
"No."No. Because they aren't interested in Science Fiction. They want the tech-fantasy crap.
The stuff that will be guaranteed to appeal to the 12 - 24 year old male audience.
This isn't even about "low budget". Look at Red Dwarf's first few seasons. They had no budget, yet they had great characters and amusing plots.
They haven't realized that going with the status quo will always result in mediocrity.
In order to produce something memorable, they have to push the envelope.
Watching their crap, I get the feeling that the actor's salaries, the FX, everything is calculated to the exact penny and matched against the ad revenues. They know exactly how many people will watch another rendition of the same-old same-old and they're not going to break a profitable formula.
Here is an excerpt from an interview http://www.bookslut.com/features/2003_10_000738.ph p
with Augusten Burroughs (author of Running with Scissors) that is relevant here:
INTERVIEWER: Are you going to write the screenplay?
BURROUGHS: He is. I'm not going to write the screenplay.
INTERVIEWER: Are you going to have an advisory role with it?
BURROUGHS: Yeah, but I'm not writing the screenplay. That's one of those things -- maybe my advertising background makes it easier -- but when you come up with an ad campaign, you come up with this vision, something you think is really smart, yet really entertaining, and then you give it to a director and he takes it to the next level. You learn early on in your career -- if you're going to have a long career -- that you need to let it go. You either need to have complete control over [a film], write the screenplay, choose the director, much the way John Irving did for Cider House Rules, or you need to let it go. But you can't option it, and then whine about it not being good, because the only reason you option it is for money. That's why you do it.
Like others, I was more surprised at LeGuin's ignoring the plot changes (including switching use-names and true-names) and focussing on skin color.
...Naah.
Who gives a flying fsck about skin color, anyway? I'd say "dinosaurs from the 50s," but I was born in the 50s! In the South, yet!
Besides, Caucasian though I am, leave me out in the sun long enough and I certainly turn "red-brown." In fact, if I had to describe the skin color of "white" people, it'd be pinkish-brown anyway.
Perhaps she's just trying to see if anyone noticed that.
Oh, my God. Those Hollywood grassfuckers *would* do something like that, too. Please, do not repeat that statement anywhere else. Thank you.
However one very rarely hears about them returning the money they received when they sold the rights.
Heh, you've obviously never looked into the publishing industry. 20 years ago it was pretty bad, you could publish your own works, which were never put in book stores, or available to the public and no one would ever read your work. Or you could sign a contract to give up the rights to your work and your next several works, and a publishing house would ship it to all kinds of stores. Most stories were then ignored but some became popular and the authors wrote more stories (already owned by the publisher) for the already negotiated fee. Today things are even worse. You see some authors, like Stephen King, developed a large following and then, were able to make money on their fourth or fifth novel, and dictate terms to publishing houses who wanted to make some profit. Now they pretty much make you sign away the rights to anything you want to write for the next 10 years if you want a shot at a mainstream audience. It is ironic that avoiding this exact situation in Europe was one of the primary concerns of the authors of our copyright law. Ben Franklin predicted this outcome which was why he railed against the passage of our copyright laws.
Simply the fact that one can make a movie based on and using the title of a copy-written work without consulting the author, is proof that our system is horribly broken. No author wants to give up rights to their creations, but if they want to be published, they have little choice.
This sort of thing can work in a book, but it is hell on the audience for a film or a video.
I don't see where she gets off comparing the SciFi channel's treatment to changing the LOTR ending.
I also don't understand, financial considerations aside, what would posess an artist to relinquish so much artistic control over their material, that such complaints ever need to be raised. With Tolkein or Heinlein, it makes sense that they might not be respected by a screenplay writer -- but this author is alive.
Does Stephen King have this problem?
You can't have your cake and eat it too, Ursula.
If you surrender your rights to control of your work, you pay the price.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It seems as though the author's main complaint is that instead of using native american or other ethnic actors, the producers used almost all white actors. That complaint is fine and good if race plays a role in the story, but her original reason for making diverse characters comes across as pretty shallow ("I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill"). Sure, it would have been nice to have a diverse cast, and it would have been more realistic, but the author comes across as very whiney in her blog. Perhaps it was the use of "honky" when it was completely inappropriate.
:/
Why does everything have to be about race?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
When you aim for mediocrity, you hit mediocrity. Low popularity, etc. The sort of movie that is forgotten as soon as you finish watching it.
To get mass appeal, you have to aim above mediocrity.
They didn't buy the rights to some mediocre novel. They wanted the rights to a series with a big time name recognition and a big fan-base.
She didn't get those by writing mediocre novels about "safe" subjects with stereotypical characters and plots.
You will turn a profit on a mediocre movie if you can keep the hype up and the costs down.
Like I've said, they don't want to break a profitable formula.
But they'll never see mass appeal or profits like The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings.
Mediocre is what people will choose when they don't have anything better. Welcome to the Sci Fi channel.
I feel so special. I just Slashdotted my childhood goddess! w00t!
Hmm - couldn't help but notice that 90% of her complaints were about the fact that they changed the story into all white people. I didn't get the impression that race was a huge issue in the novels - it was just part of the *colour* of the setting, if you'll pardon the pun. While it certainly isn't nice to lose that part of the story, it seems kinda odd to obsess over it. On the other hand, the scuttlebutt is that Ender's Game is being made with a less international cast, which really hurts the story.
At any rate - after reading her comments, I suddenly don't feel so bad that I missed it.
Just to be a little nitpicky, this could work fine in a movie. The people in Earthsea all have their true names which they rarely reveal to anyone else (and which give other people power over them, a trope that LeGuin popularized and Vernor Vinge later adapted into his early cyberpunk story "True Names"), but they go by monikers that other people refer to them by. For instance the main character's true name is Ged, but he goes by Sparrowhawk, so most of the dialog in the book has people calling him that.
So you wouldn't really have to sit through a whole movie with all the characters refering to "that guy who we met earlier" or "hey, you."
I didn't get the impression that race was a huge issue in the novels
I can understand someone not seeing that. The more subtle the message, the more powerful the art, I guess.
LeGuin is not happy about the whitey cast because of two things.
1) Race is a big deal in her work because it wasn't a big deal.
2) Race is (sometimes) a big deal in her work because it's really (or also) referring to gender. (or visa versa)
The thing that (at least in the sixties and even seventies) that was important was that her portrayl of race wasn't a big smelly trout moral issue; LeGuin just presented the characters as people.
Sometimes, though, in her work she talks about gender issues (Left Hand of Darkness of course springs to mind) and the subtext is clearly "i'm also talking about race here, white sci-fi reading America!". And versa visa.
Although her stories are fun stories, she is above all a *social* science fiction author, so there *is* also a subtext present, whether or not one chooses to pay attention to commentary on social discourse.
Danny Glover had a central part not just a supporting role.
In terms of screen time, he had a more minor role than the characters whose race was changed.
I don't think it was at all "racist". I think it had more to do with popular actors and "looks".
If anything, it seems like it went the other way. The most prominent actors that they managed to recruit were Danny Glover and Kristin Kreuk. Is it coincidence that they are also the only characters permitted to deviate from the otherwise lily-white color scheme?
Race was obviously important to the author. But I don't think the suits even read her novels, they just went with what they thought they could package and sell to a predominately white audience (US & Canadian SciFi channel viewers). People use the racist label too easily.
It seems to me that eliminating mixed race characters in hopes of appealing to a "predominately white audience" is inherently a racist decision, even if the racism is driven by economics rather than bigotry. There is also a disturbing circularity in justifying such a decision based on the fact that the viewership is predominately white, when the systematic elimination of people of color from major roles helps to drive off nonwhite viewers.
What seems pretty shallow and superficial to me are quotes like this from her post on slate:
... Lets ask Bradbury if he deliberately made his characters white/black/red/green...
My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill
... That's funny, when reading "Out of the Silent Planet", "Martian Chronicles", "Dune", "Stranger in a Strange Land", etc.. I don't ever recall thinking "Damn, I'm glad these guys are
and...
I figured some white kids (the books were published for "young adults") might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees--hoping that the reader would get "into Ged's skin" and only then discover it wasn't a white one.
White, or any other color-kids won't relate to or "get into the skin" of a character if the character development isn't very good. The author's responsibility to the reader is not to pre-determine if they are able to 'deal' with a character's skin color, but to make them interested in the character regardless and the story as a whole. or...
I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don't notice, don't care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being "colorblind." Nobody else does.
...uh, how exactly do whites have the privilege of being colorblind ? Its not a privilege, its your duty to your fellow man to be colorblind. So far, the only 'honky' (as she so nobley puts it) that doesn't have the privilege of being colorblind is the Her.
As an anthropologist's daughter, I am intensely conscious of the risk of cultural or ethnic imperialism--a white writer speaking for nonwhite people, co-opting their voice, an act of extreme arrogance.
Isn't is also extreme arrogance to call ethnic imperialism the act of a white author speaking for a non-white people.? The word "ethnic" is a generic term, yet she uses it specifically to target white writers in her statement. Ethnicity is defined as a group of people sharing a common and distinctive racial, national, religious, linguistic, or cultural heritage.
She should spend some time pulling the plank out of her own eye before removing the splinter of others.
I can't find any sympathy for someone who sells the rights to their work, then complains about what happens to it.
You should read the entire article then. She's a pro. She didn't complain or attack the miniseries until the director decided to put words in her mouth and say what "she had intended by..."
A very understandable reaction, I believe.
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
Yes, the rest of us read the Slate article
:)
My bad!
I figured the Slate article was a rehash included for bandwidth purposes and went straight for the "true word".
Of course now I've read the Slate article and see that she wrote it as well and it is indeed all about color (funny she didn't mention that at all in the post on her site).
However, many people who see a movie will read the book just to see what got left out. This could be a good thing! I'm sure there's a segment of the population that would either be turned off by the presence of color or read negative reviews because of it.
This way some of them will see the movie, read the books and, as she put it "get into Ged's skin" before discovering that he's not a "lily". (She does have a way with words, I've always loved that series).
Hell, they had John Wayne play Temujin Khan in "The Conquerer". Hollywood sucks ass!
I drank what? -- Socrates
However, you are forgetting the well known exception to the racist term rule that allows one to use it on one's own race. Le Guin is herself white, and therefore can slur white people. Just like blacks use the "n" word, gays can use the "f" word, and, well, everyone else can use whatever they are using against their own kind. Don't ask me why this is so - in college I believe I heard something about reclaiming the term for yourself, self empowerment, etc.
Perhaps on the same vein, if someone on the schoolyard growing up called me a nerd, I got all offended. If someone on slashdot called me a nerd, I would take it as a compliment.
Again, I don't make the rules. Its a strange world, eh?
It does seem tacky for her to use it in print, though. Definitely borderline...
Hmm. I understand your argument, but I'm not sure it's correct. I mean, I simply don't remember any outrage at all about this. The protagonist of Starship Troopers was Puerto Rican, but I don't remember anyone getting bent out of shape about that, either.
In any case, my feelings about LeGuin's Slate piece remain. One would have expected her to be outraged by the way they butchered the books' plot and meaning -- instead, she focuses on the races of the actors in a rant made baffling by the fact that the books have nothing to do with race, even as an allegory.
Also, she loses a lot of sympathy I would otherwise have, due to the fact that she sold the rights of her own free will, without insisting on some sort of creative control. It reminds of Krusty the Clown's anguished line: "What was I supposed to do? They rolled up a giant dump truck full of money! I'm not made of stone, you know!!"
- AJ
It is ironic
Whereas I agree with the sentiment, that's not what irony means.
Simply the fact that one can make a movie based on and using the title of a copy-written work without consulting the author
That's not frequently true of well-known authors, or in fact of most book contracts with little-known authors. Pretty much the only publishing subindustries with that sort of conjoinder in their contracts standard-issue are science fiction and horror; if you try to run that sort of clause in a fiction contract you will be summarily laughed off of the phone by any typical book agent.
Furthermore, in science fiction and in horror, movies and miniseries are rarely made from the work of little-known authors. So, whereas it is an issue for those two genres, it's less of an issue IMOALE than you suggest.
No author wants to give up rights to their creations, but if they want to be published, they have little choice.
If this is spoken from experience rather than guesses and prejudice, then my friend, you need a better agent. This is a bit like hearing "no programmer wants to use Microsoft tools, but if they want SQL, they have little choice." Well yes, they do, given a simple familiarity with what's available to them.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I agree...original poster was overboard IMHO.
;)
The way I get past the dunes and other modestly executed sfx shots is to think of it as a theatrical production--makes it much more palatable. Backdrops are AOK in theater!
Now, as for the follow up mini-series, The Children of Dune (Actually an adaptation of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune books), I thought was far superior..and parts borderline fantastic. The only teeth grinding were at some of the Leto II scenes.
Please, even if you were turned off by the Dune mini-series, give the CoD a chance!
-db
Let me 'splain...
:)
> Funny joke
> -- Joke Comeback
> -- -- Joke Comeback pointing out movie origin
> -- -- -- Joke Comeback pointing out I know the origin
> -- -- -- -- Joke Comeback originating from the same movie
> -- -- -- -- -- Angry Comback misinterpretting the previous joke
No... is too much. Let me sum up.
> This could go on forever
Still, though, what I find more interesting is Le Guin's attitude towards Caucasians. Just reading through the article I see phrases such as "petulant white kid", "honky", "lily-like", "whites...have the privilege of not caring". It's almost as though Le Guin is defensive about her own ethnicity.
I guess I take offense at being lumped into the generalizations that Le Guin makes. For example, when I read novels I do indeed tend to overlook the ethnicity of the protagonists, unless it is considered a major pushing point of the novel. When I enjoy well written novels, I enjoy the plot and the development of the character's personalities, and the motivations for their actions. I could care less whether the main characters are Caucasian, African-American, Native-American, Asianiac, and so forth. I was taught as a child by my family that a person's ethnicity should not give or take away from their value as a person - it is the quality of their character that is the important element in their person.
That's why I bristled a little when I read her reaction. I came away thinking that she put too much emphasis in the ethnicity of her characters. It's her prerogative, of course, and by her own admission it is a basis for her novels. In that sense, I imagine, she should be upset by how the story was changed. Of course, I seem to recall someone in a class I took once in creative writing telling the class that a sign of good writing was when you could take the characters and change their race, gender, ethnicity, etc, and the story would still be compelling and engaging. The point then was that you should focus on writing a strong story first, and use your characters to drive the story, not the other way around.
In any case, I'm more disturbed by how Le Guin "gets away" with using the term "honky", which is a derogatory term. (Ironically, it is a derogatory term that is likely derived from the African Wolof term honq) Although I haven't read every single response here on /., I don't notice anyone taking offense to her language. I guess I'm personally irritated by the double standard in society where a person of one ethnicity can be punished for using an ethnic slur against another race, but you can get away with saying a slur against your own race. (IE, it's alright for African-Americans to say "n****r", but not okay for anyone else, and it's alright for Le Guin to say "honky")
Oh, and in case anyone feels this is too off-topic, let me make one final observation. By Le Guin's own admission, one of the key factors in her decision to sell the group the option to the film rights was knowing Philippa Boyens was onboard as primary script writer. If that were true, she should have had it written into the contract that the rights were contingent upon Boyens' participation in the project. I've seen that happen many times, where an author won't let anyone but a certain script writer handle their stories. If you care about your stories that much, you will take that sort of care.
Londovir
As we're about 10% of the world's population, it's actually the rule outside your enclave. (I live in Hong Kong, so I'm disabused of any idea that we're a majority of the population.) That was something UKL expanded on in her Slate piece; that it's absurd to think in the future most people in every place will be Caucasian, as they are in every single SF movie and TV series (please correct me if you can think of one; I can't). It makes one wonder what happened back on Earth; is there still a rich white First World and a dirt-poor Third in the 23rd century? Was there a global ethnic cleansing? The implications are creepy and never explained.)
Of course, it's the same reason most aliens look like humans down to their fingernails (with some latex on their forehead or ears); because that's what Hollywood has available.
However, I was a bit surprised that was the thing UKL focused on; the general opinion (looking at the forum on the Sci-Fi Channels's site) is very negative with regard to the story, script and acting; everyone who read the books hated it, few who came to it without knowing the books liked it either.