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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.