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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.
I'm guessing her next blog posting will be a complaint about Slashdot.
Le Guin is the author of the books.
Text from her website...
"Earthsea"
11/13/2004
"Miss Le Guin was not involved in the development of the material or the making of the film, but we've been very, very honest to the books," explains director Rob Lieberman. "We've tried to capture all the levels of spiritualism, emotional content and metaphorical messages. Throughout the whole piece, I saw it as having a great duality of spirituality versus paganism and wizardry, male and female duality. The final moments of the film culminate in the union of all that and represent two different belief systems in this world, and that's what Ursula intended to make a statement about. The only thing that saves this Earthsea universe is the union of those two beliefs."
Sci Fi Magazine
December 2004
I've tried very hard to keep from saying anything at all about this production, being well aware that movies must differ in many ways from the books they're based on, and feeling that I really had no business talking about it, since I was not included in planning it and was given no part in discussions or decisions.
That makes it particularly galling of the director to put words in my mouth.
Mr Lieberman has every right to say what his intentions were in making the film he directed, called "Earthsea." He has no right at all to state what I intended in writing the Earthsea books.
Had "Miss Le Guin" been honestly asked to be involved in the planning of the film, she might have discussed with the film-makers what the books are about.
When I tried to suggest the unwisdom of making radical changes to characters, events, and relationships which have been familiar to hundreds of thousands of readers all over the world for over thirty years, I was sent a copy of the script and informed that production was already under way.
So, for the record: there is no statement in the books, nor did I ever intend to make a statement, about "the union of two belief systems." There's nothing at all about the "duality of spirituality and paganism," whatever that means, either.
Earlier in the article, Robert Halmi is quoted as saying that Earthsea "has people who believe and people who do not believe." I can only admire Mr Halmi's imagination, but I wish he'd left mine alone.
In the books, the wizardry of the Archipelago and the ritualism of the Kargs are opposed and united, like the yang and yin. The rejoining of the broken arm-ring is a symbol of the restoration of an unresting, active balance, offering a risky chance of peace.
This has absolutely nothing to do with "people who believe and people who do not believe." That terrible division into Believers and Unbelievers (itself a matter not of reason but of belief) is one which bedevils Christianity and Islam and drives their wars.
But the wizards of Earthsea would look on such wars as madness, and the dragons of Earthsea would laugh at them and fly away...
Toto, something tells me Earthsea isn't Iraq.
I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien "intended..." would people think they'd been "very, very honest to the books"?
Ursula K. Le Guin
13 November 2004
Does anyone think that the Sci Fi channel will ever get actual decent Sci Fi authors to do their scripts and come up with series for them?
It's one thing to be low-budget in production (the original Star Trek was about as low budget as Sci Fi comes), but they could at least make an attempt to get decent writers. Someone should explain to them that people who watch/read a lot of Science Fiction are more interested in a decent scientific plot instead of their writer's latest flavor-of-the-week politically-correct-philosophy with "futuristic" stuff tacked on. I can think of at least three recent "original series" that may have been a series, but were original in all the wrong ways.
USA has better "Sci Fi" original series than the Sci Fi channel. What's up with that?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Yes, you should be more familiar. Ursula Le Guin is one of the greatest living authors of science fiction and fantasy, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. Her novels include The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, and the EarthSea series. She is also the author of a wonderful interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Ursula LeGuin wrote two absolutely classic SF novels:
The Dispossessed, about an anarcho-syndalicist society formed when the founders of their political movement were exiled to their planet's moon, and whose first visitor to the a couple of hundred years later is the most brilliant physicist in known space: a man who has figured out a very, very important issue in physics (which I will not reveal), and has numerous adventures that illustrate the homeworld's society (and also has contact with an alien ambassador from a very familiar planet).
The Left Hand of Darkness, about an alien ambassador visiting a planet whose inhabitants naturally change sex with each mating season, and so have a very fluid concept of "gender" - and who consider someone who sticks with one sex throughout life to be a pervert. There's some political intrigue, too, and a journey across an ice field.
She's probably most famous for A Wizard of Earthsea and its related books, which formed the basis of the miniseries being critiqued.
Years ago, I went to a panel discussion at an SF convention about how books are adapted to film. The authors on the panel had all had their works adapted.
First up was Barry Longyear, whose novel Enemy Mine was turned into a "B" movie. He rattled off a good-natured Hollywood horror story.
Next was Gary Wolf, whose book Who Censored Roger Rabbit was turned into what I recall was a rather popular movie a few years back. He was wearing the fancy jacket provided to the cast. He got to go to the Hollywood premiere and got very rich.
When he described getting to sit with Kathleen Turner at a celebratory banquet, Longyear got up and pretended to strangle him.
For real? You guys have books now?
Phil
I guess today is a passable day to die.
sPh
C'mon, Chuck! If you've going to post a URL to a high-bandwidth site, at least post it as a link...
"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.
We first had this discussion in an English class when reading Huck Finn (if you recall, Mark Twain says in the introduction specifically that you shouldn't read any meaning into the story, blah, blah).
So of course we all said that we shouldn't be reading into the story, the author specifically said not to!
Years later, as an artist, I can honestly say that yes, 85% of the stuff people "read into" my work is totally random and stupid (or optimistic on their part). But the other 15% is either outright correct or something that rings very true even though I hadn't intended it.
So much of the creative process is subconscious that I have to grudgingly agree with my old English teacher that the author doesn't always realize (or even recognize!) all of the things they put into a work.
So even when an author says "I didn't mean to represent X as Y", it doesn't make it any less true that X is represented as Y, or that it tells us something about the story, the author, or the characters. it just means the author didn't intend it consciously (or wants to disavow it after the fact).
But of course, 85% of the theories are still utter crap.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
The teacher liked it so much, she had me type it up and she put included it on the midterm as a sample work for the other students to pick apart. I was an incredibly sloppy student and typing the thing up seemed like a horrible burden, but the idea that I'd ace the test was enough to motivate me. After all, I wrote the dang thing, didn't I?
When test day rolled around, though, she asked things about "what technique is the author using to suspend disbelief?" and "which passages are used to build foreboding for the ending?" In the end I was lucky to pass the thing by the skin of my teeth.
I won't pretend to be their equals, but I have to admit I vaguely know how Tolkien and Le Guin felt.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Le Guin wrote a sci-fi series that was intended to complexify and breakdown the super-whiteness of sci-fi and fantasy, i.e. LOTRs, Vampires, etc. Look, I liked LOTRs but it got a little creepy how white everyone was, and how the only slightly non-white, Arab/African looking guys are bad guys. Le Guin knows she achieved her intended effect because people write to her telling her it did.
So big media wants to turn this written work into a widely viewed video work. Because they believe in the racism of the general public, they commit a racist act themselves (of course they may claim so only to deflect the accusations of racism to others). The theoretical discussion about authorial intent versus thematics is interesting but besides the point--what "unrealized" or "unintended" insights were brought into the film by white-washing it? That's the point.
In addition to her site and Slate, she has put up a more detailed chronology at the Agony column called "Earthsea in Clorox". While the second half is a reiteration of the Slate essay, I provide the first half here to prevent slashdotting:
1. Background: my (non)involvement with this production.
For people who wonder why I sold out to Halmi, or let them change the story -- you may find some answers here.
The producers (not yet including Robert Halmi Sr.) approached us with a reasonable offer. My dramatic agency at that time was William Morris. The contract of course gave me only the standard status of consultant -- which means exactly what the producers want it to mean, almost always little or nothing. The agency could not improve this clause. But the purchasers talked as if they genuinely meant to respect the books and to ask for my input when planning the film.
As I had scripted the first two books myself, with Michael Powell, years ago, and also worked with another scriptwriter to plan his script of the first book, I was in a position to be useful to them. I knew some of the difficulties in carrying this story over to film. And some of the possibilities that could be fulfilled, too, the things a movie can do that a novel can't. It was an exciting prospect.
They were talking at that time of a large-scale theater movie, although the possibility of a TV miniseries was mentioned. They said that they had already secured Philippa Boyen (who scripted The Lord of the Rings) as principal scriptwriter, and reported that she was eager to work on an Earthsea film. As the script was, to me, all-important, her presence was the key factor in my decision to sell them the option to the film rights.
Time went by. By the time they got backing from the Sci Fi Channel for a miniseries -- and Robert Halmi Sr. had come aboard -- they had lost Boyen.
That was a blow. But I had just seen Mr Halmi's miniseries Dreamkeeper with its stunning Native American cast, so I said to them in a phone conversation, hey, maybe Mr Halmi will cast some of those great actors in Earthsea! -- Oh, no, I was told -- Mr Halmi had found those people impossible to work with.
Well, I said, you do realise that almost everybody in Earthsea is 'those people,' or anyhow not white?
I don't remember what their answer to that was -- it may have used that wonderful weasel word colorblind -- but it wasn't reassuring, because I do remember saying to my husband, oh, gee, I bet they're going to have a honky Ged. . .
This was in the spring of 2004. They moved very fast then, because if they didn't get into production, they would lose their rights to the property. Early in this period they contacted me in a friendly fashion, and I responded in kind; I asked if they'd like to have a list of name pronunciations; and I said that although I knew well that a film must differ greatly from a book, I hoped they were making no unnecessary changes in the plot or to the characters -- a dangerous thing to do, since the books have been known to millions of people for over 30 years. To this they replied that the TV audience is much larger, and entirely different, and changes to a book's story and characters were of no importance to them.
They then sent me several versions of the script -- and told me that shooting had already begun. In other words, I had been absolutely cut out of the process.
I withdrew my offered pronunciation guide (so Ogion, which rhymes with bogy-on, is Oh-jee-on in the film.) Having looked over the script, I realised they had no understanding of what the two books are about, and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic MacMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence. (And fai
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Pretty much the consensus seems to be that the adaptation is as bad as she claims, but she did sign the rights away. No matter what she may have thought was going to happen, if it's not in the contract, it's not going to happen.
As soon as the line was crossed from not involving her to putting words in her mouth, though, she's got every right to complain as loudly as possible about what was done to her work. To her credit, she stayed quiet out of an honorable respect for the contract, and only began publicly making her feelings known once ideas and motives were attributed to her that weren't hers.
As sour grapes as her last salvo might come across, it's important to bear in mind that it was only caused by the producers clearly stepping over the line. They opened the floodgates, she's simply providing the water. Also note that she does not claim that the producers were under any legal obligation to stay true to her books, she simply claims that the books were better, and what the producers put onscreen is essentially unrelated to what she wrote.
*Yes, this is a shameless plug.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I had to turn the website off temporarily. 90% of you were getting errors, anyway. Sorry, but we're a little hosting company, and a single Slashdot mention can swamp our connection.
Please get the article from Google's cache, or any of the mirrors mentioned in this thread.
I'll bring www.ursulakleguin.com back up later.
Jeffry Dwight
Ursula's Administrator (among other chores)
I think the biggest mistake the W brothers made in Reloaded was to cram all of the important information into a single scene with a man whose face was more interesting than his droning voice, i.e. the Architect.
That scene is the single most important scene in the entire movie. If you weren't paying attention, you missed it.
First, there was no implication of matrices within matrices. The architect spoke of five previous matrices. Each time there was an anomaly that caused the matrix to implode (The anomaly was the dual creation of Neo-One/Smith-virus). Each time, the Architect had presented the One the choice of immediately merging with the Virus and in gratitude, the machines will spare 17 women and 6 men (sound familiar? Morpheus speaks in M1 of the 23 founders of Zion) of his choosing, or he can reject the offer and everybody dies.
In every previous Matrix, the One chose to save the twenty-three of his choosing and face/merge with the Virus. Until Neo. Sure, you can really get deep and discuss the Oracle's manipulations of the whole situation, but that's for another discussion. Neo, told the Architect, the Machines and everyone else to fuck off and go save his girlfriend. At this point, from the POV of the machines, the wheels fell off the cart. Because, the machines need Neo to stop Smith. They couldn't. They never could. They were screwed.
Because Neo rejected their offer, he was now in a position to dictate terms. Of course, it takes him a while to figure that out ("Not too smart, though."), which is most of Revolutions. I don't think Neo really understood his own decision when meeting with the Architect beyond saving Trinity. I don't think it occurred to him until much later that he could be dooming both the humans and machines into extinction by making the choice he did.
When it came down to it, Neo chose the chance for peace and coexistence. That's a resolution. And a damn fine one at that. The whole matrix within a matrix just perpetuates the endless loop and IMHO is a cop-out ending.
Yes, I agree, most people don't pay attention to plot anymore.
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle