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Rumors of Pratchett Film
kongjie writes "The BBC reports on the rumored possibility of Terry Pratchett's novel Wee Free Men being made into a Hollywood film, with Raimi attached to it. This would be the first, although in the past his stuff has made the television screen."
Is currently being shown (in the U.K.) on BBC1 on Sunday nights, serialised, for anybody who might be interested.
CRIVENS!!!
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
This suggests to me that, like Rowling, he now probably has enough clout to prevent his work being butchered by the studios.
By way of illustrating this point, he tells an amusing story about the first time round the Hollywood block. Someone had optioned "Reaper Man", and was actually putting some money into scriptwriting, preliminary planning, focus groups, and that kind of thing. One evening, he got a phone call from a studio executive. Who began like this: "hi, Terry! Great to talk to you, we here at XXXXX studios really like Reaper Man, and we're looking forward to making it a great movie. However, we'd like to make a few changes. We ran the outline past a focus group in rural Iowa, and they weren't very positive about this 'Death' character. If we just replace him with Tom Cruise ..."
This is how Hollywood typically deals with SF/F fiction properties.
And that's why you didn't see a big-budget production of "Reaper Man" (probably re-titled "Die Hard 4: Reap Hard") during the mid-nineties.
I love his books. I think Small Gods would be great to see. If that made it to screen the religious community would go bonkers!(did I mention I like to instigate) Some of his book would make a great Anime feature too.
"The universe is my dwelling place and my house is my only clothes! Why are you entering into my pants?" - Liu Ling
I'd much prefer to see a film done about another Pratchett book - Mort.
Everyone I know says that's the best of the Discworld books to start with, as it's the most accessible, and the characters are the most recognisable. Everyone for some reason identifies with Mort as he confronts, literally, death. It's funny, it's clever, and you don't need to be a discworld fan to love it - lets convert some people.
"A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which went down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said "Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centres of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton". The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys. Whereupon, I'm happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years." - Terry Pratchett. So either things have changed, or the movie will end up being a sequel to Charlie and Chocolate Factory or something.. 'Hey, Wee Free Men? Those are kind of like Ooompah Loompahs, right?'
I really want to get into him. Anyone, anything to be an (in)adequate replacement for Douglas Adams' sensibilities. God I miss that guy.
I've read Kingdom For Sale
IF you want to get into Terry Pratchett, why are you reading books by Terry BROOKS?
Mort preceeds "Reaper Man" and is a better starting point.
If you want to work out where to start for each of the various plotlines, there is a diagram of the various streams of thought involved. Check out the reading guidelines for more options.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
"So, what rating are they going to put on the movie, PG-13?"
Er... that would be "Pray to the Gods (all 13 of 'em)", right?
sig? Oh, that sig...
I'd agree with you, in general - it seems like, for a while at least, he listened too much to the sad inbred clique of a.f.p. and wrote books that tried to fit everybody's favourite characters and bits in. After the first one of those, they became formulaic - every book had to have the Watch, A-M, the Wizards, at least a passing nod to the witches, etc.
;-).
But it seems in the last couple of years he's woken up. "Going Postal" is a brilliant piece of work, capturing a clash between the public servant culture, modern business "ethics", and the engineer / hacker ethos. "Thief of Time" runs a close second to this - the description of the spinners going wild is the stuff power plant engineers nightmares are made of, while the whole thing is a nice piss-take / homage to a thousand martial arts movies (Rule One - heh!
But still, the best stand-alone books would be "Pyramids" or "Small Gods". The latter, however, is probably too deep - it was my least favourite to start with but, having read it maybe a dozen times, each time I find some new deep cutting insight into organised religion, and enjoy it more and more...
(It has to also be said that, for a long time there, the man couldn't write a decent ending to save his life. The later books, however, are much much better in this regard.)
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?