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Watchmen Movie Trailer Is Out
I forgot to mention the other bit of exciting comic book movie news this week: DaSpudMan noted that the Watchmen trailer is out — from the Director of 300, which spawns mixed feelings at our office. But it looks pretty good.
The trailer for Watchmen got the E.T. treatment.
Just in case you were afraid that the character on screen was going to shoot you, his gun has been replaced by a walkie-talkie.
The sad fact is that authors rarely have any input in the film-ification of their work.
Indeed, Ms Le Guin has it spot-on. Having been involved with writing a few screenplays, I can tell everyone who's never been there, You Have No Idea. Seriously, on a project that makes it to the screen, there are a dozen or so self-important hacks between the writer and the final edit, all trying to "exercise their creativity" on the work. And the less clout you have as an established writer, the more talentless hacks will screw it up. It used to be that producers and other studio execs would take care of the business side and leave the filmmaking to the filmmakers. The modern studio system is rife with slick dolts who got into the business because their fathers, uncles, or other relatives "handed down" the job to them. These guys don't understand that it's not their job to "reimagine" your script. I've actually had these morons interrupt my pitch to to interject their "creative input". One instance: a story about a group of adventurers led by an old, but very wise and experienced man. One of the party is a young, good-looking, braggart prick. They're intentional polar opposites. The guy I was pitching to said "I think it'd be better if you got rid of the old guy and made the young guy the leader". His own assistant tried to explain why that'd be dumb, but the guy just kept basically saying "young heroes market better". What he was suggesting was the equivalent of getting rid of Picard and replacing him with Wesley or Barkley! In the end, he offered to buy the script outright--- which means he'd get some hack to rewrite the script with the young guy as the leader, and I'd see it on the USA Network at 3am and have to shoot myself over how bad it was. My co-writer and I insisted on full control, though, so (like all our projects) they option it for a nominal sum and it will never see the screen unless they get really desperate. S'ok. We get those option checks every year, and that's better than a single lump sum and an embarrassment on the screen. That was the last thing we pitched. We have better things to do with our time.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.