Beyond the five chapters, I can't let out more of the book before the official release on 2 January.
However, for those who would like to give autographed copies of Shadow of the Hegemon as Christmas gifts or simply have a copy signed for themselves, at http://www.hatrack.com we will be giving away sticky-backed bookplates printed nicely with the title and color scheme of Shadow of the Hegemon. Those who send in a self-addressed stamped business envelope, along with the names of the persons to whom bookplates should be inscribed, can receive up to three autographed and personalized bookplates for free.
That is, until we run out of the thousand that we printed up.
The address to which you should send the SASE is:
Hegemon
PO Box 18184
Greensboro NC 27419-8184.
- Orson Scott Card
The reason I refused to consider animation was that, despite the passions of those who love animation, until recently I had never seen animation that could express human emotion at all. Stories that are event-driven work well in animation, but character-driven stories don't - a fact well known in the industry, even if animation fans often don't understand it.
However, there recently has been one animated film that finally broke the "character barrier": Iron Giant. Genuinely witty writing was joined with art that actually made the faces expressive and brought animation to a point where at least a few nuances of expression could be shown. Maybe this was achievable all along, but the point is, few tried. So, with the right team, an animated Ender's Game might be do-able.
Right now, though, we remain committed to the live-action version.
There's a crucial distinction here that you seem to have missed. You spend all day looking at a computer screen and it's not moring at all, you say. But that's because you're looking at a screen and interacting with the programs running on the computer attached to it. How exciting would it be for someone ELSE to watch you, hour after hour, looking at that screen? No matter how fascinating you are as a human being, watching somebody else type and mouse around with a computer is excruciatingly dull on film.
And considering how low an opinion you have of the book, it's hard to fathom why you would care whether the book was "dumbed down" for Hollywood. Or why you've spent so much time posting within this topic. Surely you could have spent your time talking about something that isn't so painfully "overrated." .
Man... if only you had been around to teach me when I was learning how to write. Twenty stage plays, a hundred-plus audioplays, and a half-dozen screenplays into my career, and only NOW does someone tell me that I can't write dialogue.
While I'm not sure that extreme violence is quite as essential to the story as the post at the beginning of this thread seems to feel. Nor would I call Ender a "murderer," since his violence is only invoked in life-threatening situations. However, I share the concern that the film not "wimp out." I shudder at the thought of the Spielberg version, in which Ender finds out the truth Just In Time - the way Schindler repents at the end of Spielberg's magnum opus, while the REAL Schindler got away with a box full of diamonds.
The reason the Stilson scene was cut is because movies both magnify and compress. To begin with such an act of violence, when we can't get inside Ender's head to understand his reasoning, would overpower the rest of the story and make it impossible for many viewers to get into the film at all. Film magnifies violence because you can see it and remember it; what I could do to good effect in the book doesn't work at all in the movie. Instead, I replaced it with much milder violence directed at Peter.
However, the crucial scene with Bonzo is intact (though it will be filmed very carefully to avoid nudity), and the double-surprise ending will be preserved, so that the moral implications of Ender's actions remain as in the book. Since these are precisely the issues that matter most to me, you will know that if they are NOT intact, it meant that I lost control of the film after all. Up to now, however, I have managed to hold onto the integrity of the story, at least as I understand it, and am working with producers who are committed to doing the same.
The script that I wrote this past summer and posted early this fall is a complete rewrite - the old script was thrown out and I went back to the book and started from scratch. The first script was from the adult point of view, trying to make it more fundable by not relying so heavily on child actors. That was a mistake, because the emotional heart of the story is the relationships among the children. So the first strategy was tossed, and this script is absolutely from the children's point of view. Works a lot better now.
I wish I could post the whole thing, because there are some cool surprises that I wish I could have included in a new edition of Ender's Game. But what the new script definitely is NOT is "essentially the same" as the previous one. And the reaction of Hollywood makes that clear - this script is working, and it's now only a matter of time, I think, before we get the package put together and the film under way.
All full-length novels are too long for the screen, unless they've been seriously padded with extraneous writing. However, while length forced me to cut SOMETHING, I chose to cut the Peter&ValentineTakeOverTheWorld subplot because it is completely unfilmable - just a couple of kids typing - and hard to make believable without being able to use the novelist's tool of getting inside the characters' heads.
As to Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, they are all unfilmable in that they absolutely depend on knowing what characters and thinking and feeling from the inside. Most of what matters can't be visualized. So a film version of Speaker, for instance, would be a bunch of talking heads interrupted occasionally by unwatchable cruelty. Who wants a movie of that? Not me!
Most of my novels are unfilmable, except those written with film in mind (Homebody, Treasure Box, Ender's Shadow, Enchantment). A few older works would do well on screen (Treason, Wyrms, Hart's Hope) and we're exploring a film version of the Alvin Maker books. We're even attempting a version of Pastwatch - though fitting THAT into two hours is pretty hard, especially given how much has to be explained.
Print science fiction, at its best, is rarely translatable to film. Which is why film science fiction is rarely as "good" as the best print science fiction, and why sci-fi films so often focus on action. The costs of science fiction filming are so high that sci-fi films must appeal to a large audience in order to recoup the investment. When a sci-fi film can be done for much less - check out the astonishingly creative and clever "Being John Malkovich" for an example - then it can explore the much greater possibilities that are routinely exploited in written science fiction.
"Formics" did not occur in Ender's Game. But as I sat with Lynn Hendee, one of the producing partners on Ender's Game, watching Starship Troopers in order to see how much damage that film was going to do to Ender's Game, we realized that it had the potential to hurt us in only one way: If we used the term "buggers," someone might think of "bugs" and remember the ludicrous "brain bug" scene in S-Troop and start laughing uncontrollably at an inappropriate moment in Ender's Game. So we changed the name in the script, and I "previewed" the name change in Ender's Shadow. The look of the buggers will also be changed - insectoid in general body structure, but radically different from the aliens in S-Troop.
Apart from that, the only thing we discovered in watching S-Troop is how deeply dumb Hollywood filmmakers can sometimes be. Here you have a film whose storyline is so lame that only a twelve-year-old could like it enough to see it twice - and then you put in a couple of gratuitous breast shots so the film has an R and those twelve-year-olds can't see it in the theaters! Needless to say, those of us making Ender's Game will make very sure that it has a rating that will allow its ENTIRE audience to attend...
"That little brat"? I've met Jake, and he's an exuberant, decent, unspoiled, extremely bright, very talented young man. I wonder why you would make such a personal comment about a child you haven't met.
Maybe the reason you didn't enjoy his performance in Fantum Mennis was that the writing was so awful. There IS no actor who could have made those lines good. Given the right script and the right director, Jake can be astonishingly good.
However, no one has been cast because there is no director in place and no studio yet funding the film. By the time that happens, Jake will probably be too old to play the part. The kid from Sixth Sense already is too old.
But however the casting turns out, Jake Lloyd is a human being who has done nothing to harm you and does not deserve to be attacked personally in a public place where it is quite possible that he or his friends or family might see your message. The messages posted here might be electronic, but the people who read them aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
Beyond the five chapters, I can't let out more of the book before the official release on 2 January. However, for those who would like to give autographed copies of Shadow of the Hegemon as Christmas gifts or simply have a copy signed for themselves, at http://www.hatrack.com we will be giving away sticky-backed bookplates printed nicely with the title and color scheme of Shadow of the Hegemon. Those who send in a self-addressed stamped business envelope, along with the names of the persons to whom bookplates should be inscribed, can receive up to three autographed and personalized bookplates for free. That is, until we run out of the thousand that we printed up. The address to which you should send the SASE is: Hegemon PO Box 18184 Greensboro NC 27419-8184. - Orson Scott Card
The reason I refused to consider animation was that, despite the passions of those who love animation, until recently I had never seen animation that could express human emotion at all. Stories that are event-driven work well in animation, but character-driven stories don't - a fact well known in the industry, even if animation fans often don't understand it.
However, there recently has been one animated film that finally broke the "character barrier": Iron Giant. Genuinely witty writing was joined with art that actually made the faces expressive and brought animation to a point where at least a few nuances of expression could be shown. Maybe this was achievable all along, but the point is, few tried. So, with the right team, an animated Ender's Game might be do-able.
Right now, though, we remain committed to the live-action version.
- Orson Scott Card
There's a crucial distinction here that you seem to have missed. You spend all day looking at a computer screen and it's not moring at all, you say. But that's because you're looking at a screen and interacting with the programs running on the computer attached to it. How exciting would it be for someone ELSE to watch you, hour after hour, looking at that screen? No matter how fascinating you are as a human being, watching somebody else type and mouse around with a computer is excruciatingly dull on film.
And considering how low an opinion you have of the book, it's hard to fathom why you would care whether the book was "dumbed down" for Hollywood. Or why you've spent so much time posting within this topic. Surely you could have spent your time talking about something that isn't so painfully "overrated." .
- Orson Scott Card
Man ... if only you had been around to teach me when I was learning how to write. Twenty stage plays, a hundred-plus audioplays, and a half-dozen screenplays into my career, and only NOW does someone tell me that I can't write dialogue.
...
I'm so bummed
- Orson Scott Card
While I'm not sure that extreme violence is quite as essential to the story as the post at the beginning of this thread seems to feel. Nor would I call Ender a "murderer," since his violence is only invoked in life-threatening situations. However, I share the concern that the film not "wimp out." I shudder at the thought of the Spielberg version, in which Ender finds out the truth Just In Time - the way Schindler repents at the end of Spielberg's magnum opus, while the REAL Schindler got away with a box full of diamonds.
The reason the Stilson scene was cut is because movies both magnify and compress. To begin with such an act of violence, when we can't get inside Ender's head to understand his reasoning, would overpower the rest of the story and make it impossible for many viewers to get into the film at all. Film magnifies violence because you can see it and remember it; what I could do to good effect in the book doesn't work at all in the movie. Instead, I replaced it with much milder violence directed at Peter.
However, the crucial scene with Bonzo is intact (though it will be filmed very carefully to avoid nudity), and the double-surprise ending will be preserved, so that the moral implications of Ender's actions remain as in the book. Since these are precisely the issues that matter most to me, you will know that if they are NOT intact, it meant that I lost control of the film after all. Up to now, however, I have managed to hold onto the integrity of the story, at least as I understand it, and am working with producers who are committed to doing the same.
- Orson Scott Card
The script that I wrote this past summer and posted early this fall is a complete rewrite - the old script was thrown out and I went back to the book and started from scratch. The first script was from the adult point of view, trying to make it more fundable by not relying so heavily on child actors. That was a mistake, because the emotional heart of the story is the relationships among the children. So the first strategy was tossed, and this script is absolutely from the children's point of view. Works a lot better now.
I wish I could post the whole thing, because there are some cool surprises that I wish I could have included in a new edition of Ender's Game. But what the new script definitely is NOT is "essentially the same" as the previous one. And the reaction of Hollywood makes that clear - this script is working, and it's now only a matter of time, I think, before we get the package put together and the film under way.
- Orson Scott Card
All full-length novels are too long for the screen, unless they've been seriously padded with extraneous writing. However, while length forced me to cut SOMETHING, I chose to cut the Peter&ValentineTakeOverTheWorld subplot because it is completely unfilmable - just a couple of kids typing - and hard to make believable without being able to use the novelist's tool of getting inside the characters' heads.
As to Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, they are all unfilmable in that they absolutely depend on knowing what characters and thinking and feeling from the inside. Most of what matters can't be visualized. So a film version of Speaker, for instance, would be a bunch of talking heads interrupted occasionally by unwatchable cruelty. Who wants a movie of that? Not me!
Most of my novels are unfilmable, except those written with film in mind (Homebody, Treasure Box, Ender's Shadow, Enchantment). A few older works would do well on screen (Treason, Wyrms, Hart's Hope) and we're exploring a film version of the Alvin Maker books. We're even attempting a version of Pastwatch - though fitting THAT into two hours is pretty hard, especially given how much has to be explained.
Print science fiction, at its best, is rarely translatable to film. Which is why film science fiction is rarely as "good" as the best print science fiction, and why sci-fi films so often focus on action. The costs of science fiction filming are so high that sci-fi films must appeal to a large audience in order to recoup the investment. When a sci-fi film can be done for much less - check out the astonishingly creative and clever "Being John Malkovich" for an example - then it can explore the much greater possibilities that are routinely exploited in written science fiction.
- Orson Scott Card
"Formics" did not occur in Ender's Game. But as I sat with Lynn Hendee, one of the producing partners on Ender's Game, watching Starship Troopers in order to see how much damage that film was going to do to Ender's Game, we realized that it had the potential to hurt us in only one way: If we used the term "buggers," someone might think of "bugs" and remember the ludicrous "brain bug" scene in S-Troop and start laughing uncontrollably at an inappropriate moment in Ender's Game. So we changed the name in the script, and I "previewed" the name change in Ender's Shadow. The look of the buggers will also be changed - insectoid in general body structure, but radically different from the aliens in S-Troop.
...
Apart from that, the only thing we discovered in watching S-Troop is how deeply dumb Hollywood filmmakers can sometimes be. Here you have a film whose storyline is so lame that only a twelve-year-old could like it enough to see it twice - and then you put in a couple of gratuitous breast shots so the film has an R and those twelve-year-olds can't see it in the theaters! Needless to say, those of us making Ender's Game will make very sure that it has a rating that will allow its ENTIRE audience to attend
- Orson Scott Card
"That little brat"? I've met Jake, and he's an exuberant, decent, unspoiled, extremely bright, very talented young man. I wonder why you would make such a personal comment about a child you haven't met.
Maybe the reason you didn't enjoy his performance in Fantum Mennis was that the writing was so awful. There IS no actor who could have made those lines good. Given the right script and the right director, Jake can be astonishingly good.
However, no one has been cast because there is no director in place and no studio yet funding the film. By the time that happens, Jake will probably be too old to play the part. The kid from Sixth Sense already is too old.
But however the casting turns out, Jake Lloyd is a human being who has done nothing to harm you and does not deserve to be attacked personally in a public place where it is quite possible that he or his friends or family might see your message. The messages posted here might be electronic, but the people who read them aren't.
- Orson Scott Card