Why can't Hollywood make a good movie out of great science fiction? Hollywood is incompetent. And they have respect for writing last of all.
Posted on 07/20/2004 9:43:06 AM PDT by jalisco555
Isaac Asimov was the steak-and-buffet restaurant of American authors: What he lacked in quality, he made up for in volume. If you didn't like what he was serving, you could wait a few minutes for him to bring out something else. By the time he died in 1992, at the age of 72, Asimov had published more than 470 books, ranging from science-fiction classics to annotated guides of great literature to limerick collections to The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, a defense and celebration of lechery. "His first 100 books took him 237 months, or almost 20 years, until October 1969, to write," his New York Times obituary observed. "His second 100, a milestone he reached in March 1979, took 113 months, or about 9 ½ years—a rate of more than 10 books a year. His third 100 took only 69 months, until December 1984, or less than 6 years." By the end, Asimov achieved the Grand Slam of book writing, turning out at least one volume for each of the 10 classifications in the Dewey Decimal System.
The thread that connected this prodigious output was Asimov's role as a teacher, "the greatest explainer of the age," as Carl Sagan called him. Whether the subject was science, Shakespeare, or the Bible, Asimov was a popularizer who wrote with clarity and concision. Even in his science fiction, the work for which he will be most remembered, Asimov was as much an explainer as a storyteller, an advocate for science and reason over mysticism. In fact, the rap on Asimov the fiction writer is that his stories are too simple, too obvious, too easy to be the stuff of great literature. In Wired, the science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow recently described Asimov's work as "proto-fiction … from a time before the field shed its gills and developed lungs, feet, and believable characters." True. But if Asimov is so easy, why do so many people—including Alex Proyas, the director of I, Robot, and the movie's screenwriters, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Vintar—keep getting him so wrong?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
What?!? Hollywood butchers up another great novel? I'm shocked, just shocked.
I should have mentioned my "Other favorite" which I understand was his also - "The Last Question" also in the collection "Nine Tomorrows". By the way, many times I have offered the short story "The Feeling of Power" to teachers that advocate letting young children use calculators.
Some commercial, professional writers write with a possible movie in mind. They deliberately put intensely movielike passages in their work so that a movie would be suggested and movie rights would be encouraged. Those writers could produce a novel or a screenplay equally well fromn the same material.
I hope they have the smarts not to put the movie against Star Wars.. As for no aliens that was the only part I did not like. I can't wait for the movie to come out.
Me too, and I like Asimov. I found most of the I Robot stories to be more along the lines of thought exercises rather than compelling narratives.
Philip K. Dick is a name that comes up a lot more often in Hollywood films lately. Do they get him right?
If they do keep diverging from the writers, is that necessarily a bad thing? Is it avoidable? So many of the books and stories were written 30 or 40 years ago for a very distinct readership that had its own focus that a wider audience doesn't share.
Film can do a lot more than the old pulp fiction could. Dick's stories, for example, only provide a skeleton or scaffolding that writers and directors have to fill in or build on somehow. While filmmakers may take wrong turns, isn't it inevitable that their product will be different from the writers'?
Was "Feeling of Power" the one where they discovered the new science of "Graphitics"?
Told you it had nothing to do with the book!
;-)
bicentential man got far to mucked up with PC. I want to see this but I have no illusion about what I am going to see.
It may be an E ticket but it will still just be a ride.
I read some of his stuff in the 50s and 60s when sci-fi was a fringe area of literature and there were few writers, most of them bad. Asimov was a gigantic EGO who delighted in insulting his audience at speeches while telling them how stupid they were. He had only contempt for most people and he didn't try to disguise it. He was a "literary giant" because, in a desert populated by pigmies, it's easy to look tall.
Once scifi took off in the 60s and 70s his stuff quickly went out of style as far better writers and thinkers came into view. Reading his stuff now is like trying to listen to music with your ears full of mucus; it's difficult, nasty, and not worth the effort.
He is missed principally by middle-class Kerry supporters.
Well, I think the Sci Fi and Fantasy are largely 2 genre's that haven't had many home runs. Mainly because most of it was B movie attempts, or simplisticly written and cheaply produced.
THere are highlights in both Genre's but by and large most films of the genre's have sucked.
IF I had to pic a Fantasy Trilogy to take the screen it would be without a doubt "DragonLance Chronicles".... Followed by "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" by Tad Williams.
"based on the front cover of the book with the same name"
what a great, and deserved, slam!
Did just that, and you are correct; I can hardly get my friends to return them!
DTOM
Thanks!
When I was ten, my father started giving me Heinlein novels to read. I've been hooked on SF ever since. I was so excited when I heard a movie of Starship Troopers was coming out (too young and dumb to realize how hard it would be to make a decent movie of it)... I've never forgiven the existance of that film.
I understand someone's planning to make "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" into a movie. They could get that right! Although the most excellent sequence at the beginning, where Kip discovers how bad his education has been and starts teaching himself things, probably won't translate too well to film.
Conversely, today's movie producers are a bunch of low-IQ buffoons who wouldn't know how to translate a good story if their lives depended upon it. Who honestly thinks Forbidden Planet or even Casablanca could be made today?
There was a movie version of Nightfall? I loved that story.
Huh? You're being sarcastic, aren't you? Starship Troopers, the movie, was an abomination that had little in common with the novel, and got the background politics screwed up beyond all recognition.
The only thing I can think would make you say such a thing is if you'd only read a novelization of the screenplay. They did the same thing with Little Women believe it or not.
Who's to say how long it will be before our first contact? I found the idea of basing the series before that occured to be intriguing, mainly because no one's really done it before.
Why can't Hollywood make a good movie out of great science fiction? Hollywood is incompetent. And they have respect for writing last of all.
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