The Soundtrack

peter heyneman · 10 Apr 2007, 14:28 · from 2007-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: pheyneman at hotmail.com (peter heyneman)
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:28:28 +0000
Subject: (urth) The Soundtrack
In-Reply-To: <200704100755.08668.ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
Message-ID: <BAY125-F37BA190A476001568B7DA6A2580 at phx.gbl>

I'm rereading the Long Sun now and imagining it as a mini-series for HBO 
with a quirky soundtrack of Jen-Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk and Coco-Rosie 
and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and stuff played on electronic toy 
instruments from the 70s. It relies on narrator/narrative ambiguity less 
than most other of his series and has some cool fight scenes and a love 
story. So there.

--Peter


>From: Daniel D Jones <ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
>Reply-To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>Subject: Re: (urth) The Soundtrack
>Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 06:55:08 -0500
>
>On Monday 09 April 2007 19:14, Mark Lewin wrote:
> > I doubt if if anyone on this list disagrees with me that none of GW's 
>books
> > would make a good film.
> >
> > What ... you do?  Which one?
>
>That depends a great deal on precisely what you mean when you say "...a 
>good
>film."  I think most people would agree that TBOTNS wouldn't _translate_ 
>well
>to film.  It would be impossible to capture a great deal of what makes that
>series work in a visual medium.  However, that's not at all the same thing 
>as
>saying that TBOTNS would not make a good film.  With the correct choice of
>screen writer and director, it could make a good film.  But the film 
>wouldn't
>tell the same story that Wolfe told in his books.  (And, of course, with 
>poor
>choices as writer and director, it could be made into the most God awful 
>pap
>ever to grace the silver screen.)
>
>That being said, I think some of his "lesser" works would translate well to
>film.  I can't think of anything vital in "Pandora" which would be lost in
>film.  Same with "Devil in a Forest."
>
>The events of the Latro series would probably translate well but I'm not 
>sure
>that the same sense of Latro's memory loss could be maintained throughout a
>film as are present in the prose.  Again, they could make a great film but
>I'm not sure that it would tell the same story.
>
>"Fifth Head" is a more interesting proposition.  It would be tricky to pull
>off, particularly the third book, but I think the right writer and director
>could make an absolutely amazing trio of films from that series.
>
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

_________________________________________________________________
Exercise your brain! Try Flexicon. 
http://games.msn.com/en/flexicon/default.htm?icid=flexicon_hmemailtaglineapril07

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net