The Soundtrack

Nathan Spears · 10 Apr 2007, 18:30 · from 2007-April.txt.gz

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From: spearofsolomon at yahoo.com (Nathan Spears)
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:30:25 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) The Soundtrack
Message-ID: <738092.87533.qm at web54406.mail.yahoo.com>

There Are Doors could be a great movie - the novel is driven mostly by action and dialogue, rather than atmospheric prose, philosophizing, or textual games.  The themes in There Are Doors also translate well to screen - love, loss, longing, beautiful women, etc.

Free Live Free for similar reasons.  There are riddles in Free Live Free, but they stem from the narrative rather than the medium.

As an aside - has anyone ever thought about the possibilities of creating a movie from an excerpt of a novel?  For instance, while I was watching the recent Lord of the Rings movies, I found myself wishing that they would have chosen one or two scenes from the book and done them justice, rather than consolidating and reducing quality of the work as a whole to what ended up on film.  The Battle of the Pelennor Fields (and it's aftermath), for example, could have been a fine movie in its own right, complete with all the themes from LotR in microcosm.  Or a "chase movie" with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas pursuing the orcs that abducted Merry and Pippin, with long takes of the chase the way that Rabbit Proof Fence drew out the journey through the outback.

In my opinion this would have been preferable - the movie can be a self-contained story in its own right, satisfying people who have not read the books.  True fans of the books who know that, unless the story is serialized the way HBO is doing for Martin's A Game of Thrones, it won't be adapted properly, should also be happy to see part of the book filmed "correctly."

Anyway, if this sort of thing were possible I think the Book of the New Sun could provide some fantastic movies.  Large portions of the book are already visually dancing in my mind anyway . . .

----- Original Message ----
From: Daniel D Jones <ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:55:08 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) The Soundtrack

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.

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