For years I have held to the theory that the trouble with sf films is that the people in charge of making them in the studios are, at the highest level, demented little animals. That would explain it all. However I am no longer quite as sure of this as I was, since my dearly beloved daughter-in-law, as a senior vice president of one of the biggest organizations, says it certainly isn’t true of her own bunch. She even says that, in many years of dealing with executives at other outfits, she has encountered several who are hardly demented at all, and, as I know that Meg would never lie to me, my theory must be wrong.
Still. . . . Well, let’s look at the record.
In the task of turning my written words into performable scripts there has been one recurring problem. (With English-language producers, I mean. With Europeans — German, Spanish and Italian — there have been other problems, but at least they got something made.)
There are three books of mine — rather two of mine, Gateway
and Man Plus
, and one that was half mine and half Cyril Kornbluth’s, The Space Merchants
— that have struck any number of Hollywood people as good bets for dramatization. So they have repeatedly ponied up money for option or purchase — over the years a not negligible sum — and then tried to find someone to write a script.
This is where every one of these ventures has come to grief. They’ve never been able to find a writer who could figure out a way of translating the novel into a shootable script. In the process they have given employment to quite a few scriptwriters all over the world, at a cost of quite a few dollars apiece — apparently totaling, in a single case, close to a million — but the one person they have never once asked if he had any ideas to solve the problem was the guy who wrote the things in the first place, namely me.
Honestly, now. Is this not pretty close to madness?
I am, of course, not alone in this; approximately 99 out of every 100 people who have sold the rights to a published story to a moviemaker have similar stories to tell. Still, it rankles. Oh, I do not deceive myself that I know more about scriptwriting than a Hollywood pro does. I do know more about those stories than they do, though.
I don’t mean to say that every producer is an imbecile. I can testify that there is, or was, at least one Hollywood producer who knew a good story when he saw it and immediately set about getting it made as a film. His name was Larry Schiller, and the novel was my book Chernobyl
, the story of the nuclear power plant that took out a whole industry when it blew. Larry acquired the rights, lined up financing, developed a script, began casting and arranged with the suddenly independent country of Belarus, which owned a power plant identical with Chernobyl but more prudently managed, to do location shooting there … being careful to stop in Chicago now and then as he passed through to let me know how things were going.
Oh, vision of delight! Everything was going just as one ignorantly dreams. . . .
And then at the last minute, thirty-six hours before principal shooting was to start, one of the pledged backers pulled his money out of the deal, and the whole house of cards irretrievably collapsed.
I regard that as one more symptom of an industry-wide dementia, and it broke my heart. It didn’t help Larry’s any, either, because after that happened he abandoned his career as a big-time motion-picture producer and turned himself into a vastly successful writer of bestselling books. I’m glad for Larry. But I do wish the damn film had got itself made.
Related posts:
Me and the Biz, Part II
Me and the Biz, Part II (continued)
The year is 2079. In the shadow of Mount Vesuvius a virtual reality theme park has been erected for Il Giubelo — the celebration honoring the 2000th anniversary of the volcano’s great eruption. Tens of thousands of tourists from around the world have converged on the site for the occasion. But trouble is brewing in Pompei. . . .
