George R.R. Martin is looking out movie and TV diversifications of books that don’t stay as much as their supply materials.
In a brand new weblog submit, the creator recollects a panel with Neil Gaiman, the creator of the comedian guide sequence Sandman, which Netflix tailored right into a sequence. Gaiman was concerned in growing the Netflix sequence, and though Martin didn’t touch upon the difference, he stated that “very little has changed since” 2022.
“If anything, things have gotten worse,” Martin wrote. “Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by.”
Martin went on to quote well-known authors like Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula Ok. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, and Jane Austen.
“No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it,” he continued. “‘The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own.”
“They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse,” he stated.
Martin notated that “once in a while we do get a really good adaptation of a really good book” and talked about he had come throughout the FX sequence Shogun.
The creator of the House of the Dragon stated he had learn the 1975 guide by James Clavell when it was initially launched. Martin additionally cited the 1980 miniseries adaptation within the Eighties starring Richard Chamberlain “was a landmark” and didn’t really feel the necessity to have a brand new adaptation.
“I am glad they did, though. The new Shogun is superb,” he stated. “Better than Chamberlain’s version, you ask? Hmmm, I don’t know. I have not watched the 1980 miniseries since, well, 1980. That one was great too.”
He continued, “The fascinating thing is that while the old and new versions have some significant differences — the subtitles that make the Japanese dialogue intelligible to English-speaking viewers being the biggest — they are both faithful to the Clavell novel in their own way. I think the author would have been pleased. Both old and new screenwriters did honor to the source material, and gave us terrific adaptations, resisting the impulse to ‘make it their own.’”