Kevin's Watch

We all here want a TC Movie, I feel that is a given. We are all resigned to it never happening. That sucks. I have often said if I had millions of $$ I would buy the rights from SRD for the first three books, and finance the movie myself.

So, lets say it happened. Hypothetically. Say I made some money and want to make a movie of Lord Foul's Bane. The right way. explicitly true to the story line and content, even the rape. especially the rape and its consequences. true to the emotions it invokes in us, which is why we are all here at KW.

What would it take in terms of $ and time? Could we, members of Kevins Watch, pool our talents, devotions, fanaticism, and motivations to pull off the movie as we would want to see it? And have it be enough of a success to finance the next 2?

I feel there is enough talent here at KW to come up with a screenplay, story line consultants, actors and extras, set builders, grips, lighting techs, costume designers, programmers, caterers, etc. We could do a lot of it. But not all.

We would need to :

1. Buy the movie rights from SRD.
2. editor for the screenplay (the right way, strict to the book)
3. find some actors -- unknown but well cast
4. scout locations
5. get professional camera work
6. professional editing
7. a musical score
8. A Director!

SO, the (hypothentical) questions are:

1. would you be willing to devote your time and skill in exchange for some fraction of film profits, input to the film, and mention in the credits.

2. How much hard cash money would we actually need to pull this off?

3. Could it succeed in the Box Office if it was explicitly true to the original storyline?



My answers:

1. absolutely.
2. $ 4 million
3. Yes.

Good to see you here, Iq!

My answers:

1. Absolutely.
2. $100 million
3. No.

1) Yes! Obviously I'll write the score :)
2) 100 million seems a lot. I guess we're used to the budgets for this sort of thing being utterly enormous these days, but that said I'm sure it's easier to spend that much than we'd think, even just on LFB. (4 million is definitely too low though!)
3) Not for the "usual" definition of "succeed", no. Being true to the source and being commercially successful are mutually exclusive, I'd say, as much as we'd all like to see it.

Generally speaking I think the mini-series is a better format for this sort of adaptation (assuming one has a proper budget) since it's impossible to sensibly fit something novel-length into a film, even a very long one. Game of Thrones works very well this way though the novels are, perhaps, written in a way that makes it especially suitable to that format. But while some might argue that GoT has revealed that there's a huge audience for a grittier and more uncompromising sort of fantasy on the screen, it's pretty much a melodramatic and rather flashy soap-opera type experience compared to what Covenant would be. (And I say that as a big fan of the books and series.) Ramble, ramble.

1. if I'm able to provide something useful - perhaps if the score has a song or a few - maybe I could try singing, perhaps voicing some character

2. depends on the result aimed at - from about a million to hundreds of millions - and there's also the variant to do it more or less on volunteer basis by fan hands, pretty much like FBH

3. very unlikely, though there should be some amount of people sick and tired of empty and hollow blockbusters, perhaps if the information could be spread well

A good thought on mini-series, that can allow to cut out less

iQuestor wrote: We would need to :

1. Buy the movie rights from SRD.
2. editor for the screenplay (the right way, strict to the book)
3. find some actors -- unknown but well cast
4. scout locations
5. get professional camera work
6. professional editing
7. a musical score
8. A Director!

Add:
9. CGI work, with computer/database farm
10. Makeup
11. Prosthetics
12. Costumes
13. Set Construction
14. Miniature Construction.
15. Weapons and Armor Construction
16. Stunt doubles
17. Small and large scale doubles
18. Transportation and Logisitics
19. Marketing

"The film [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe] cost $150 million to make and Disney spent another $50 million on promotion."

I think that's a fair basis from which to begin.

Umm see/download/rent Iron Sky and observe what can be achieved with fan-funding and an overall budget of 7,5M euros.

Yet with present the state of initiative, creativity, and general responsiveness regarding the actual novels on this board, highly unlikely. Unless the Tank of Kevin's Political Watch suddenly gets interested in something else than current American events.

Frostheart wrote: Unless the Tank of Kevin's Political Watch suddenly gets interested in something else than current American events.

That might not be so hard...many of the most active tankers are [or were] also among the most active of SRD posters...especially if you go back to the first 6, before the LC's divide.

Funding doesn't HAVE to be huge, but it makes things easier especially since Chron's are in a genre that basically expects very pricey production values/techniques...maybe someone with great social-media skills could do a mega-kickstarter-like fundraising job.
Or could just get lucky, there are occasional films in all the genres that succeed by cutting against whatever the current dominant trend happens to be.

Series has always been the best bet for getting everything in/being true to text.

I maybe should mention my wife is a costume/makeup person by profession...though getting her to volunteer would be problematic since I haven't managed to even get her UP TO the rape scene, let alone past it.

Would be easier to start with a short animation where someone composes the background music. And in the usual case, witness the finished piece and/or progress feedback thread collecting lichen at the bottom of some rarely glanced-at forum.

As long as the majority of the audience neglects even the infrequent freebies on the basis of "I don't look", "It's boring", etc., significant volunteering won't happen.

A Large part of the $100 - $150 Million per movie is spent on the Actors and Director, I believe. Really big Stars can bite a $25 Million chunk outta yor budget, before you have a chance to spend a dime anywhere else, and I don't know what Directors get paid. So, yea, unknown actors and Director could be quite the Cost saver, but, of course increases the risk. Zombie movies or Underworld or something like that smaller than "Summer Tentpole Blockbuters" can have really good effects and cost under $50 Million

I seriously doubt a Theatrical Film Series true to the books could be financially sucessful. In order for it to be Financially successful, I think many of us wouldn't be satisfied with it.

However, considering what Games of Thrones and True Blood can do on Showtime and HBO, I see no reason, a "True to the Book" Series/Mini-Series, couldn't be successful on Pay Cable, or even possibly AMC, considering what The Walking Dead brings us.

I was obviously well off my mark on $4M. wishful thinking.


What I want to know is, WHY do you think it would have to deviate from the books in order to have Mass Appeal? Is it that TC is too dark?

I think it would be a refreshing change to have a series like this. of course i am a huge TC fan, so what can I say? Take the new Battlestar Galactica: that was dark as hell for 4.5 seasons. it never let up. But it was very popular.

You spend more than $50 Million on a movie, and it has to be an Adventure/Effects bonanza (In the Corporate Bean Counter Head)

So, straight off, you've got to accept that. So much of the 1st Chrons is Internalized, that's tough enough to put on screen.

Big books, lots would be cut, and Action/Effects would be most likely to make the cut (though, fortunately, alot of the words are thorough descriptions, so that means you can show more pages quicker than expected)

I just think, for us to explore all the things we would want to explore in Visual media, it lends itself better to the character development allowed in the Long Form of TV Series/Mini-Series.

A 6 Episode Season for each Book (Unless you'd prefer the extra 4 - 6 episodes to make a full Season), could be very cool on a Pay Cable channel, ala Game of Thrones

Personally, I'd be willing to settle for a mini-series, one per book, with relatively modest production values, as long as the story was done well.

I think the timing is right (though admittedly any contributions from myself towards the proposed $100 million+ budget will, by necessity, be marginal); look at the success of Breaking Bad, the Sopranos; people are more open than ever in accepting flawed, complex characters on television screens these days.

I recently saw a pretty underwhelming local television adaptation here in Australia of two of the 'Jack Irish' books written by one of my favourite writer's, Peter Temple.
Each of his first two Jack Irish books were afforded a two-hour 'telemovie', and there simply wasn't enough time to make a coherent story from Temple's deceptively complex books; there was a lot a awkward exposition and unclear motivations.
The point being; to tell the story which in any way does justice to the source material, it will take time; shoe-horning Lord Foul's Bane into a 150-minute film would most likely result in a product which would appear sacrilegious to any true Covenant fan.

I think that Dune is a great example of a book that is hard to translate to a move because so much of the plot is internal to characters. Books can tell, but movies need to show. It's easier to show action, but it's harder to show an internal dilemma.

So movies can need to be different from books for more reasons than return on the dollar. There are these media-based issues as well.

I don't think the Chronicles is quite as bad as Dune. If anything, Donaldson is expert in making internal conflicts manifested in action. Think of the Covenant/Atiaran/Triock scene in the river. Think of Covenant summoning the Ranyhyn. Think of Covenant trying to throw himself from the side of Mount Thunder. So I don't think that's a direct problem.

I think the problem is secondary to that - whatever you cut, you cut the action that shows the internal conflict.

Other media-based issues have to do with physical vs intellectual perception. For example, reading about leprosy is one thing, but seeing leprosy is quite another thing. There's no intellectual detachment possible when you're looking at festering sores and mutilated people. The rape scene falls into the same category. It's a lot easier to maintain caring for a character when you read about his rape crime than when you see his rape crime played out before you. Now, there are movies that indulge in these things, but you may not want that kind of movie.

And I think another category of issue that requires changes from book to film is pacing.

WF, as usual, very insightful.

Personally, I would want a strict adherence to the book. I think we here at the watch love TC because he pulls no punches. Covenant has to be the most unloveable and unsympathizeable protagonist I have ever encountered in a book. But I kept reading. Honestly I think the first read of LFB I read just to see how SRD was going to try and make me sympathise with covenant. I am not sure I ever did.

But the book is emotionally exhausting, but at the same time brutally honest. I would hope it would be a refreshing change from the most of the crap thats on film now.

For people who like their heros nice and unambiguously good, and their endings neat and clean, LFB as a movie would probably not even be fathomable. I usually describe TC as "Imagine Lord Of The Rings Where all the Hobbits and Elves are slaughtered in front of you, and the Wizard is a real unloveable bastard who is powerful but can't use his magic."

But I still want to see the movie made, exactly as written.

I personally think the problem with translating this to a movie resides in the fact that the beauty of the Chronicles is in the language. It's not that so much of it is internal--and it is--but that even the externalizations aren't as visual as they are emotional. This isn't merely my opinion, it's SRD's own description of his style. I think for Donaldson, more so than for many other writers, the sense of magic lies in how our minds translate emotive language into quasi-visual details. Granted, some form of this translation is a basic feature of all verbal acts of story-telling, but Donaldson achieves this on a more figurative and surreal level by refraining from literal description and instead giving impressions in terms of the characters' emotional reaction to what they're seeing. Having those vistas literally translated into definitive images would undermine this magic, this sense of transcendence and surreality.

Maybe in the hands of the right director, some kind of facsimile of this surreality could be achieved. But it's going to take more than a good script and some CGI. It's going to take a truly visionary director. Someone like Tim Burton (but not him).

If this was done poorly, I think it would damage rather than help Donaldson's legacy. It might make him some money, but it would cheapen the very things we love about the Chronicles.

Maybe the way to go is animation. Think about the work of Miyazaki - look at "Spirited Away" or "Howl's Moving Castle" or "Grave of the Fireflies". There's someone who, I think, both would "get" the Covenant books, and is capable of capturing the essence of them and putting it on film.

It can be done..

But more like 200 mill..
(the 1st movie is always more expensive then the next movie/books.)

The CGI would not have to stand out in as much as that it make the story and the theurgys seem natural.

The Bloodguard fighting styles would have to be enhanced as not to look like the gunfu or the matrix type fights but could incorporate a limited-like effect.

This, the location and Cinematography would take alot of the funds.
And definetly I would stress staying with the book as the strict as possible..

Cast unknown actors and make them famous.
(some long term contracts if it's sucessful enough to make 13 movies (or more)

starkllr wrote:Maybe the way to go is animation. Think about the work of Miyazaki - look at "Spirited Away" or "Howl's Moving Castle" or "Grave of the Fireflies". There's someone who, I think, both would "get" the Covenant books, and is capable of capturing the essence of them and putting it on film.

Hahaha, I can already conceive a mental image of a huge, huggable Foamy grinning like Totoro. XD Nah, he'd need a bit more ruggedness. However, that style would portray such emotive, eldtrich scenes like the dance of the wraiths in an excellent manner.

(Huge Miyazaki fan here.)

I can't see how the film could be made without the rape seen but I also can't see how it could possibly be published with it.

Apart from that Zarathustra said it all:

I personally think the problem with translating this to a movie resides in the fact that the beauty of the Chronicles is in the language. It's not that so much of it is internal--and it is--but that even the exernalizations aren't as visual as they are emotional.

I completely agree on this. Just think about it, we all know what Foamfollwer is like but we don't all agree on what he looks like. I haven't seen a picture of any SRD character yet that convinced me (though I appreciate the artistic talent of those who try to display them).

Or take Hile Troy - some think he's Afro-American, some don't. I'm sure that whatever a movie will look like a lot of readers (and active Watchers) won't be satisfied.