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adiva_calandia*blink* What? When did it become Saturday?
*so, so out of it*
We're in a perfectly lovely '50s style motel in Salina, KA (is it KA or KS?), made especially lovely by its AC. *luxuriates* Salina seems like a typical small town -- although the guy holding a cross on the "Welcome to Salina!" sign at the edge of town was worth a double-take.
As for driving through Kansas . . .![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
madbonnycaptain? I hope you won't take it as an insult to your home state that I slept through most of it, when I wasn't actually driving. When I was driving, though, I was moderately freaked out. Kansas is flat, and the freeway is straight, and you'd think it would be an easy drive -- but because it's so flat, there's nothing to cut down on the wind. And while that might not be a problem in a regular car? In a 19-foot-long, 8'4"-high RV, those winds get scary.
*sigh* And my computer still hates me.
Mainly because I've been mainlining WoT (which is really probably bad for me, and my blood pressure, cough cough Nynaeve and Elayne cough), I've spent some time considering the idea of a WoT movie -- dream casting and the like. I'm sure I'm not the first fan who's come up with the thought.
There's two things about WoT, though, that bear keeping in mind when considering screen adaptation. First: It wouldn't work as a movie. Period. There is no way you could cram the sheer amount of information, political machinations, and plot involved in every book into even a three-hour-long movie, not without taking an axe a la Loial's to the text. Which, okay, some might say would not be a bad thing. You can't fit all those long involved interior monologues of Rand's into a scene without extensive and clumsy voice-overing or similar, so why not cut them, right?
Here I pause and listen to the hollowing of thousands of die-hard fans at the very thought.
Of course, if you cut out all the narrative recapping, not to mention the detailed descriptions of place and dress (more on those in a minute), you could probably trim each book by a good hundred pages, at least, but the point stands. The number of characters and sub-plots makes the series impractical for movies.
However, that doesn't make it impractical for screen entirely. It could do very well as a TV show. Today's TV audiences, as has been pointed out before by people paying more attention than I am, are perfectly capable of watching and enjoying shows with hugely complicated cast dynamics and storylines: I give you Lost as the prime example of this, but other ensemble shows like Heroes are good examples, too.
In fact, some aspects of the WoT books make them fairly well set up for an episodic format: each chapter, or couple of chapters, focuses on events from a different primary POV; and plot points tend to split up into a few main groups of characters (right now, in Crown of Swords, we have Egwene and the Aes Sedai, Nynaeve, Elayne, Mat, and hangers-on, and Rand and Min. There are others, of course, like the Whitecloaks or the Forsaken, but those are the three main ones). If each book were a season of TV, things might work out nicely.
Here's the second consideration, which makes it ideal for adaptation: the highly visual nature of the books. Complain all you want about the ridiculous amount of page-time RJ puts into his characters' costumes -- I sure will -- but it makes imagining what's going on really, really easy. Even his characters are fairly easy for me to picture, which is no small feat, because he takes equal time to emphasive the physical features. I can never keep a firm picture in my head of how Harry Potter et al look, even with their movie counterparts to picture, but I've got a very nice image of Annoura Sedai, who's fairly minor, not to mention Min and Mat and Egwene and Faile and . . . You get the idea. (I have trouble with the Aiel 'cause I can never remember who's got what hair color, but that's a another story. Except Sulin. *hugs her*) Designing costumes and sets, casting actors, would all be relatively easy, because RJ has laid out such a precise framework for it.
The visual aspect makes me hesitate over pushing the TV adaptation idea, though. WoT is an epic -- duh -- and just like the plot, the scenery is writ large, practically demanding those swooping helicopter shots ofNew Zealand countryside that we got used to in Lord of the Rings. I have trouble imagining a TV show emulating that. But then again, I don't watch much TV -- maybe I just haven't seen the right show yet.
After writing all that (holy crap this was way longer than I expected), there's one medium that springs to mind that could handle both considerations: the comic book. That's already been done with WoT, of course -- they adapted New Spring, right? -- with I have no idea what degree of success.
It seems like only a matter of time, in today's current "OMG CASH IN ON LOTR AND HP AND MAKE EPIC FANTASY MOVIES" climate in Hollywood, that someone'll pitch WoT. And if it gets made? I'll bet the price of the movie tickets of anyone who wants to see it with me that it'll be as much a butchering of the text as Dark is Rising, unless they do something unexpectedly intelligent and only do New Spring, which I'm guessing stands alone reasonably well.
. . . You know, I swear I didn't sit down to write an essay that long. I was just gonna babble about dream casting and "ALAN CUMMING AS PADAN FAIN Y/N?!" and stuff.
ETA: Speaking of dream casting -- a quick Google reveals this list. Some of the choices make me nod approvingly; most of the Aiel casting choices make me blink. Coloring, people! It's important! [/snark]
*so, so out of it*
We're in a perfectly lovely '50s style motel in Salina, KA (is it KA or KS?), made especially lovely by its AC. *luxuriates* Salina seems like a typical small town -- although the guy holding a cross on the "Welcome to Salina!" sign at the edge of town was worth a double-take.
As for driving through Kansas . . .
madbonnycaptain? I hope you won't take it as an insult to your home state that I slept through most of it, when I wasn't actually driving. When I was driving, though, I was moderately freaked out. Kansas is flat, and the freeway is straight, and you'd think it would be an easy drive -- but because it's so flat, there's nothing to cut down on the wind. And while that might not be a problem in a regular car? In a 19-foot-long, 8'4"-high RV, those winds get scary.*sigh* And my computer still hates me.
Mainly because I've been mainlining WoT (which is really probably bad for me, and my blood pressure, cough cough Nynaeve and Elayne cough), I've spent some time considering the idea of a WoT movie -- dream casting and the like. I'm sure I'm not the first fan who's come up with the thought.
There's two things about WoT, though, that bear keeping in mind when considering screen adaptation. First: It wouldn't work as a movie. Period. There is no way you could cram the sheer amount of information, political machinations, and plot involved in every book into even a three-hour-long movie, not without taking an axe a la Loial's to the text. Which, okay, some might say would not be a bad thing. You can't fit all those long involved interior monologues of Rand's into a scene without extensive and clumsy voice-overing or similar, so why not cut them, right?
Here I pause and listen to the hollowing of thousands of die-hard fans at the very thought.
Of course, if you cut out all the narrative recapping, not to mention the detailed descriptions of place and dress (more on those in a minute), you could probably trim each book by a good hundred pages, at least, but the point stands. The number of characters and sub-plots makes the series impractical for movies.
However, that doesn't make it impractical for screen entirely. It could do very well as a TV show. Today's TV audiences, as has been pointed out before by people paying more attention than I am, are perfectly capable of watching and enjoying shows with hugely complicated cast dynamics and storylines: I give you Lost as the prime example of this, but other ensemble shows like Heroes are good examples, too.
In fact, some aspects of the WoT books make them fairly well set up for an episodic format: each chapter, or couple of chapters, focuses on events from a different primary POV; and plot points tend to split up into a few main groups of characters (right now, in Crown of Swords, we have Egwene and the Aes Sedai, Nynaeve, Elayne, Mat, and hangers-on, and Rand and Min. There are others, of course, like the Whitecloaks or the Forsaken, but those are the three main ones). If each book were a season of TV, things might work out nicely.
Here's the second consideration, which makes it ideal for adaptation: the highly visual nature of the books. Complain all you want about the ridiculous amount of page-time RJ puts into his characters' costumes -- I sure will -- but it makes imagining what's going on really, really easy. Even his characters are fairly easy for me to picture, which is no small feat, because he takes equal time to emphasive the physical features. I can never keep a firm picture in my head of how Harry Potter et al look, even with their movie counterparts to picture, but I've got a very nice image of Annoura Sedai, who's fairly minor, not to mention Min and Mat and Egwene and Faile and . . . You get the idea. (I have trouble with the Aiel 'cause I can never remember who's got what hair color, but that's a another story. Except Sulin. *hugs her*) Designing costumes and sets, casting actors, would all be relatively easy, because RJ has laid out such a precise framework for it.
The visual aspect makes me hesitate over pushing the TV adaptation idea, though. WoT is an epic -- duh -- and just like the plot, the scenery is writ large, practically demanding those swooping helicopter shots of
After writing all that (holy crap this was way longer than I expected), there's one medium that springs to mind that could handle both considerations: the comic book. That's already been done with WoT, of course -- they adapted New Spring, right? -- with I have no idea what degree of success.
It seems like only a matter of time, in today's current "OMG CASH IN ON LOTR AND HP AND MAKE EPIC FANTASY MOVIES" climate in Hollywood, that someone'll pitch WoT. And if it gets made? I'll bet the price of the movie tickets of anyone who wants to see it with me that it'll be as much a butchering of the text as Dark is Rising, unless they do something unexpectedly intelligent and only do New Spring, which I'm guessing stands alone reasonably well.
. . . You know, I swear I didn't sit down to write an essay that long. I was just gonna babble about dream casting and "ALAN CUMMING AS PADAN FAIN Y/N?!" and stuff.
ETA: Speaking of dream casting -- a quick Google reveals this list. Some of the choices make me nod approvingly; most of the Aiel casting choices make me blink. Coloring, people! It's important! [/snark]
no subject
Date: 2007-08-05 03:21 am (UTC)And, oh, yeah. I trust cable much, much more - for a start, they can actually plan out a certain story to tell from beginning to end without as much pressure about pushing the number of seasons, or adding wacky guest stars, or anything. Which when you're adapting a book series is especially important.