Oh.

Oh dear.

Such a bad idea.

I hope they have a gay R2D2 with an attitude.

Aw, jeez. This'll be worse than the De Laurentiis Dune or the appalling Nightflyers. I hope it's not as bad as the travesty that got made of Varley's Millennium, though.

Did you hear that Miyazaki bought the rights to Earthsea? After Howl's I have mixed feelings about this. But, even if the result isn't really Earthsea, it'll most likely be a fine and entertaining film. Unlike, say, Doom.

But what color is Ged?

Oh my.

And I like that book so...

I'm sayin'.

oh, jesus flying christ, they're going to get Karl Urban to star, aren't they?

[shoots self]
[misses]
[shoots self again]

*goes into such slow motion that his heart blissfully just stops and he dies*

Me, for example. Karl=yum!

But yeah. Doom? *shudders*

Me too.

Plot? Dialog? Who's listening?

*fans self*

Does anybody watch Sci-Fi original movies hoping they'll actually be good?

I know I won't be crying...

Well, they do have those Twilight Zone marathons.

Other than that, fuck 'em.

Other than Battlestar? Nope. And we spend the BSG commercial breaks -- when we're not fast-forwarding through -- laughing our asses off at the "SciFi Original Movie! (tm)" previews.

Doctor Who. The new Doctor Who is magnificent, easily Buffy-level.

I'm scared. Make the evil stop. Can't SciFi Channel just stick to making original crappy movies that have no basis in the classics?

"Hollywood didn't ruin my books. Here they are." James M. Cain, pointing to his shelves.

Don't judge a book by its movie. Sigh.

Ugh.

I met a scriptwriter/special effects guy years ago who was working on an adaptation of Stars. He'd been at it for ages and said it was the most difficult work he'd ever done (and this, after designing effects for Jurassic Park among other things.) I got the sense he felt that in the end it was most likely unadaptable, but he loved the book so much he had to try. (And now I have the sinking feeling he's definitely not going to be involved in this project. Nope, they'll probably pawn it off to some hack like Akiva Goldsman. ::shudder::)

And you're expecting anything else but tears from anything made for the Skiffy Channel?

My favorite comment about movie rights comes from comic book writer Steve Niles, on the rights to his Walking Dead books having been sold. It was something to the tune of, "I don't expect much from it, but it did pay off my student loans."

(To be fair, I can't get the article to come up, and the author in question might have paid off their student loans long ago.)

nnnnoooooooooooooooo!!!!!

Sorry, they need someone who's both a visual genius and dedicated to the spirit of the book in order to adapt this particular story successfully.

There's no one who could handle it right now, unless they somehow ressurect David Lean.

I'm crying already.

I'll provide the tears, if you'd like. They'll be sincere, too. The only silver lining I can think of: Bester's pageturning prose would actually translate pretty well to a movie format.

Whew! It's been years since I read that book, so my recall may be a bit faulty. My objection isn't that they want to give it the SciFi treatment (better than ya monster of the week: Bats, for instance; fercrissake!). But let's call a book the fruit and the adaptation a jam. How to best retain the flavor while boiling down the story and condensing the experience? Tricky. The psychodrama with Gully Foyle as Mr Fourmyle was, um, kind of weird even in the book. They'll need to keep the asteroid-dwelling primitives as a plot point, at least. Then there's the whole problem of Gully Foyle not being the most sympathetic character...
Hope it plays as well on screen as it did in my head.