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A Novel Approach: Books That Should Be Made Into Movies

Written by Erich Wood

January 01, 2008

Erich tries to solve "The book was better" syndrome.

MOVIES: A NOVEL APPROACH By Erich Wood Hi. Welcome to the first of an ongoing series of articles in which I will try to unravel the mystery of why____________(Fill in the Blank book title) hasn't been made into a movie and later I'll look at why ____________(Fill in the Blank book title) hasn't been made correctly with a faithful adaptation into a motion picture.
To begin with, let's talk about ENDERS GAME by Orson Scott Card. If you are one of the 17 people who haven't read the book or the short story, here?s the synopsis from our friends at Amazon.com: Ender Wiggin is a very bright young boy with a powerful skill. One of a group of children bred to be military geniuses and save Earth from an inevitable attack by aliens, known here as "buggers," Ender becomes unbeatable in war games and seems poised to lead Earth to triumph over the buggers. Meanwhile, his brother and sister plot to wrest power from Ender. Twists, surprises and interesting characters elevate this novel into status as a bona fide page-turner. It captured the Nebula and Hugo Awards.

Sounds great, right?
Okay, first we need a script.
We're in luck because the book?s author, Orson Scott Card has written a script. Okay, now we need a studio. According to Mr. Card?s website Warner Brothers is attached.

Great. What's next?

Here's where the fun begins.There are several factors in determining if and when a film is made.
Those factors are: scheduling, budget, director, cast and marketing. According to Mr. Card?s website, the last update to the status of the ENDER movie was March 22, 2006.

Now before we start gathering up pitchforks, lighting torches and booking flights to Warner Brothers Burbank office, let's pause for a minute to consider what it's like on the inside: or, what are the suits thinking?

Another thing to consider is the suits aren't just thinking about the budget-which we will, in a minute, but they are planning their movie release dates many years in advance and not only trying to jump on the newest bandwagon of whatever is currently popular, but also trying to come up with the next big thing.

A good parallel to draw here is the idea of what constitutes popular music-there's the current trend-for this illustration we'll use the synth-pop of the 1980s-a musical trend consisting of mainly British artists singing fluffy songs to drum machine beats as over-produced, over-the-top synthesizered melodies wash behind them. Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest a guy hears these young kids, garage bands at best, singing ragged vocals in the cold bars of Seattle, dressed in flannels, ripped jeans and Doc Martens, these bands were angry, but had that Rock n Roll attitude that felt like a breath of fresh air (and looked like it too, it was so freaking cold up there), and the beginnings of Grunge Rock were born and soon, figuratively speaking, Rick Astley was getting his balls kicked repeatedly by Nirvana, Pearl Jam and many others. The grunge movement rolled forward with great momentum until _______(the next big thing) showed up.

Yes, making popular films, like making popular music, is a combination of riding the current trends and milking them for all they are worthwhile being on the lookout for the next big thing.

So, getting back to ENDERS GAME, I figure there has got to be some exec in Burbank right now thinking about the market trends and where EG fits into all of the current trends and the competition it will face in the upcoming years.

Now let's talk budget. Keeping in mind, that the budget figures released by the film companies often are often a part of the marketing of the movie, and thus, the actual figures may not REALLY reflect reality, the bottom line of the bottom line is that, there's still a hell of a lot money being tossed around. And really, it's not being tossed around-these people (mostly) are not idiots and they are watching where the money disappears. (That means paying attention to what movies
bombed.)

But, there are the idiot bean counters that want to second guess the director and manipulate where the money is going. When that happens, you can end up with something like what happened to David Fincher on ALIEN3, or you can leave the creative processes alone and you can get something like Finchers SE7EN.

Speaking of directors, let's talk about directors. Presuming the powers-that-be find a director that likes the script and wants to shoot it unchanged, the director is also one more part of the film's marketing. The studio will want a director that is "hot" (made a movie that made a lot of money recently (the more recently the better)) as well as one that can apparently handle the material.

Right now, Warner Brothers loves Zach Snyder. He turned 300, a gory R-rated flick, made from a comic book no one has ever heard of or read, starring a bunch of not very well-known actors into a hit. And thus, they gave him, as his next assignment, their trophy 500-pound Gorilla :
WATCHMEN.

What makes a fine director like Richard Donner go from SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE to TIMELINE? I don't know. But, my eventual point is, finding a director isn't easy. Finding a good director is hard. Finding a good director that's had a recent hit is very difficult. Finding a good director with a good track record that won't screw with Orson Scott Card's ENDERS GAME script is going to be really tough. And even supposing the producer is pleased with the script, it doesn't mean the eventual director-from-heaven will like it. There's the famous scriptwriting cliché-Your script is perfect, but let's change this..which is based on many such instances of script doctoring and re-doctoring running around Hollywoodland. Moving along, casting ENDERS GAME is going to be a bitch. Think here. How old is Ender at the beginning of the book? He's six. One more time-he's six. So, to put it another way, he's got FIVE years before he's the same age as when we first me Harry Potter and SEVEN years before he becomes a teenager.

At the end of the story, he's ten. Even cheating the numbers a little, we've still basically got a bunch of third and fourth graders running around. Oh good.

Do we need to find a mini-army of twins so that the producers can do the whole Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush thing (or, for you readers younger than me-all of you-the Olsen twins thing) so we can get more than the four or eight or whatever the restricted number of hours the little ones can act thanks to the child labor laws (which are meant to be obeyed-I'm talking to you, John Landis)!

And can the kids act? If they're using twins, can both act equally as well as the other? I have a friend who worked on HONEY I BLEW THE BABY-whoops, I mean HONEY, I BLEW UP THE BABY and he reported one of the baby twins (and I'm not going to bother to IMDB.com the names here) frequently looked into the camera while the other one had no such issues.

And with such a TERROR OF TINY TOWN in space, that leads to our next issue: Marketing. Imagine marketing a war movie with ten-year-old soldiers training to fight against an unseen enemy (which makes it harder to sell the Bugger happy meal toys, believe me) while playing video
games.

Doesn't sound that easy when you put it that way, does it? So, with all of these elements in the movie making blender and you can easily see why the process from script to screen is referred to
lovingly as "development hell" and why it can take often years or decades for even a high concept film like the film that eventually became 1989's BATMAN, which I seem to remember reading about an early version back in 1980 or so. Or, continuing the BAT motif, what about lag time from the franchise-killing BATMAN AND ROBIN in 1997 to 2005's BATMAN
BEGINS?

In spite of all the advances in storytelling available through judicious (one hopes) computer graphic imagery, it appears that ENDER is going to be stalled until someone pushes money in some kind of forward moving direction.

Until that time, all we can do is, to paraphrase Casey Kasem, keep our feet on the ground, keep reading the book (and all of Orson Scott Cards awesome follow-ups in the Ender Saga) and keep reaching for the stars.?