Monday, March 12, 2007

Yum. Crow.

FIVE YEARS AGO:

John: "I think you're a great match for Mage."
Young Director: "I love it. I'm a huge comic book fan."
John: "That helps."
Young Director: "I just optioned Frank Miller's 300."
John: "Who bought it for you?"
Young Director: "No, I did. Bought the rights with my own money -- basically harassed Miller into giving it to me. Just wouldn't leave him alone. I have a vision, and I'm going to do it. "
John: (chuckling) "Zack, Zack ... 300 is unfilmable."

Commence pointing and mocking now.

66 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's ok, man. Your heart... er, your hidebound, inside-the-box, conventional thinking was in the right place.

OTOH, that's an interesting bit of trivia about Snyder being the one who optioned it. Wonder what project he'll do next with all those millions...

Kelsey Gower said...

Seems he's going to do Watchmen

Anonymous said...

$70 million of opening weekend box office, "unfilmability".

I sneaked out of work to try and catch a 3:40 showing, and the theater was packed.

I've heard the IMAX showings in San Fransisco are pre-sold out for 12 days, so there's that demographic as well...

David Press said...

you certainly learned your lesson.

Beckylooo said...

It's true. Unwatchable and unfilmable are not the same thing.

Anonymous said...

Damnit, beaten to the unfilmable-vs-unwatchable snark.

300 wasn't awful like "Ultraviolet" was awful, but that was still a pretty painfully bad movie there. Not incompetent -- the fights were well-staged, and it was well shot and edited -- but every time a character opened their mouth, bad things were guaranteed to happen.

I desperately want Watchmen not to suck, so I'm going to try to mostly chalk this up to faithfulness to Miller's terrible writing... but I can't convince myself of that. When an audience of mostly adolescent men is laughing out loud at your sex scene involving (and greedily focussing on the nude form of) an unbelieveably beautiful woman, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

(And yeah... a guy who just made $70M in a weekend in March obviously doesn't have to answer to the likes of me. Oh well.)

DJ said...

I think that's the first miss step you've ever made. that... and the "Lemmings " Joke.

Unknown said...

The lemming joke is MAGNIFICENT.

DJ said...

I agree...it's all in the delivery. In my hands...the things I could have done with it. all the Australia media said so.

DJ said...

That and My favorite other none starter " They call the Wind Myra"...if you simply would have let your white knuckle grip loosen just a wee bit on the anal-retentiveness of the process. we could be Australia Rich...Rich like Asronauts...even with Rick McKenna's over the top commissions. for one season we were Gods...ladies and Gentlemen please welcome back to the stage your headliner....Mr. Paul Wilbaum...bow and exit.

Anonymous said...

as a book, 300 isn't exactly high literature. what it is is bad ass. personally, i could never believe it hadn't been optioned yet.

i think the fact that snyder went ahead with it -- before anyone knew that sin city would be such a success -- speaks well of him. i figure that the great comic books are going to get made into movies eventually. i'd at least like to see people with passion working on those projects, rather than getting hoovered up into franchises like spiderman and x-men (bryan singer shone through the first two), or cheapened to the point of unwatchability like catwoman, daredevil, the incredible hulk, etc, etc, etc.

just look at the difference between the first.... however many batmans there were, and batman begins. what it takes is someone that really gets it.

and i'm sure it doesn't hurt that the studio will likely give snyder a long leash on watchmen. i'm anxious about it, but since they're already going ahead with it, all i can do is wish him luck, and remind myself that it could be much, much worse. the fact that they're even trying to make it says something to me.

Anonymous said...

or cheapened to the point of unwatchability like catwoman

Ouch.

Noah Brand said...

Okay, is this a bad time to point out that WATCHMEN is, in fact, unfilmable?

Ross said...

"Okay, is this a bad time to point out that WATCHMEN is, in fact, unfilmable?"

Yes, but only because you beat me to it.

Photognome said...

I dont thing Watchmen is unfilmable, I just think its unfilmable as a single movie. Its something that would be better handled as a series on a high budget cable affiliate such as HBO...

Benari said...

Well, having actually read (one draft of) your sceenplay for Mage, I'd love for him to spin his magic on that script next, rather than Watchmen. Maybe if you tell him he couldn't possibly make a Mage movie work...

towniebastard said...

I never would have thought when I first read 300 that it was unfilmable. I would have thought the director would be hard pressed to do a duplicate the exact look on screen as Snyder did, but the story itself certainly lends itself to the big screen. And Miller's greatly simplified version of the story seems to match Hollywood's liking of making the stories simpler.

But hell, what do I know...

Unknown said...

You have to remember, even at that late date when I talked to him, the tech available to make 300 as he did simply did not exist. "Unfilmable" in this context meant "$100 + million dollars to make it look in any way as cool as the comic book." And a comic book movie, no less. Which at that point was not quite the shit-hot it is now.

I remember the temper tantrum that hit when I turned in the first draft of MAGE and they budgeted it out. "$60 million? For a COMIC BOOK MOVIE? Are you INSANE?" Now they'd kiss me on the lips and give me a corner office. But back them the Geek Wave had not quite broken ...

Anonymous said...

I haven't seen it. Can I still put this scarlet A on your neck, though? Scarlet becomes you!

Besides:

>>>You have to remember, even at that late date when I talked to him, the tech available to make 300 as he did simply did not exist. "Unfilmable" in this context meant "$100 + million dollars to make it look in any way as cool as the comic book." And a comic book movie, no less. Which at that point was not quite the shit-hot it is now.

That's just no excuse. You own and know how to use a computer. Something I don't think any studio execs own or can use. Tch!

Anonymous said...

Unfilmable:

Watchmen

Atlas Shrugged

Oh, for the days when the networks did mini-series. Roots, Holocaust...

(Well, in the case of Atlas Shrugged, no mini-series is a Good Thing!)

Anonymous said...

Have you all seen the test image of Rorshach over on CHUD? http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=9241

Hurm.

AntoBlueberry said...

What happened to the Mage movie?
Where can I read your script?
I read Ale Tse third draft of the Watchmen script and it was nice. Improvable, but nice.

The Constructivist said...

You know, in Japan they do movies and tv series (ex: Ghost in the Shell: manga, anime, sequel; Stand Alone Complex: tv series, movie...) and don't worry too much about continuity between them. I love the mini-series format--Beloved would have so worked as a mini-series....

Canadian Yankee said...

Speaking of 300, you should check out Scott Feschuk's commentary on the (lack of) historical accuracy in the movie. It's one of the best paraphrasings of "It's just a movie, dorkwad," I've ever seen.

Francis Wayland Thurston said...

Am I the only one that thought 300 was offensive in every possible way that its possible for a movie to be offensive? It's great for Snyder that he's managed to make so much money with it, but 300 and its subtle and non-subtle messages amount to the height of irresponsible storytelling, especially at this point in history. And I don't care that it’s adapted from another work. I've never considered that a good excuse for not making changes. The fact of that matter is that the film is fascistic, and panders to post-9\11 right-wing American sentiments to an extent which before I would consider unimaginable.

But I'm not going to go on-and-on here (I've done that enough in my own journal) -- rather I'll supply a link to a list written by Umberto Eco back in 1997 that should be compared to the film:

Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

John Seavey said...

You are not the only one to so think; we were all particularly impressed by Queen Gorgo's "Persia has WMDs" speech. (And incidentally, did anyone else expect Queen Gorgo to go rampaging through London and destroy Big Ben? Just me, then. OK.)

I reviewed the flick here:

http://fraggmented.blogspot.com/2007/03/review-300.html

Suffice to say, though, that I have a real hard time believing all that snuck in accidentally.

Anonymous said...

Am I the only one that thought 300 was offensive in every possible way that its possible for a movie to be offensive?

you are not the only person to think that -- however, you're all equally wrong. :)

putting aside the dubious historical arguments (there is, for example, a notable difference between a slave and a Helot), most of the movie (with the exception of some of the Queen stuff) is lifted directly from the original graphic novel, which predates the war on terra by years. it's not credible to read intent into this.

had fight club been released after 9/11, people would have been apoplyptic over the main characters blowing up buildings (well, more apoplyptic, anyway). making the same argument about 300 is equally wrong. it's ironic that people who are so insistent on reading a political bent into this movie absolutely refuse to view it through any other lens but 9/11.


oh, and as long as i'm here -- no one's to blame for catwoman! except halle berry, i hold her accountable.

John Seavey said...

My feeling on the "it predates the War" argument (which I've seen here and elsewhere) is that it's not just a commentary on the current war in Iraq, it's a commentary on a number of right-wing preoccupations, which the post 9/11 environment allowed Bush and Co. to turn into...well, into actual occupations. (Rimshot.)

There are some bits added, and I thought it was obvious even at the time that they were more Iraq-specific, but my feeling is that it's a right-wing movie first and a war movie second.

Anonymous said...

I'm a fan of quality B-movie cheese (Conan the Barbarian), sword-and-sandals flicks (Gladiator, Spartacus), and B-movie cheesy sword-and-sandals flicks (Troy)... but even the one-minute teaser clips of 300 defeated me. God bless you, Internets, and thanks for the warning. ("Tonight... we dine... in hell!" Spartan, please. That's painful like Jar Jar Binks was painful. I really have no idea how people are making it through two hours of that shit.)

Good for those involved that it's turning an impressive profit, but... meh. The Phantom Menace turned a profit, mostly on the strength of a fan base that couldn't bring itself to admit how bad it sucked. Same (if not as bad) with Dead Man's Chest, which lots of people shelled out money for but few seem to have really liked. 300 looks kind of like a miniature version of that phenomenon -- except unlike those other films, I suspect it has a cultic future as some of the most hilariously unintentional homoerotic kitsch ever made. (An honour I'm pretty sure the graphic novel is also well on its way to earning.)

Sadly, I'm betting this is going to tempt someone to bring even stupider Miller products to the screen -- I'm sure we can all look forward to the film version of Holy Terror, Batman! in the next few years. C'est la vie. On the upside, maybe the success of 300 will convince Universal to do something with Gates of Fire, which apparently it's optioned. That, I would go to a theatre for.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and to Doc Memory: I desperately want Watchmen not to suck, so I'm going to try to mostly chalk this up to faithfulness to Miller's terrible writing...

I think you may have reason to hope. The graphic novel really is completely ridiculous, and by all accounts the film really is regrettably faithful to it. Also, Snyder has demonstrated he has good films in him, too.

Greg said...

"Somehow I can't get the image out of my head of Kevin Smith playing Kevin Matchstick. He'd have to train up, but I could really see it working."

Me, too--I cast Smith in my head. He'd be perfect. John, I hope *somebody* makes Mage; would love to see what you've done with it.

Doctor Slack, count me among one of the few who really enjoyed Dead Man's Chest--thought it was fun & well-written, and was tickled with glee at the ending. Maybe I just have a jones for Elliott & Rossio, I dunno.

Unknown said...

The right-wingers are going crazy over the movie... as if they themselves somehow represent the great warrior types. Personally, I think it's it all those sweaty six-pack abs that gets their closeted panties in such a tizzy.

Anonymous said...

Classic Excuses for Bad Cheese, #3014: "dude, it's impressionism."

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