Safehold Movies?!?! (I know, so overdone)

DMcCunney wrote:I don't expect it to happen. One of the problems facing SF in movies or TV is that it's expensive to produce.
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I think Honor Harrington is still a better bet to get on screen than Safehold.

Safehold won't need a lot of special effects and almost none that wouldn't be common to a period/historical drama. Far fewer special effects than any Honorverse production.

First I'm going to concur with everyone that said TV series. The stories are continuing arcs that need that room to be told. A movie won't do it, it needs more time.

I disagree with everyone that said it can't be done for a book containing so much thinking or so many characters. Game of Thrones proves that's untrue.
However, it's also true that the series (or movies if you really insist) would certainly not be identical to the books. As far better analysts of the creative arts than I have pointed out, different media require a different interpretation of the story line. To recast the books into a movie might require telling the story from a different perspective. Not giving all the background, abbreviating some of the infodumps (or eliminating them entirely) and playing up the action.
Viewers, as opposed to readers, want to see things happen, receive good dialogue, watch plots advance and characters develop. One of my favorite movies "The Longest Day" doesn't bore me with long solicitations about the height advantage of the hardpoint the Germans set up at the casino, or specs on the guns, or muzzle velocity of American destroyer navel guns. It shows desperate men in battle, the difficulty of the assault with dead bodies, and the actions of brave men to overcome them, I don't need the stats on the Bangalore torpedo that blows the hole in the German defense to allow the Americans to get off the beach, I just need it to go boom, and let the action flow. Don't give the details on Merlin's guns, just let me see him shooting down inquisitors as he allows Irys, Lord Ahzgood, Daivyn and the rest of their party to escape. Don't tell me about the new sail plan or the new ship, just put the model of the damn thing on the screen and make it sail. I'll be able to tell it's not the same as the other ship.
Stop telling me how clever everyone is and instead tell the story. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
So can it be done? I say yes. but it won't be the same as the books so the purists won't like it. Oh and I suspect David won't either. Our author spends a lot of time getting the numbers right and worrying out the details. He's fond of them and he should be, they represent a lot of hard work and research. But they don't matter a darn to a television production (or a movie) and I'm not sure he could let them go. And that might just be the biggest stumbling block to ever seeing the books on the big screen.
Well that and finding anyone willing to put up the megabucks required to finance it.

And that's my two pfennigs for what it's worth.

Larry

You really need to go back and read all Himself's commentary on the movie process.

One of my favorites was years ago when he waded in to the early [and still on-going] series of plaints about 'where do we find a 6' Eurasian martial artist to play Honor Harrington?' with something to the effect of "I don't care if the actress is a 5'2" blond with blue eyes, as long as she can project Honor's command presence"

Larry wrote:
< snip >
So can it be done? I say yes. but it won't be the same as the books so the purists won't like it. Oh and I suspect David won't either. Our author spends a lot of time getting the numbers right and worrying out the details. He's fond of them and he should be, they represent a lot of hard work and research. But they don't matter a darn to a television production (or a movie) and I'm not sure he could let them go. And that might just be the biggest stumbling block to ever seeing the books on the big screen.
Well that and finding anyone willing to put up the megabucks required to finance it.

And that's my two pfennigs for what it's worth.

Larry

Peter2 wrote:

Reptide wrote:i dont think any RFC book is good for movie/tv series. Its kind hard fix 500page book in 90 or 120 minutes and its even harder put characters thinking in play when all u can do is dialog and RFC use lot of character thinking in his books.

I agree with you. You would never get any sort of visual medium able to put over the sheer scope and complexity of the storyline. Merlin is the obvious central character, but he isn't present in any of the sea battles after Armageddon Reef, and although he flits in and out of all the land campaigns in a variety of personas, it's as an agent and commando. In the later story, his main interaction with the other major characters is as a planner – he's seldom if ever involved in any large-scale fighting – and that won't come over well in any visual way.
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No, you do not get this kind of thing in the US. But in Japan there is a practice of a major TV drama being presented each year. These dramas usually cover important historical events in extraordinary detail, and total about 100 hours in length (two hours per week for a year). Unfortunately, US production companies simple do not do this kind of presentation.

The other thing that is common in Japan is to have single "season" shows - that is some number of episodes of a story with no intention of trying for renewal. The episodes presented represent the complete story, and there is no pressure to have a cliffhanger or major changes to developed characters to create the next season. I really get irritated when a major character suddenly changes their fundamental moral character because the writers could not come up with a good story for a renewed season and fell back on lame tropes to make some drama for the renewal.

Well, what about the anime series? Of course, only if someone respectable would work on the series: Yoshiyuki Tomino maybe?

Did you ever read 'battlefield earth' it was made into a film starring John Travolta and it was terrible (the film not the book). Also I think it would only really work in animated or CGI format due to requirements. And don't forget each book covers pretty much the amount of time it took for ww2 to start and finish, so your talking about 1 film based on action in ww2...

3353AndyRyan3353 wrote:Did you ever read 'battlefield earth' it was made into a film starring John Travolta and it was terrible (the film not the book).

The book wasn't very good either...