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So this is more on the Fantasy side of the Scifi/Fantasy section of the virtual bookstore….but Scifi wire had a story about adapting The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever to the big screen……I shudder to think how much of the story they will cut out… 🙄 🙄
As for Stephen R. Donaldson, writer of above mention fantasy series….I loved his space opera The Gap Series….personally I think that would have made a much better convert to the big screen. Not that it truly is a space opera, but very dramatic. (melo-) But there’s mind control addicts, great space ships and issues with space travel, scary DNA warping aliens and plenty of political intrigue, sex, fights and just plain human stress from being in space in confined areas (spaceships!). not to mention plenty of death and destruction with a realistic and almost let down of an ending.
Can you tell I really enjoyed them????
For covenant, I don’t now how a 2-3 hour movie can encompass 6 books, and he actually wrote a seventh after the original series.
It could be that they will just focus on the first 3 books which I’m sure could be done…but it’s just as complex a story as LOTR and very much a descendant of that tradition, so I’m very sceptical a movie could be made to do the core story justice.
And quite frankly there are a lot of themes that Hollywood doesn’t deal with well….Covenant is a leper – very bitter in his disease and rapes the first woman he meets in The Land. Not the most pretty hero type.
They will take the Lysol spray to him.
I joined this site just so I could add my thoughts to this discussion:
My wife and I read all 6 of the Thomas Conenant books in 1987, 1 after the other. As I finished one, my wife started it. We found them both fasinating and uncomfortable. TC never wins (even when he does), he has no control over his destiny and even gives anti-heroes a bad name, Riddik is a pure white saint compared to TC. We were so affected by the series that we have never read them since. Also, as mentioned before, he is a leper with physical deformaties and a MAJOR chip on his shoulder. Not a Hollywood Hero by any definition
There is no way in any universe that Hollywood could do justice to such a dark and complicated story. There are no happy endings, no love, no one liners and no heroes. Only pain, lonliness, betrayal and death. Am I being too melodramatic? TLOTR was a superbe one off that I don’t think will be emulated anytime soon.
On the flip side of that, it did get me thinking about what WOULD make a superb of epics; how about The Many-Colored Land books by Julian May? That is one series I have read again and again.
7th_Dizbuster,
Thanks for chiming in!!!! And very well said!
As I had said, they will most likely hatchet Covenant’s character to such an extent, they might as well just create a new character with a different name.
I was very surprised to see the story on scifiwire.com because I loved the books precisely for the reasons why it is so uncomfortable…same reason I love Donaldson’s scifi work the Gap Series.
He begins his characters out in such bleak terrible places,(Thomas Covenant, Angus Thermoplye) but I love how he pushes them into places where they perform redeeming acts, but are never fully redeemed as individual souls.Much more fascinating than reading about the “good guys” trying to do the right thing, but constantly making mistakes. (though that has it’s place too) 🙂
I read the Covenant books in a week, when I was 14 and have reread them since. The gap Series I had the agony of waiting the year – year and a half between books and I’ve reread them again since too. I like Donaldson’s other books too – the Man Rides Through series(there were 2 I think)I remember enjoying quite a bit.
He’s a great story teller.
Just perusing http://www.stephenrdonaldson.com
in the News section, he talks about the possible movie, apparently there’s no studio yet. Take a look:
“Covenant” movie
This past week, “The Hollywood Reporter” announced that “Covenant” is coming to the big screen. This is both premature and misleading. Here are the facts to date.
The production team of Mark Gordon (“Saving Private Ryan”) and Peter Winther (“Independence Day”) is quite serious about wanting to make a “Covenant” film. “Revelstone Development” has a design in place and a screenwriter on board (John Orloff, “Band of Brothers”). What Gordon and Winther do *not* have is a studio (i.e. money); and without a studio little or nothing is likely to happen. Since Hollywood basically shuts down in December, Gordon and Winther plan to start approaching studios in January.
I would like to emphasize that I have no control over any aspect of this process. After all, the film rights are held by Ballantine Books, not by me. I’ve met Winther and Orloff, and I’m convinced that their respect for and excitement about “Covenant” is genuine: for that reason, I’m starting to get excited myself. And I have no doubt that Revelstone Development will consult with me from time to time, and will take whatever I have to say seriously. But I have no actual power here. Nor do I want any. In fact, I’ve refused every offer to give me any power. I love movies; I hope a “Covenant” movie (or several) will be made; I hope it will be good; and I hope it will be successful. But I’m simply not qualified, either by experience or by personality, to make the kinds of decisions–and compromises–which are essential to film-making. And I have my own work to do, work which pretty much consumes all of my creative energy. So I’m rooting hard for Revelstone Development; and if Gordon, Winther, and Orloff ever want my opinion, I’ll give it to them. But really this is all out of my hands.
More news as it develops….
P.S. I’m just guessing here; but I suspect that peculiar references to “Saturn” in “The Hollywood Reporter” are a confused conflation of “Satan” and “Sauron.” I can’t think of any other explanation.
I’m glad he took the time to post his thoughts on this.
Adaptations tend to annoy me. But I do understand the difficulty.
Where my main problem enters, is when the film producers or someone within the production deliberately cuts content.
Harry Potter is an easy example. It took them 2 hours to tell most of the first book. The same people think the same 2 hours are still good enough for books 2 and 3 times as long. That’s crap, and they know it. So it evolves from a series that claimed to be as faithful as the books as possible, to a franchise of it’s own.
Not that it will keep me from watching them, but lets face it, anyone who read and saw the 3rd book/movie knows exactly how much was left out, including the major explainations of the Patronus and Mauraders Map. No previous HP movie left out so many important details, and it’s only going to get worse as Book 4 and 5 are far larger than 3.
Other series take a different approach by combining content. So in the case of the Dune miniseries, you had Dune Messiah and Children of Dune combined into one story. This prevents conflict and drama progressing naturally. It would’ve been impossible to explain why Irulan nearly kills Chani, but ends up being one of (if not the most) loyal Atreides in CoD.
It can work, but most times it doesn’t. But the end result is, it brings a story to a broader audience and generates more interest than would’ve existed prior. At least until a series comes out that causes the author to say “That’s it, because of this movie/mini-series, Im cancelling the books!”
I think that day might come sooner rather than later, as producers are no longer waiting for series to mature and develop (Hell even be finished!) before churning it out on the screen.
Ah, Many-Colored Land by Julian May. this books had scope and range. probably the hard part would be knowing where to start. Hollywood not being known for that starting in the beginning thing.
But if they could figure that out, They would have enough there to do a high quality movie a-la Stargate and then enough *cannon* material to do a series also. And who knows, perhaps unlike Stargate they could semi-stick to the story and not go haring off to where ever some tv-writer of the week took them.
Showstopper on this? Sets. Could be a bit pricey after the Movie. Perhaps that is why Stargate went down the path it did. Or, it could be they only had rights to a certain part of the story. Who knows.
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