The screenplay, that is. See http://socalbrowncoats.com/images/moonfriday.pdf . Now, I have no idea and haven't bothered to check whether this is (a) authentic or (b) current, but so what? And I know that it's common before a movie comes out for so-called scripts to float around the net - I read one of the alleged Star Wars Episode 1 scripts that bore not a shred of resemblance to the eventual Phantom Menace. I don't know who that web site belongs to or how the script came to be on the net - all I know is the URL.

Be that as it may, what are your thoughts on this script? I find it delightfully true to the book and gently updated where necessary (e.g., in computer processing capabilities). I would love to see it on the screen.

This has ALWAYS been the book I would most like to see on the screen, but as Hollywood has managed to destroy all of RAH it touches I am more than a little concerned that this could be another Starship troopers.

Will the script relay the book well?
Audrey

Problem number one: Choose which third of the novel you want to see on the screen. Get back to me when you have a decision.

I haven't looked at the alleged screenplay, but I have just one question: Has there ever been a screenplay or teleplay that successfully included "political discourse" (as freesharon puts it)? That is, was there ever a movie or TV episode that attempted such a thing but wasn't stopped dead in its tracks as a result?

A separate but important element that has to be considered in trying to make Moon into a movie is the narrator's voice. Having an occasional voice-over or completely omitting narration: that's your choice, and in some cases (perhaps this one) both choices are awful. So much of what makes the book interesting is that it's told by Mannie.

This is an authentic item, by the way - Tim Minear was indeed attached to a serious development project when he drafted this. Of course, all of the major Heinlein properties have been in more or less continual option since first written. I'm sure the file cabinets of H'wood are littered with first draft scripts and treatments. Only in the Google age does this stuff float out into the public stream.

I think the script indicates the tremendous problems with adapting any of Heinlein's major works to the screen. Yes, the bare-bones narrative is there and it's almost slavishly faithful... as first drafts, written by someone familiar with the material, often are. I think what's there is nearly unfilmable and an insult to the original material - quite a feat.

As noted, MIAHM is entirely a first person view, and the view of someone who is pretty clueless and out of his depth. That's nearly impossible to translate from interior monologue to screen action. So page 1, scene 1 has to begin from a different viewpoint - you CAN'T use as much VO as Minear indicates. You'll end up with a "Vicky Christina Barcelona," which was a series of short tableaux connected by a droning narrator. Hardly one word of the story was told by the actors or action; it was told by the narrator at endless length.

Once you've chosen your viewpoint, you have to grapple with content and length - as I said, choose which third of the novel you want to see up on the screen.

A very well-done miniseries of six hours or so would get all but the fringe items in. I wonder if one of the big non-film players like HBO could be interested.

Well, my lengthy responses have now disappeared into the ether twice, so I won't try again, but I do think a faithful 2-hour theatrical adaptation could be made if one were to, as Jim suggested, focus on a third of the book. I would focus on the action surrounding the planning and execution of the revolution and let the political underpinnings and social mores be illustrated in a limited way through the action and dialogue. Just don't include stuff that is not faithful to the ideas in the book. And of course include Mike, who is the heart of the story.

Ok, boys and girls, after all the griping about bad scripts, let's see if you can name one film adaptation of a book that you thought turned out just as enjoyable as the written page.

When I think about it, it pretty universally tracks to which medium I consumed first being my preference. I read Gone With the Wind first, and found the movie inferior (hurried, less poignant). I read The Shawshank Redemption second, and found the story inferior (less dramatic); same with Runaway Jury. But there are very few instances where I can say that a movie was better than a preceding book, and the only times where I may have read the book first (can't remember; I was very young) and still thought the movie was better are The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

And that's it. Proof by exception. Every other translation of book to screen has disappointed or at least been inferior, even James Bond and The Saint. Especially when considering anything made after 1970. So maybe we're all chasing a will-o'-the-wisp, a collective snipe hunt for a movie adaptation that will make us grunt with approval.

Maybe it just can't be done.

I read "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" before I saw the movie, and liked the movie better. I liked the films Godfather I and II more than Puzo's novel (but in that case, I saw the movies before I read the book). I liked the movie On the Beach more than Shute's novel, which I read many years before I saw the movie. I've tried a couple times to read Tolkien's LOTR trilogy, and never get through the first book. But the movies were wonderful. 2001 was a better movie than the story on which it was based. I like the Tom Selleck made-for-TV movies of Robert Parker's Jesse Stone novels better than the novels (although both are good). I'm sure I could come up with more examples, and I realize that this is all subjective.

I think you are right that there is usually a bias towards what you are exposed to first -- the written word or the screen version. But not always, and at least in my experience, there are enough counter-examples to go beyond "proof by exception".

I'm with Bill on LOTR - I have tried to read it through at least four times in my life and at best I run out of gas right around the beginning of the third book. I've never had a taste for straight fantasy so it's an effort even though I can clearly see the quality of the work. I thoroughly enjoyed the movies, however - we went from the original DVD release to the ultra-extended set, and Audrey watches the set through about three times a year. I don't have the patience or butt-pads to watch 12 hours of film, so I just sit in on some of the good parts.

Silence of the Lambs is an almost perfect translation from book to film - not identical, but very much the same story, just as creepy in both forms. I think it's the best example of translation to the screen yet done.

I was pleased with the translation of Watchmen to the screen and am looking forward to the director's cut - oh, exactly a month from today! I know just enough about what additional material goes into the longer take to believe the rough edges and gaps will disappear.

By the way, Bill, 2001 book and movie were created more or less simultaneously - Clarke got to revise his story after watching the film's dailies and of course had significant input into the developing screenplay. The book is rather dry, yes, but up against that film, what wouldn't be?

2001 doesn't count, because the book was created contemporaneously with the movie and is arguably an adaptation. This exercise only matters for books that were written first.

Do not get me started on Bored of the Rings. I tried several times to read through that because it is such an effing classic, don't you know, and I wanted to take an elf-knife to the author's wattled throat until the ichor ran in the streets. HHGTTG was honest enough when picking alien names to make them ridiculous. LOTR renames virtually every noun in the dictionary for the sake of torturing the reader and tacks "elfin" as a prefix on every other noun. And the friggin' pages of description about every place, plant, animal, building, person, and insect encountered made me want to stick a fork in my eyes.

This will get a price on my head in certain quarters, but I found The Sword of Shannara better. At least I could finish it.

Well to each his own, but I discovered LOTR as a misty eyed teenager with a ridiculously romantic view of the inherent nobility of the Impossible Quest where the Little Guy Saves the World in spite of having no chance whatsoever to do so, using just determination and a sense of right and wrong. I still think that there is a chance for a bit of a hero to emerge from almost all of us given the right circumstances. In fact I will be so bold as to say that I have seen it more than once. For many many years I read it every Christmas because without fail it put me in that mood. Also a fondness for flowing tresses and all that.....

But I did always just skip the parts written in Elvish....

And I loved the movies also but do not see really in the same league as the books. The books will probably outlast the movies, IMHO.

Where LOTR is concerned, Audrey, I'm not sure I agree. The books are works of literary genius, and I'm sure they'll still be studied in hundreds of years. I've read them more times than I can count and can quote long passages from memory. Whether they'll be read for fun in a few hundred years, though, I'm less sure about. The language and ideas in them are already dated by the standards of today's generation; they take *work* to read. You have to live up to these books, and as the English language continues to develop and change over time, the amount of work will increase.

Look at Shakespeare for an example. At the time he was alive and writing, and for considerable time afterward, he was not considered a "serious" writer, but rather an entertainer. His plays were the Hollywood blockbusters of their day; everyone who could went to see them and nobody thought they were too difficult or inaccessible. But now, he's highbrow. It takes real work to read his plays, and even watching them stretches people's skills because they have to understand the language, which has changed over time, and the culture, which has changed even more.

I think that Peter Jackson created is much more likely to be watched for fun even after hundreds of years; I think it will simply be more accessible to our remote descendants than the books will. I also sometimes still have a hard time believing just how fine a job Jackson did in creating those movies. Before I saw the first LOTR movie, I did not think a decent movie could be created from LOTR, nor did I think that it should be done at all. Jackson created something I think that Tolkien would have been happy to see, even with the stuff he had to leave out (like my favorite, Tom Bombadil) and a few miscues (like botching the character of Faramir). He nailed Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Aragorn, however, and IMHO made something much better of Arwen than Tolkien himself managed to do.

The biggest problem with MC's later novels is that he fell prey to a syndrome for which I have not found the proper name - the "I had a huge success in Hollywood with one of my novels so now I am unable to write a novel without thinking of the next cast party with Angelina Jolie" syndrome.

It causes a very definite turn in writing style. As nearly as I can capsulize it, they stop writing the story as if they're telling it around a campfire, and start describing the movie they see projected up on the wall. Crais has fallen completely off this cliff and become utterly unreadable. Crichton was a longer slope beginning with Sphere (which, fer gossakes, broke into script format in places).

State of Fear is an inexcusable detour into fictionalized political ranting - I loved his footnote about how everyone except him had an agenda in the debate.

I've also never been sure what to make of a Harvard Medical School grad who never practiced a day in his life. There's something... wrong there.

How wonderful that anyone else here was exposed to Dealing: or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues by "Michael Douglas" (i.e., Crichton and his brother). I was about 15 when it showed up in my parents' library, I think as a book club selection - we already had The Andromeda Strain. I only learned a few years ago that Dealing became a movie, which I haven't seen - John Lithgow is in it.

I don't know if it's "wonderful," JJ, but it remains one of the most colorful memories of books I read in that era. (Add in Divine Right's Trip and Steal This Book.)

The character that sticks in my mind is the speed freak who can't stop obsessing over his BMs. That should tell you something.

I was vaguely aware it had been filmed but - yep, just checked again - for some strange reason it's never been released on home video. Can't imagine why. It's Lithgow's debut film, too.

State of Fear was putrid - I mean, a novel with footnotes every page proving the characters' right-wing arguments that global warming was a fallacy were correct? Puh-leeze. Goes right in there with Clancy's book about a PETA offshoot trying to kill half the human population (Rainbow Six, I believe). Strawman argument that big hasn't been seen since Christopher Lee set fire to Edward Woodward.

Prey was better, but not great. Nextwas not good writing. However, on balance I liked Timeline - poignant ending. But especially I liked Airframe, which for some reason gets no attention at all, maybe because it's fairly unassuming. Well-deserved jab at mainstream journalists.

Crichton was one of those guys who could write about something very new so well that his work became its own cliche. Kinda like someone thumbing through Shakespeare going, "Man, this hack sure does recycle a lot of familiar themes," only in Crichton's case it could happen within a year or two. Only a few years after Jurassic Park came out, everyone and his sabre-toothed dog was talking about reconstructing dinosaurs from DNA so much that it just became assumed in the popular culture that such a thing was not only possible, but undoubtedly underway somewhere. Having that kind of impact is ridiculously difficult but he made it look easy.

Abbie's one of my enduring heroes. An awful lot of people give me funny looks when I say that, but I've been in awe of this complex figure since I was a kid. Finally understanding that he was deeply bipolar explained a lot. When he was "up" he was practically a force of nature - and he blew around a lot of heavy stuff.

I was shattered to hear of his death - Abbie gave up!? - but again some clarity about the circumstances helped put it in perspective. I don't think it was bad medicine as much as racking chronic pain combined with a really deep down cycle. Perhaps very little anyone could have done about the combination.

Two of the most important maxims I absorbed from him:

"I can't think of anything sold on television that's good for people."

"The purpose of a talk show is not to present guests, exchange points of view, hold a rational debate, or any other ostensible function. The purpose of a talk show is to make the host look good."

In the late '70s, during Hoffman's underground period, I lived in the Montrose district of Houston, then as now a haven for alternative lifestyles. Abbie was rumored at the time (later confirmed) to hide out occasionally in a house on Buell Street in Montrose. I never met him, but knew others who claimed to have.

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Only 67 years to wait.

Free Luna,