hether you want it or not, what happens when you start writing a column is that you become a pundit, a talking head like many of the folks on MSNBC or Fox News, sought out for your opinions and your insight. Fortunately for the audience, subjects like O.J. Simpson, the awful JonBenet Ramsey situation, impeachment, Gary Condit and the recent unpleasantness in Afghanistan have conspired to keep the airwaves and column inches blessedly free of punditry on science fiction and fantasy film and television.
But it's there, trust me, bubbling up from the Internet and fanzines and right onto the pages (in my case) of the New York Times.
I don't know what to think about it. If I didn't have opinions—and if I weren't happy to let you know about them—I wouldn't be doing this column in the first place. And there is an undeniable, ego-boosting pleasure in being asked for your thoughts by other writers. Or telling your parents you were just quoted in a noted news journal.
The whole business can be quite habit-forming: those of you who watched coverage of the subjects in paragraph one may have noted the repeated appearance of certain pundits. Some people have built whole careers out of the job, which I think is bad—until I figure out how to make more money doing it myself.
Faithfulness is no guarantee
I've been brooding about my skills as a pundit as I live through the opening of two major, major feature films based on popular, even classic works, of fantasy lit. I'm speaking about Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.
I approach the films with two different sets of expectations: I've read Lord of the Rings, but not Harry Potter. Unlike my 13-year-old daughter, who has read each book as it appeared, and had very firm notions about how the adaptation of volume one should be accomplished (and was poised to dislike the movie the moment it went into production), I could sit back and enjoy it for what it was.
My experience with Lord of the Rings will be different: I've imagined those settings and characters already, so I'll be judging Peter Jackson's film not on its own terms, but on its ability to come close to my own vision.
Adapting classic or popular works is a tricky business. My own career is littered with the wreckage of various attempts: none of the adaptations, of works by Simak, Heinlein, Matheson or Farmer, has so far made it to a screen of any size.
The choices you face as a writer are these: be faithful to the source, or jack up the title and run a new story under it. I've taken both approaches, and a couple that were in-between.
Either way, you face problems. An excessively faithful adaptation is usually impractical just in terms of running time. My favorite example comes from outside the SF community: the BBC version of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, a novel of moderate length, took 12 hours of screen time when aired back in 1982. Every scene in the book was dramatized: the adapter, John Mortimer, invented two scenes of his own.
Closer to home, you have Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five—a shortish novel that seems to have been successfully and faithful translated to film. (Vonnegut once said that the only two novelists who had no right to complain about movies made from their books were Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, and him.)
As a counterexample, there's Blade Runner, a case of a team of filmmakers using the bare ghost of a Philip K. Dick concept to make something entirely different—and wonderful—out of it.
Fidelity is no guarantee of artistic success. One of my favorite contemporary sci-fi writers, John Varley, spent years turning his terrific short story "Air Raid" into a faithful, and completely undistinguished, feature film called Millennium.
Nor is a more free-form adaptation a recipe for failure. Look at Blade Runner. Part of the uncertainty is due to the nature of the work to be adapted. Some stories just don't dramatize very well: the whole appeal of a piece of sci-fi may be in a narrator's voice or attitude, for example, things difficult to recreate on film.
A well-known figure in the world of sci-fi prose—an award-winning novelist, short story writer and anthologist—once shared his feelings after reading a script based on one of his novels. He had been offered the chance to do his own adaptation, but declined. The job had been done by a screenwriter, who had taken the Blade Runner approach. Upon reading the script, the novelist initially reacted with alarm. "I thought, why did they bother buying my book if they weren't going to use it?" Thinking about it further, he decided he liked the script on its own terms. He ultimately told me that "I would have written a more faithful script. But the screenwriter has written a better movie."
SF's turn is yet to come
Now here we have Potter and LotR, huge projects with big studios behind them. Potter has done well, certainly well enough to justify the sequels. The buzz on LotR is good.
Are we on the verge of a golden age of sci-fi films? Is Stranger in a Strange Land, Childhood's End or Neuromancer (to name three so-far unfilmable sci-fi classics) coming to our cineplexes and video-on-demand screens?
My feeling is no, not yet, for some of the reasons given above. Sci-fi and fantasy films still require not only filmmakers to have an exceptionally strong affection for a classic work (like Jackson's for Tolkien), but also studio heads, production designers and distributors. Potter is one of the most financially successful fiction properties of any century; a studio can run those numbers and make itself enthusiastic.
Tolkien's trilogy is also a best-seller, albeit of a different age and tenure. Nevertheless, the fame of the title and the appeal of the story were enough to get some brave executive to pull the $300-million-dollar trigger.
I still don't think there are many Potters or Lords out there, and even told the New York Times that "the age of the sci-film hasn't opened."
Then again, some years back, at the very beginning of my career as a pundit, I wrote a piece for a magazine I shall not name here (those of you who want to read it will have to do the work) in which I noted the sad history of fantasy television, specifically sword and sorcery, and predicted that we might face a long wait for such entertainment. At the time I was writing this, the first Hercules TV movies were in production. Hercules, for those of you who came in late, was one of the most successful television series in history, running for years and hundreds of episodes, and spawning the equally successful Xena.
I could have shrugged it off as a bad guess, but I knew Hercules was in production. Based on what I'd heard, I thought it would be awful. Well, maybe it was, who can say? But awful doesn't automatically translate into unsuccessful, so I was wrong twice.
And maybe I am again.
Michael Cassutt is writing scripts for MTV, Nickelodeon and 20th Television. His novel, Red Moon, appears in paperback from Tor in January 2002.
