[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

That's a question posed by Kevin Drum on his blog at The Washington Monthly.

[dvandorn]

Yes, Alex, I'll agree with you -- SFX seems to drive the stories, not serve them, in Hollywood these days. There are thousands upon thousands of decent, filmable sf stories out there that languish because they're not big, glittery SFX vehicles. And when someone does try to bring a good sf story to the screen, it ends up being chopped into mush by studios that want to add elements like wisecracking detectives and neat-o morphing robots to a classic tale such as "I, Robot."

No one ever had the guts to film Harlan Ellison's "I, Robot" script -- which was vastly superior to the Will Smith abortion that came out recently. It told the story with beauty and elegance, getting elements of many of Asimov's short stories into it and wrapping up a story of vast scope in a decent 2-hour feature film format. I'm not the world's biggest Harlan fan, but this was a fine script. It, not what eventually got produced, is what deserved to be made.

-the other Doug

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Yes, Alex, I'll agree with you -- SFX seems to drive the stories, not serve them, in Hollywood these days. There are thousands upon thousands of decent, filmable sf stories out there that languish because they're not big, glittery SFX vehicles. And when someone does try to bring a good sf story to the screen, it ends up being chopped into mush by studios that want to add elements like wisecracking detectives and neat-o morphing robots to a classic tale such as "I, Robot."

The fundamental problem is that SF is, for all practical purposes, a niche market. Hollywood produces movies for mass marketing purposes, so it's really no surprise that good SF stories are mangled or even ignored. Indeed, it makes economic sense for Hollywood to produce its own story lines by eliminating the SF author from the equation. I'm reminded of the quote (paraphrasing) from the Tim Robbins character in Robert Altman's satire The Player: "If only we could eliminate all these directors and actors too, then we'd have something."