One of my oldest friends has been advising me on the possibility of making a film treatment out of my book and sending it to Hollywood to become the next “Project Hail Mary.” What immediately came to my mind was Hollywood taking the story and making the evil president, Donald Trump and making Bogey a leftist trans-woman. Yikes!
But what was surprising is that there is actually an AI capable of taking my story and converting it directly into a film treatment. And it has an enormous capability to annotate the details necessary for actually filming the thing. There are notes on casting each of the characters (appearance, age, personality, voice), locations, special effects, visual effects, weapons, special personnel (e.g., armorer), special equipment, weapons, etc.
And then it used the dialog from the book and adapted it for the screen; shortened and elided from it to bring the screen time into a realistic movie length.
Now I haven’t finished going through this document but so far what I’ve seen seems very interesting. It’s basically my book. And that’s exciting. I was assuming the story would be too long for a movie without very serious pruning of scenes that I’m attached to. But we’ll see.
Now, I’m aware that Hollywood doesn’t make movies from books that don’t sell millions of copies. They’re looking for a built-in fan base for their product. So, no studio in their right minds would take a chance on spending potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown story. But it’s always fun to dream about these things.
And that brings me to Andy Weir’s story. He self-published “The Martian” on Amazon and only eventually got a book deal when he had already built up an audience for it on his own. And now he has two hit movies made from his books. Think about that. Someone who couldn’t get a publishing contract ends up with a smash hit movie that everyone in Hollywood probably hates because it has a white guy as its hero and he doesn’t have the usual diversity cast to allow the movie to be an Oscar contender. They broke all of Hollywood’s rules to make this movie by not having a girl-boss as the hero surrounded by the usual multi-cultural struggle session ensemble. It just brings tears to my eyes.
Chances are I won’t be duplicating Weir’s experience. My book is not an uplifting tale of human endeavor. Mine is a tale of revenge and destruction. I openly attack the Left and my heroes are identifiable people on the Right. So, no. I won’t be getting a Hollywood deal. Ever!
But despite all that I’m excited about what is now happening in Hollywood. The Ellisons bought Paramount and have now shut down the travesty that was Star Trek – Star Fleet Academy. They’re buying Warner Brothers and they’ll probably shut down the people making terrible stuff like “Supergirl” that’s coming out soon. And now we see Amazon/MGM making stuff like “Project Hail Mary (PHM).” That’s a pretty good chunk of Hollywood already. And with PHM looking like it’s going to break the $600 million mark and become a big moneymaker, even places like Netflix and Disney will say to themselves, “Hey, why can’t we get into some of that “normal film-making” that those other guys are doing and make money for a change? Let’s call that photog guy and get an option on, “The Sniper” before the Ellisons scoop it up.”
Or something like that!
