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 \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Yikes!<\/p>\n
But what was surprising is that there is actually an AI capable of taking my story and converting it directly into a film treatment.\u00a0 And it has an enormous capability to annotate the details necessary for actually filming the thing.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now I haven\u2019t finished going through this document but so far what I\u2019ve seen seems very interesting.\u00a0 It\u2019s basically my book.\u00a0 And that\u2019s exciting.\u00a0 I was assuming the story would be too long for a movie without very serious pruning of scenes that I\u2019m attached to.\u00a0 But we\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n
Now, I\u2019m aware that Hollywood doesn\u2019t make movies from books that don\u2019t sell millions of copies.\u00a0 They\u2019re looking for a built-in fan base for their product.\u00a0 So, no studio in their right minds would take a chance on spending potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown story.\u00a0 But it\u2019s always fun to dream about these things.<\/p>\n
And that brings me to Andy Weir\u2019s story.\u00a0 He self-published \u201cThe Martian\u201d on Amazon and only eventually got a book deal when he had already built up an audience for it on his own.\u00a0 And now he has two hit movies made from his books.\u00a0 Think about that.\u00a0 Someone who couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t have the usual diversity cast to allow the movie to be an Oscar contender.\u00a0 They broke all of Hollywood\u2019s rules to make this movie by not having a girl-boss as the hero surrounded by the usual multi-cultural struggle session ensemble.\u00a0 It just brings tears to my eyes.<\/p>\n
Chances are I won\u2019t be duplicating Weir\u2019s experience.\u00a0 My book is not an uplifting tale of human endeavor.\u00a0 Mine is a tale of revenge and destruction.\u00a0 I openly attack the Left and my heroes are identifiable people on the Right.\u00a0 So, no.\u00a0 I won\u2019t be getting a Hollywood deal.\u00a0 Ever!<\/p>\n
But despite all that I\u2019m excited about what is now happening in Hollywood.\u00a0 The Ellisons bought Paramount and have now shut down the travesty that was Star Trek \u2013 Star Fleet Academy.\u00a0 They\u2019re buying Warner Brothers and they\u2019ll probably shut down the people making terrible stuff like \u201cSupergirl\u201d that\u2019s coming out soon.\u00a0 And now we see Amazon\/MGM making stuff like \u201cProject Hail Mary (PHM).\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s a pretty good chunk of Hollywood already.\u00a0 And with PHM looking like it\u2019s going to break the $600 million mark and become a big moneymaker, even places like Netflix and Disney will say to themselves, \u201cHey, why can\u2019t we get into some of that \u201cnormal film-making\u201d that those other guys are doing and make money for a change?\u00a0 Let\u2019s call that photog guy and get an option on, \u201cThe Sniper\u201d before the Ellisons scoop it up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or something like that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,239,1289,1263,237,4,242,243],"tags":[4729,1290,5168,4484],"class_list":["post-36596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-movie-reviews","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-movies","tag-my-fiction","tag-project-hail-mary","tag-the-american-archipelago-book-1-the-sniper"],"yoast_head":"\n