How Hollywood’s Unoriginality Could Revive Great Ideas

Hollywood is adaption-crazy. This is somewhat understandable: Hollywood is risk-adverse and adaptions build buzz. Could you imagine “The Hunger Games” done without the book buzz behind it? The recent spate of “Fairy Tale” adaptions is a case of a seemingly safe trend, one that delivers and gets people’s attention (“It’s Hansel And Grettel In SPACE!”)

However at some point, Hollywood is going to tap a lot of big adaptions out as well as strip-mine our culture. Admittedly I see it taking 5-10 years, but somewhere in that point they might start looking at “lesser” properties. Such properties may be easily available, have enough buzz/mindshare to be worth it, and after awhile people may just be sick of “remade from something I heard of before.”

This is something I think could be a good thing.

There’s many things I remember reading and seeing over the years that may not be famous, but could make delightful adaptions.

“The Cenotaph Road” series by Robert Vardeman, erratic in quality (and at times taste), the simple idea is a series of fantasy worlds connected by the tombs of heroes, whose heroism leads to a gate between realities. Yeah, “Sliders” with giant spiders and headstrong heroes, money in the bank.

Or the “McGill Feighan” series by Kevin O’Donnell. A series where an infant is temporarily kidnapped and swallowed by an amoeboid alien who then just let him go? The infant grows up to be a “Flinger,” natural teleporters who bind a rather erratic galactic alliance together? The fact that his kidnapper may have been sent by a being some think of as God? Yeah, sign me up!

I’m sure you have a lesser-known, obscure, but brilliant property you’d love to see adapted. I can see Hollywood, when the Big Names have played out and the big trends have disappointed them, taking a look back. I can see them seeking for that mixture of “tested” but not “big name.”

This could actually be good. It brings attention to things that deserve it, and it may, if possible, force Hollywood to consider that horrible thing “originality.”

OK maybe I’m going a bit far, but still, a man can dream.

If this trend happens, you, progeeks, might be there to make it work.  You know the obscure properties, the technologies, the marketing potential.  Heck, you might even be able to prepare some public-domain projects now . . .

So what out there is obscure but worth Hollywood attention?

- Steven Savage

 

Steven Savage Steven Savage (2027 Posts)

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.


  • http://www.genjipress.com/ Serdar (GenjiPress)

    I could easily fill a page this long with suggestions. Theodore Sturgeon’s “More Than Human”; Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My Destination” and “The Demolished Man” (both of which were in dev hell for years on end); live-action adaptations of some of Osamu Tezuka’s gekiga properties (“Ode to Kirihito”), or even a “Dark Knight”-styled adaptation of “Black Jack” (!);  live-action versions of “Berserk”, “Claymore”, “Moribito”, “Vampire Hunter D”, “Dirty Pair”, Hiroki Endo’s apocalyptic “Eden”, the “Mardock Scramble” cycle, the long-debated “Ghost in the Shell” live-action feature, “Soul Eater” with Tim Burton at the helm, or “Princess Jellyfish”; some of Hubert Selby, Jr.’s later works (“The Demon”, “The Room” [not to be confused with THAT other movie]); Evgeny Zamyatin’s seminal dystopia “WE”; an HBO-sized adaptation of “The Brothers Karamazov”, the better to take the taste of the Yul Brynner version out of our mouths; Natsuo Kirino’s thriller “Out” (which was made into a bad film version in Japan, but could be cross-adapted well); Austin Tappan Wright’s “Islandia”; Larry Marder’s “Beanworld”; Natsume Ono’s “not simple”; a proper live-action rendition of “No Longer Human”; some of Daniel M. Pinkwater’s gloriously subversive young-adult novels, like “Alan Mendelson, the Boy from Mars”…

    … and that’s just from looking at the shelf behind me.

    • Steven Savage

      Weirdly, this unoriignality could work out.

      Also I could see a Soul Eater live adaption if you got some talented kids and worked on the goth-meets-HP vibe.  Also for some reason I imagine Lucy Lawless as Medusa, because awesome.

  • Scott D

    And let’s add TV here.  Although television tends to re-use certain genres (has there ever been a TV season without a police drama since “Dragnet” first aired?), it, too, has been getting into the adaptation business.  And some larger works are better off done as series instead of one-off movies.

    What I’d like to see:  RPG settings adapted.  ”Shadowrun” has a format that works well for episodic series (the weekly hit on a megacorp’s facility) and a rich background that has been developed for over 20 years.  Dream Pod 9′s “Heavy Gear” could work for both a TV series and a movie with rich visuals and, again, a well-developed setting.  ”Hellcats & Hockeysticks” is one part “Charmed”, one part St. Trinians, and would work well on TV with its low-powered approach to magic (thus, lower budget needed there).

    Looking in the literature field, CE Murphy’s “Urban Shaman” series would be great as an ongoing TV series.

    • Steven Savage

      I can see Shadowrun making it on HBO or Syfy.  It could be a chance to build on a crossover revival.

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