25% of the #1 fan of Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages in the world. I scream into the void about movies, video games, and animation, plus whatever else. | she/her
Honestly, after reading the alleged script for Ridley Scott’s version and the few bits of the original Steve Tesich script that are publicly available to read, the bar for an adaptation is truly in hell and I think it could only go up from here. In my opinion, if the movie somehow does get made it doesn’t have to be amazing, it just has to stop other people from trying and probably doing it even worse. I guess this news means that McCarthy didn’t get far into his script after all, though they didn’t say either way, perhaps Logan is finishing what McCarthy started.
I’m in the camp that thinks a BM adaptation should be animated so 1. Holden can look completely accurate to the book’s description and 2. I think it would capture the various sublime landscapes that are written about much better than shooting deserts literally in live-action, but considering how we’re only now moving more away from most adult animated things in America having to be comedies, it would probably be even harder to get an animated version off the ground.
I have an idea for how people who are really deep into true crime content can get their fix more ethically (not that I think all stuff that discusses true crime does so insensitively, but you gotta admit much of it does):
A podcast, video series, whatever that takes fictional serial killers and pretends like they’re real people, and it can satirize true crime fandom tendencies, the media that it’s referencing, etc. An example could go something like this,
“Hannibal Lecter’s story begins far, far away in the castle he called home, which lay within a forest of Lithuania…”
“Lecter lived in a castle? What was he, a goddamn prince?”
“He was a lord, not a prince. His father was a count.”
“Sounds made-up, but keep going.”
If this has been done already, tell me. I think this could be a gold-mine for humor.
A classy advertisement for a grand strategy game called Fantasy Knight, released by SystemSoft in 1987 for the PC-98. Taken from the October 1987 issue of POPCOM.
all these retro style games that are like "NO tutorials NO handholding" apparently forgot about the little books that used to come with your game that detailed all the mechanics, controls, special moves, lore, maps, collectables, means of unlocking additional content, character bios, etc
LAIKA Studios to Produce Movie Adaptation of Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger"
President and CEO of the animation studio LAIKA, Travis Knight, has recently revealed that the company has entered pre-production on their seventh feature film following the upcoming Wildwood, which is to be based on Mark Twain's unfinished story most commonly known as The Mysterious Stranger.
This dark tale by the seminal American author has several different versions of varying completeness, but are each united by the common premise of the titular mysterious stranger appearing in a small town and using his powers to expose the moral hypocrisies of many of its denizens just beneath the surface. Elements of the story were most famously adapted by LAIKA'S own predecessor, Will Vinton Studios, for the 1985 film The Adventures of Mark Twain, and now, nearly 40 years later, Knight and producer Arianne Sutner plan on revisiting and celebrating the studio's roots.
No director or writers have been selected yet, but Knight and Sutner have both made it clear in their announcement that they plan on following both Twain and Vinton's lead by pushing the envelope content-wise on what LAIKA has done before:
"Millions of people across the internet have watched and spread around The Mysterious Stranger segment from Will's movie," said Knight, who joined Will Vinton Studios as an intern following both his father, Nike co-founder Phil Knight, becoming an investor in the studio and the failure of his rap career under the stage name "Chilly Tee". "People are drawn to things that seem happy on the outside but are a lot more complicated inside, and many of our movies since we restructured into LAIKA have played on that fascination. But now with adult-oriented American animation becoming more accepted beyond sitcoms, we're ready to take things a step further."
Knight and Sutner have assured that no matter what choices they might take in adapting The Mysterious Stranger to the big screen, they won't hold back on the various versions' scathing criticisms of religion and society. "It'll probably get us a PG-13 rating if we put in all that death, existentialism, and heated discussions about God," admitted Sutner. "We might take a slightly different approach to reflect on how things have or haven't changed since Samuel Clemens’s days, but we're not going to soft-pedal the themes to avoid offending some people. It's hopefully going to start some conversations."
Lastly, Knight and Sutner stated that while they'll primarily be drawing from Twain's writings for their adaptation, fans of The Adventures of Mark Twain can expect to see some nods to it in the final product.
"I think Will was pretty mad at me and my dad till the day he died," said Knight, referring to Vinton's ousting from his studio in the early 2000's when he struggled to raise finances, "but I hope now more than ever to do right be him with this new movie."
I recently found a pdf of an alleged Blood Meridian movie script written by a guy named William Monahan for Ridley Scott's attempt to make the movie, and let me tell ya, it is truly something else. At first, I refused to believe that it could be real because of some atrocious dialogue and truly baffling changes from the novel. I thought that it MUST have either been written as a prank or it was an amateur trying to pass it off as real, but on Twitter I talked to the guy who leaked the script online in the first place and now I'm more inclined to think that, unfortunately, it was legitimate.
Below are screenshots of some of the worst parts. You'll notice that a lot of the text is in red, but I think it must have been somebody on the Cormac McCarthy forums, where this comes from, highlighting some of the differences from the book, but this was the only pdf I could find so whatever. I also put in a few handwritten notes to express my frustration haha.
If you want to look at the full thing yourself, you can find it here, but I should warn you in advance that on top of the usual Blood Meridian type of violence that you would expect, the screenwriter also put in a sprinkle of random homophobia and underage sex which was NOT in the book and I will be showing those screenshots last with another warning so you know where they are in the script and can avoid it if you want to.
Okay, this part gave me a chuckle. Maybe it's not the best time for a joke from the Judge, though:
These next two come from the ending, which, if you were already aware of this script's existence, you probably heard about because it's the most infamous part. For those who don't know, the screenwriter decides to put in a bizarrely happy ending where the Kid slays the Judge in the jakes and adopts Randall, the brother of the boy that the Kid killed in self-defense (and there's no significant time skip in this version, so the Kid is in his late teens at most probably):
This random fucking nugget of homophobia is on page 32 of the script. I have no idea what this was in here for since it never comes up again and the script leaves out most of the children going missing or being found dead along the way:
And here's the Kid having sex because the screenwriter in their infinite wisdom decided that was missing from the Blood Meridian experience, it's on page 70:
So yeah, good thing this particular adaptation never got made. I just picked the screenshots that were the most obviously awful, but the biggest problems with the script are a very rushed opening act that compresses a bunch of story elements and character introductions to the point of confusion plus the cringy saccharine happy ending that was part of the reason why I thought the script was a joke at first. When the script adheres closer to the book, mostly in the middle, it's not the worst thing in the world. It has a few clever bits of streamlining the book and most of the characters sound like themselves, though the biggest problem there is that the Judge feels like a different character.
Someday I hope to read other scripts trying to adapt the movie from Steve Tesich, James Franco, and Tommy Lee Jones to see how each of them tackled the book, though to my knowledge none are publicly available online, but do let me know they are somewhere and you can lead me to it. This particular effort has set the bar very low.
Most of all I want to know if Cormac McCarthy wrote a complete draft of his attempt before he died. If this latest attempt to make the movie falls through, I hope that the script, if it exists, is released to the public so we can see what would certainly be one of the last things he wrote.
I’ve never seen a Scream movie, but one thing I wonder about in that universe is whether there’s a Roger L. Jackson equivalent character who provided the synthetic voice that all the Ghostface killers use, and if so, how would he react to the knowledge - if he were alive, that is - that not one, not two, but like a dozen or more people have used his voice to cover their identities and commit murders. That would be like if there were serial killers out there who used Hatsune Miku’s voice, if I were Saki Fujita in that situation I would become a hermit.
Last night I was watching the interviews with the directors of the Memories anime from before the movie came out, and when they showed Katsuhiro Otomo’s workspace I noticed he had Inside Out with Gadget on his bookshelf!
The book would have just come out while Otomo and the rest were still working on the movie. I’m not surprised at all he would’ve bought it, what with all the cool sci-fi machines and retrofuture architecture. I wonder if he played the games, too… Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize any of the other books they showed.
a commission i did for @oneinathousand to draw how i interpret Elena Hausmann from GADGET: The Third Force :] i loved designing her so much. ty buddy for commissioning me <3