TV I love Misfits, E4's comedy drama about special humans in orange boiler suits so when I heard that the creator, Howard Overman, had been commissioned to adapt Douglas's Dirk Gently books, I was optimistic.
Then I read this quote he's given to SFX Magazine:
“What I did was take the character, Dirk Gently, and his detection method, and write a new story. It has elements from the book, obviously, in it, but it’s kind of a different story. Because if you’ve ever read the book, the story in there isn’t really adaptable for TV. Especially not on the budget we’ve been made to do it on, because it involves an alien planet and all sorts of weird and wacky ideas."
Let's review that sentence again:
"the story in there isn’t really adaptable for TV. Especially not on the budget we’ve been made to do it on, because it involves an alien planet and all sorts of weird and wacky ideas."
Harumph. Oh well, we'll see. But aren't the "all sorts of weird and wacky ideas" in Douglas's writing
the point? I bet the Electric Monk was the first thing to go ...
3 comments:
I'm rather cheered by this news. I was resigned to an "interesting" but disappointing adaptation; this way we get a new Dirk Gently story and one that is written for the screen rather than for stringing together the ideas from the novel that could have survived the transfer.
And presumably the "alien planet" is the Monk's, so if it's gone I think you've made a safe bet.
True, except as I said in the post, with Douglas the weird and wacky ideas are everything. There reason there are so few books is because he wrote and rewrote and rewrote until he'd reached the sense of what he was trying to say.
But it seems like Overman is treating it like AN other genre adaptation with the view to a longer series which just seems like a disservice to the material which should be treated like a literary adaptation, I think.
In other words, if the Monk has gone, it stops having anything to do with Douglas Adams.
Weird and wacky ideas can come in film-able variety as well as the impossible (or very, very improbable) to film variety. Is Overman rejecting both varieties? Perhaps, but I hope not. I agree the weird and wacky ideas are everything, but I'm sure I'd be disappointed by any attempt to realise the Electric Monk other than by hearing his inner dialogue. It's not a visual joke.
The irony in the fact that Adams wrote and rewrote is, as we know, that the first book has already been made for screen (ie City of Death and Shada) and that the rewriting was to make the story work (to a greater or lesser extent) as a novel. If Adams written DG as TV rather than a book, wouldn't it have been very different? (In the same way the HHGG the novel was very different, being an adaptation, to So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, being original)
The radio series didn't do it at all for me. It was "faithful" (although the changes made didn't actually seem to be necessary to serve the medium and certainly didn't imporve the story) but I'd rather hear Adams' reading of the novel so what was the point.
So if Overman is going to take a Douglas Adams character and a Douglas Adams situation, and can add to it to make something good, I'd still say it had something to do with Douglas Adams even if there's no Monk.
But I'm probably being over optimistic; a good non-Adams adaptation of Adams would be a first.
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