Li'l story. So I've got this friend. Agent at William Morris. He sent one of my scripts out, got me some meetings, never did end up getting me a manager. We're having lunch and he says "The way you get a spec script made these days is you throw it at a comic company. You pay for it, they make it, they don't even need to publish it before somebody buys it." "For serious? How much that cost?" "Anywhere from five grand to five hundred. Why?" "'cuz I could probably get my producer to spring for a graphic novel on this other script." 'K. Give it to me and let's see what we can do." "I don't even read graphic novels." "But you have, right?" "Yeah, but I pretty much bailed at Watchmen, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Miller's Batman Returns." "Well, at least you ended on a high note. Hang on a sec." (Proceeds to leave the room and return with a filing box, open three cabinets and absolutely stuff them to the gills with graphic novels) "Here, take these. Keep them." "Damn. You sure?" "They're client samples. If you could carry another box I'd give you another box." * * * And that's how I ended up being courted by Viper, Top Cow, Xenescape, Xene*scope*, Asylum and a half-dozen others… but why my graphic novel experience is pretty spotty. Thing about Moebius - Influential? yes. Readable? no. Airtight Garage is straight-up meaningless and while you can see Blade Runner happening in the Nikopol trilogy, you aren't really that touched by anything that happens. Good friend of mine trained under Juan Gimenez. We keep trying to adapt Goodbye Soldier, and I keep pointing out to him that no less than three different directors have already done Goodbye Soldier as a short film, many of them with really big budgets and, like, Cillian Murphy.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, I'll concede the point on Moebius. The drawing was always of higher quality than the writing and I can see how the lack of a real story in a lot of the work could turn people off. The influence his work had on world building though, is important, I think. I like Airtight Garage but it has that weird Jumanji vibe, what with the dude in the pith helmet. So, is the whole comic/graphic novel adaptation thing slowing down at all? I think an adaptation of DMZ or *Y: The Last Man might be pretty good.
It's completely fucking dead, in fact. Between 2007 and 2009, it worked like this: 1) write a spec script. 2) pay a company like Top Cow to make it. 3) Give Top Cow's work product back to William Morris (CAA had their own department; endeavor didn't) 4) William morris shows it around and some studio somewhere options it 5) William Morris makes 10% of the option money, their writers go on to get meetings and maybe a few other assignments, the project gets shelved where it's never seen again, everyone makes money and nobody has to make a movie. Ari Emmanuel wasn't into it so when Endeavor took over WMA that whole thing stopped. Put it this way: James Cameron made Avatar because it was easier to get greenlit than Battle Angel Alita. Read that again: The guy who brought you movie cyborgs and* titanic can't get money for a movie about a cyborg chick.* Probably because Dark Angel didn't accomplish much other than launching Jessica Alba on us.
Here's the difference:: By the time Hollywood took an interest in The Hunger Games it had sold a million copies. By the time Hollywood took an interest in Twilight, all three books had been written and sold millions of copies. By the time Hollywood took an interest in 50 Shades, it had sold millions of copies. By the time Timur Bekmambetov told a couple buddies of mine to "find a graphic novel to adapt" Wanted had sold less than 5,000 copies. Da Vinci Code? Da Vinci Code is gonna be a movie. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is gonna be a movie. Graphic novels were a short-lived end-run around the "public approval process" whereby studios could be cajoled into making an unknown property without first having an overwhelming tide of public acceptance in place. I heard the chairman of DC comics say that the entire comic-buying public is less than 125,000 people and that if they need to piss off that demographic to get 2.5 million people to watch Green Lantern, they'll do it in a heartbeat. Comics have always been seen as a harbinger of the edge but after 2009 not even that was enough. Mark Millar made it out of the ghetto just in time but everybody else is stuck there. If you aren't Marvel or DC, nobody cares. I first started flirting with Archaia in 2008. Since then, they've gotten one (1) property set up at a studio. You've never heard of it, and you never will.
I guess I can understand DC's stance and also the movie studios' stance. I've read a couple things from Archaia. It seems like a nice little comics company. I'm surprised by the number of the comic-buying public, but I guess comic book characters have been present in cartoons and on merchandise for so long that some of them are bound to be present in the public consciousness, whether or not people have actually bought comic books.