Harry here, and boy is this a can of worms that I can just see spilling on for a few hundred 'K' in TALK BACK. It seems that everytime Heinlein is cracked open for use as a film... well... the source material is beat to hell. Now I happen to like STARSHIP TROOPERS as a film, but hate it as a book adaptation. These are two separate beasts. One is literary the other is cinematic. Out of curiousity what could you live with in changes or differences. What do you see as necessary vs unnecessary changes in adapting THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS from novel to film? Terry Rossio and the WordPlayer site are both quite adept at explaining the process, and Terry is quite a talented screenwriter. If only PRINCESS OF MARS had moved forward instead of dying the death at Disney's rour fingered grasp. Sigh....
I found a tid-bit of movie news I thought you may be interested in. It seems that Dreamworks is in the process of developing a movie from Robert A. Heinlein's sci-fi novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". If you don't who Robert Heinlein is, it's his books that became "The Puppet Masters" and a little movie called "Starship Troopers", both being (in my opinion) horrible. Both movies completley missed the point of the novels, and instead of being a "smart" movie like the books are, were dumbed down because the studios think we are a bunch of drooling morons who like explosions and gooey-slimy-alien-secreted-stuff in our sci-fi!!
Anyways, the point is, I found out the script is being written by Terry Rossio, who I then found out is a BIG Heinlein fan (and also helped to develop the script for "The Puppet Masters" - you can read an cool column written by Mr Rossio about his trials with writing the original Puppet Master scripts at The WORDPLAYER.COM site - this is an excellent example, from a screenwriter's point-of-view, of how a great script can be turned into a piece of garbage by the studio).
I know you Harry are passionate about good scripts getting the boot. Well please post this so it doesn't happen once again! TMisaHM is a great book, and doesn't need explosions or alien goo to be a movie. After all, great sci-fi is simply a great story set in the future (Star Wars anyone?). And it looks like this movie has a good chance right from the start, so please you studio hacks, don't fuck this Heinlein novel up as well? Please?
The Advocate General
