If the movie Argo had really been made, would it have been any good IYHO?
Depends. Who would’ve been cast as Sam?
It’s a hard role to cast given the types of male leads that prevailed in the late 70s. Maybe Tmothy Bottoms?
Which “Argo”? As I pointed out recently, the real Argo was actually an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, with production concept drawings by Jack Kirby (!!!) It wasn’t at all the Strar Wars ripoff they portrayed in the film Argo.
Properly executed (especially if they did it now, with CGI – but they coulda made it thirty years ago with glass paintings and mattes) it could be awesome. But Hollywood has shown an infinite capacity for Screwing Things Up, so I can’t really say how it would turn out. It deprends on who did it, and how free a hand they got.
No… it would have been “Battle Beyond the Stars” level.
Thanks Cal! I hadn’t seen your discussion of it. BTW, I mean that they actually made the movei they had written the fake script for.
I’m not sure what you mean. “Lord of Light”, renamed “Argo”, was the film they had been planning to make, and which they made up storyboards for, and wrote a script for:
It wasn’t at all like the movie-within-a-movie faux Star Wars film depicted in the recent movie Argo, for which they seem to have written a completely different fake script.
(Full disclosure: Haven’t seen Argo yet) My OP was asking would *Lord of the Light *have been any good.
Darn…I was getting all excited for a Starblazers thread.
Love the novel. But I’m not sure how well it would have translated back in the day - it might of come off as pretty damn hokey.
It might be a bit more viable today given modern CGI. The problem is that it assumes either a very basic familiarity with Hindu and Buddhist mythology or at least the willingness to dive into it and look it up, which is obviously easier for a book than a film ;). Dumbing it down would weaken the story, but leaving it as is might lose a lot of Americans. It’s not a project I’d relish tackling if I was both a fan ( which I am ) and a filmmaker ( which I’m not ).
Still asking: who plays Sam?
Rutgers Hauer would have been a fine young Rild.
I meant Rutger goddamnit. Stupid iPad spelling corrections.
Which Sam? IIRC, he changes bodies at least three times during the book.
There was a recent Kickstarter to complete a documentary about the whole saga. Let’s see… oh, good, it got funded: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scifilandmovie/science-fiction-land-a-stranger-than-fiction-doc
Pick one!
If it happened the way they showed it in the movie, the SCRIPT wasn’t fake - they picked it out from a pile of other scripts. It was the PRODUCTION of that script that was fake.