I would like to make a proper Super Mario Bros. movie, or TV series. Animated.
Fantastic book, but would make a terrible movie, too much talking and exposition. Many great books would not convert well into film. Glory Road would make a great film, as would Tunnel in the Sky.
I’d love to see a good biopic of Colonel Tom Blood, although I would really have wanted George MacDonald Fraser to write the screenplay. I’d love to see what he would have written for the scene between Blood and Charles II after the incident with the crown jewels.
I’d also like to see someone do a real bronze-age-correct movie about the Trojan war.
I frequently see this sort of accusation, but it doesn’t necesssarily hold. Nobody requires you to translate sl og Heinlein’s poitical discussions onto the screen. There’s plenty of action and physical activity to carry a film, and extensive discussions aren’t essential to the plot. I think it’d make a great film, properly handled.
I’m especially interested because I’d like for someone to properly portray lunar low gravity indoors, for once. The indoor scenes of Moon and Moon Zero Two and First Men in the Moon and Space: 1999 and even the highly-regarded 2001 depicted standard earth gravity.
I feel that you’re implying Coon probably read Brown’s story and took the idea from it. I was saying that I feel it’s believable that Coon came up with the idea independently without having been aware of Brown’s story beforehand.
You need to read more carefully – I implied that he started writing the story first, then learned of it through the legal department. How could this possibly be any clearer:
I’d love to see a really good biblical-historical epic about Saul and David as told in II Samuel. Seriously, what a freaking awesome movie! It’s got it all! Love, betrayal, war (insurgency!), it’s got a witch! It’s one of the few Bible stories that really hangs together as a good story, revisiting characters and such.
The TV show Kings was a noble effort but every time Ian McShane wasn’t on screen chewing scenery I remembered how it wasn’t very good at all.
Watching the recent Thor movie, good effects, lackluster script, I couldn’t help think that they now had the technology to shoot Zelazny’s Lord of Light or Creatures of Light and Darkness. Either would be great movies.
I want a Rendezvous with Rama movie so bad that I keep wanting it even though I know they’ll completely fuck it up.
At this point, I’d really rather no one tried to do a Childhood’s End movie, because it would seem lame and trite and people would think it was a rip-off of too many things.
Apparently I misunderstood your intent. When you said that somebody “noticed the similarity” I thought you were implying that Coon got caught copying Brown’s idea.
If you feel that Coon came up with the idea without copying Brown, what was all this about?
The only way this appears relevant is if you’re trying to make the case that Coon must have known Brown’s story before writing his own.
My apologies if I misunderstood you. But I thought what you were basically saying was “I’m not Gene Coon so I can’t prove that he copied Frederic Brown’s story. But here’s all the evidence that that’s what he did.”
Or Jack of Shadows.
I loved most of the landscapes in LotR but the small Anduin (going through a jungly forest nonetheless) was the biggest thing that sticks out IMO. I was also bugged by the CGI rocks, the bottom of the Fangorn looking pretty artificial (not that I would know), the waters of the Shire not looking like I imagine them in England, and the lava stones stuck all over the plains of Rohan.
But these are flaws in a movie whose landscape was the best I’ve ever seen. The Misty Mountains were even better than I had imagined them (as Alps): they looked just as imposing as they were meant to be, considering they were created by Sauron’s master to impede the forces of good.
No, I was suggesting that he should have been aware of the story – or someone there at the Star Trek franchise should have, before the legal folks tipped them off. It’s not as if Roddenberry was working i a vaxcuum – he was searching through SF magazines and stories for background, and his first two seasons were characterized by scripts by a number of well-known Sf writers (Jerome Bixby, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch) and up-and-comers (Norman Spinrad, David Gerrold)
Just recently watched the Ken Burn’s documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright. What an utterly fascinating man. An unimaginable genius and a complete asshole. Such a complex character would make an excellent biopic. There’s enough drama, heartbreak and triumph in this story to match any biopic I’ve seen in recent years.
I’m a huge fan of the “Bloody Jack” series by L.A. Meyer (which if you haven’t read them, but you like teenage girl pirates who are constantly up to shennanigans then you MUST read the series 
) and I’d LOVE to see this series made into a movie if they could only find the right girl to play Mary Alsop aka Jacky Faber.
A movie about Jack Churchill, you’d have to tone it down or no one would believe it’s true.
I wouldn’t mind a Forbidden Planet remake with better acting and less woooooooooooooo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo sound effects.
I’d really love to see the Mars trilogy made into a trio of miniseries (or one lone epic miniseries). Of course the dates would need to be changed and several of the Russian characters would need to become Chinese.
Do you have any idea of how many SF 'zines were out back in those days? Each churning out a dozen stories a month? His stroy was published in 1944. It wasn’t collected until 1970, likely due to it’s inclusion in the 1967 ToS epi.
There’s no freaken way anyone could have been aware of such a obscure story from a more or less little known author*? (Most famous for The Shortest Horror Story).
- I am not demeaning him. There were so many greats back then that Brown could hardly shine in comparison.
Back to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Likely RAH’s best loved book. But only a handful of his books have made it into film, and none are beloved by RAH’s fans (altho there are some that said good things about Destination Moon, but it’s so very dated today). It also just won’t make a great film (the same with the Foundation series). Maybe a mini-series, yes. Still, few great SF books actually make great SF films. 2001, Do Androids Dream… not so many others.