It’s a great story.
The City on the Edge of Forever I believe to be the best Star Trek episode.
I have Ellison’s book on it. I’ll dig it up and read it again.
Yes, he is a great writer with a monumental ego.
From what I have read here and there about his career, Harlan Ellison has always seemed pretty consistent about fighting for maximum creative control of stuff with his name on it. “City on the Edge of Forever” is just the most publicized example. He seems to believe that, if his name is attached to something, he should be responsible for its content. And that’s not a battle that anyone else in Hollywood, or in publishing, can be relied on to fight for him. When he makes demands, it’s ego. But when the institutionalized studio apparatus makes demands, it’s just business.
He freely acknowledges his own monumental ego in the video. And that’s the thing, he isn’t necessarily bothered by Disney creating new, processed, sanitized versions of “Mary Poppins,” or “Pinocchio,” or what have you. He concedes: that’s what Disney does, they take a property, put their name on it, and make it their own. He actually gives a very good review of the movie-- probably better than it deserves, from the trailer. (What the hell kind of weird-ass accent are you drawling, Tom Hanks? Walt Disney was from Chicago, we know how he sounded, he was not Cajun as you seem to believe.)
But the movie “Saving Mr. Banks” isn’t really about creating a Disneyfied version of “Mary Poppins”-- it’s about creating a Disneyfied version of *P. L. Travers. * Here is an author who was famously dissatisfied with the treatment of her work by Disney; and here’s Disney, decades later, turning the author herself into a property, depicting her being jollied into a more conciliatory stance, where maybe being more open to the studio’s intentions isn’t such a bad idea after all.
I think that’s the point of Harlan Ellison’s outrage here, that Disney isn’t content to engulf intellectual properties; in this movie the studio is now flat-out engulfing the authors themselves, producing a smiling doppelganger who gently disavows the opinions the author held in life.
Thanks terentii, that was cool.
And yeah, I hope I live so long. Maybe is just to mean to die.
This reminds me of two stories about authors who found out their books were considered for being made into movies:
I saw Terry Brooks give a talk a couple of years ago and he mentioned how his *Landover *series was in negotiations (going nowhere) for movie rights. He said another author (I think it was George R. R. Martin) compared having your book made into a movie to having your children kidnapped by a cult.
Back in my college days, one of my professors casually tossed off one day that he had lunch with Lloyd Alexander, knowing that would make him the coolest person in the room. This was shortly after The Black Cauldron came out. The professor asked Lloyd Alexander how he felt about the movie, as it was…not great, to be polite. Mr. Alexander replied, “Well, the book is still there.”
Well, to be honest, it’s a cult that pays well for the privilege of performing the kidnapping.
And not every author objects. Robert Heinlein once said that the greatest writing he’d ever read was, “Pay to the order of Robert A. Heinlein”.
To be fair, Hollywood didn’t treat his works like they were toilet paper, and Disney never got the opportunity to give Valentine Michael Smith a cute furry talking animal sidekick.
coughstarship trooperscough
Of course that was well after his death, so he never got a chance to rue that one.
Exactly.
One very telling incident about Disney was his reaction to the unionization of his shop and the resulting strike. Disney’s attitude towards his own workers as parasitic communists, etc., made the strike inevitable. It was only resolved when he left the country for his Latin America tour. (Him getting away from the situation was probably a bigger reason for the tour than the official goodwill explanation.)
Most company bosses at the time were strongly anti-union (unlike today!), but Disney was especially difficult and far too public about it. He was far removed from the “Gentle Walt” image cultivated later.
I never read any of the Mary Poppins books and doubt that I will anytime soon. Are the biggest film:book differences in the tone or the characterization or the plot?
There really is no plot that I could discern in either the books or the movie; they’re both pretty episodic. In the movie, a lot of the subplots are covered verbally in the first few minutes during Bert’s one-man show, and the peripheral characters are just skipped over in the rest of the film.
As I recall, Bert himself is much more developed as a character in the movie. He’s really kind of kept in the background in the books.
The tone is very different in the books, at times ranging from slightly creepy to bad acid trip. I remember reading the first book alone in my apartment at two in the morning and having the heebie-jeebies when I got to the part where they visit the zoo. The image of Mary conversing with a serpent just freaked me out!
Walt actually grew up in Marceline, Missouri. As a native of southern Iowa, about as far south as one can go with actually being in Missouri*, I can assure you that accents in that part of the world can sound very Southern indeed. Probably not Cajun, exactly, but drawling, yes.
Perhaps the trailer doesn’t do Hanks’ dialect work justice. After seeing the movie, I could buy him as a Missourian. He had a dialect coach in the credits, after all - hopefully not the same one who might have worked with Dick Van Dyke, though.
He didn’t quite work as a doppelgänger of Disney (they actually show the iconic photo in the movie of Walt riding the little train, and it’s jarring to see Hanks’ face pasted over it), but as a type of representation of Disney, I thought he did quite well. Emma Thompson, though, is absolutely amazing as Travers.
- Which brings to mind the old joke, if only Iowa would give its southern row of counties to Missouri, it would end up raising the total IQ of both states.
I’ve heard the joke about Arkansas and Texas.
I hadn’t considered that. But still, we know what Disney sounded like! Don’t we? He was on TV, we have recordings! He had a pretty neutral Midwestern accent, at least to my unskilled ear.
Here’s a segment from one of his TV presentations. Maybe I’m doing Tom Hanks an injustice, but they don’t sound anywhere near the same to me.
On the other hand, I suppose it’s possible that Disney’s performance voice was different from his normal speaking voice, and he sounded more Southern in private. I don’t think I trust this movie to give me the straight dope on that either, though.
Well, I’m sure somebody thought it was a brilliant idea: “Let’s have America’s most beloved actor portray America’s most beloved theme park impresario!” But I can’t watch the trailer and see anybody other than Tom Hanks. This seems to be a trend lately, of famous historical personages being portrayed by high-profile actors who do not particularly resemble them. Personally I blame Anthony Hopkins.
Mary Poppins is a Slytherin? :eek:
James M. Cain said the same thing in regards to a query about Hollywood ruining his books: “What do you mean?” he replied, pointing to his library. “They’re right over there.”
Stephen King said the best thing that can happen is for your book to keep getting optioned with the movie never being made.
Actually, at times it seems that she would fit right in as a Slytherin.
Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Both. The book Mary Poppins doesn’t come across as fun-loving at all, to the kids, she is actually very stern, even unpleasant (very in keeping with a nanny of the time period) and a recurring theme is that the kids will reference some magical adventure after the fact and she will pretty much accuse them of lying (at least once, there’s even a mild punishment for the lying, like being sent to bed early). This stressed me out as a kid, it was like one perpetual gaslighting of Jane and Michael, although reading them as an adult, I can see that there is a very dry, wry, winking subtext present. You might be thinking “huh, he movie has that same tone” but in the books it’s really extreme.
Several of the adventures get darker and scarier in parts, more like Willy Wonka than Disney.
The mythology of the books is neat, it’s not very cartoony at all, and has more of a cosmic, almost like a spiritualist view of the supernatural. Again, I think this is true to the time period in which they’re set, you can see a George MacDonald influence on the whole thing. In the latter books in the series, it’s layered on thick.
Yeah, better let the movie feature how adaptations he opposed resulted in fat profits and satisfied audiences, while the Angry Author rails away. More credible.
I actually liked his linked review video. Very much himself but also nothing in there to which an intellectually honest person in the corporate world should take offense (of course he may say there is no such person).
He Of The Trademarked Name has for his whole life rather preferred to know he is right than to be told he’s approved of, whatever it costs him. He knows Hollywood would rather go for a mushy “can’t we all just get along”, “both sides have their good points on this” scenario when, he’ll argue, sometimes one side is just flat out wrong and the other is just flat out right and the story should be told that way and so what if it upsets the marketing department.