There's a book that I'm reading these days, and will soon Word Bomb. It's called The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. It's by David Hughes, and I haven't even finished it completely and yet it's already compelling me to write about it.

I've reached a decision. And that decision is there should be a moratorium on literary adaptations of books for five years.

Yes, you heard right. Five years. Let them remake every 70's sitcom, every Hammer film, every Shakespearean play set this time around in a modern day preschool. I don't care.

Now--why would I propose such a startling (and yes, perhaps silly) notion as this?

Well, it's because I'm just so sick and goddamn tired of watching really great ideas from books get slashed. Oh, I was jaded before--one whiff of Mark Protosevich's I Am Legend and I knew it was all lost. How you can be so afraid of vampries that you turn them into something "new" called "Hemocytes" I have no freaking clue. And yet, the heroes of Journey to the Centre of the Earth--the new cinematic version in development--will meet vampires underground. Why? Because I guess it sounded cool to some brainless exec somewhere.

So this is not a new concept to me. We've all seen what they do to adaptations of books. Hell, go engage Doc in the message boards about the beauty of the Starship Troopers movie. Just be sure to duck when the broken vodka bottles start flying.

But to have so many examples in one place--? Maybe that's it? No. I used to work at a website where I had to report on these kind of travesties daily.

It's the fact that over...and over...and over..."We really felt like it captured the essence of the book" or "We just knew that this was the draft that would do it" and so forth and so on. You will be amazed by this book in that it will open your eyes to the incessant delusional capability of people in Hollywood to think they can improve on books.

Now I'm not saying it can't be done. But don't just replace something because you can. My favorite example is Stand By Me, which was a marked improvement on Stephen King's "The Body." But you find one thing that Richard Matheson screwed up in Legend and convince me that your version would do it better and I'll buy you a drink.

But I know you want to know about the five years bit. Well, there's two bits of method to my madness.

First, I've decided that the only way a faithful rendition of a book can be brought to the screen is if you have one driving maniac behind the scenes who can have the sheer force of will to bring it off. With Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson is that force. With Harry Potter, there is none--it's an excpetion--Warner Brothers' brass just understands that if they botch it, millions of angry children will storm their estates and eviscerate them with toothpicks. But who's going to champion the I Am Legend movie? Or Blood Music? Or Snow Crash? No one. Right now it takes lots of coin to be able to pull off a movie.

But...in five years all of that is going to begin to change. The sophistication of movies being produced and featured on the Net leads me to believe that what filmmakers need to do is nab the rights to their favorite novel (that might be the most difficult part of the process)--then film the damn thing. Start to finish. Not by committee. Not by some kind of democratic voting process. Just one person, or a closely knit group of people, making their dream a reality.

Hollywood, as part of the Paradigm Shift, is going to have some nice bouts with death throes--and they'll still have their place. But someone's going to figure out how to make a small-budgeted version of Harrow Alley, say (although it's a script and not a book--but still, I wouldn't trust it to Hollywood to do it right), and make money off of it.

Imagine if you could make your version of The Stand. Of Childhood's End. Hell, an Pixaresque animated Flatland. Who cares?

It's coming. When the dust clears, we can all slave over stuff that we love--and get it away from the bastards who just love money. And you know what? I bet in the end we get the love and the money. And then we can leave them wondering how we did it.

Because we'll never tell.

Be good.

=Widge.