I don’t think I’ll be working with Hollywood anytime soon:
We’re not gonna lie, after watching the cringe-worthy “Iliad” scene from J.Lo’s new movie “The Boy Next Door” we wept for humanity a bit. Then, like the rest of the world we wondered “How the heck did this happen? Is Hollywood really that stupid?”
In case you missed it, the awful scene shows J.Lo’s hunky love interest / psychotic neighbor giving her a “first edition” copy of Homer’s The Iliad. You know, that epic 3,000-year-old-ish poem he wrote. The one in which the oldest version, called the Venetus A, dates back to the 10th century? Yeah. The “first edition” seen in the movie is clearly not 3,000 years old.
We just couldn’t let it go (seriously, The Iliad? Pick ANY
other book), so we contacted the screenwriter, Barbara Curry, a former
Assistant U.S. Attorney, and asked her point blank: “WTF happened?”Turns out writers aren’t that dumb. But Hollywood producers are.
“Much of my original script was rewritten by the producers and the
director. I was not given the opportunity to participate in the
production of this movie,” Curry told Fusion. “As for the first edition
‘Iliad’ reference in the movie, that was not something I wrote in my
original script,” she says.
As a publisher of other folks novels, I will have a responsibility to be polite if options of those novels are pursued. But if anyone EXCEPT the guys who produce A Game of Thrones contacts me again about my own books, I am going to tell them, as before, the answer is no. And if they make the mistake of asking me why, I I will absolutely tell them that I have zero interest in working with retards with no respect for the Western canon.
I watched a documentary on a day in the production of A Game of Thrones and it confirmed for me that I prefer the game industry. There is a LOT of carpentry involved, among other things; it is insane how many people and moving parts are required in order to produce a show of that quality. And then to think how readily they will throw all that sort of effort away because some arrogant executive philistine is uneducated really boggles the mind