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More on the Clive Cussler lawsuit: http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-fi-cussler14feb14,0,1384134.story?coll=cl-books
Clive Cussler Lawsuit
- Thread starter Linda Adams
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That's all just so wrong. They didn't make enough on the film so they're suing him. It's sad to hear about he apparent difficulties.
Regarding Cussler
Hello folks,
As I recall the other Cussler film adaptation, RAISE THE TITANIC, didn't do well at the box office either. Regardless, the question should be 'what makes a story marketable as a motion picture?'
Not sales as a book. Some very popular books are virtually unfilmable. This is not the fault of the writer. For a plot to be filmable it must have a visual impact and star quality characters. SAHARA had those but so did RAISE THE TITANIC. Look at what happened to The DaVinci Code. What carried, or failed to carry, this work was the fantastic nature of its premise. Cussler has the same reputation for epic quality and fantastic plots
Yet other films, based on books that have fantastic premises have done extremely well. THE MALTESE FALCON comes to mind immediatly. Why does the Falcon work and Titanic and Sahara don't?
Hammett took an epic treasure hunt story, with historical backstory, and shrank it into practically a closed room character study. Nobody really gives a damn about what the Falcon is or where it came from. Simply, it is the Macduffen to get into the characters. The characters' manipulations and strategies are what makes the book and the movie memorable.
Somebody once mentioned that all politics are local. That goes for drama as well. Nobody really cares if the Vatican disappears in a fireball or the Atlantic Ocean becomes green pea soup. What they do care about is if the 'fat man' gets his just deserts or if the shady lady will go to jail because of love.
Glen T. Brock
Hello folks,
As I recall the other Cussler film adaptation, RAISE THE TITANIC, didn't do well at the box office either. Regardless, the question should be 'what makes a story marketable as a motion picture?'
Not sales as a book. Some very popular books are virtually unfilmable. This is not the fault of the writer. For a plot to be filmable it must have a visual impact and star quality characters. SAHARA had those but so did RAISE THE TITANIC. Look at what happened to The DaVinci Code. What carried, or failed to carry, this work was the fantastic nature of its premise. Cussler has the same reputation for epic quality and fantastic plots
Yet other films, based on books that have fantastic premises have done extremely well. THE MALTESE FALCON comes to mind immediatly. Why does the Falcon work and Titanic and Sahara don't?
Hammett took an epic treasure hunt story, with historical backstory, and shrank it into practically a closed room character study. Nobody really gives a damn about what the Falcon is or where it came from. Simply, it is the Macduffen to get into the characters. The characters' manipulations and strategies are what makes the book and the movie memorable.
Somebody once mentioned that all politics are local. That goes for drama as well. Nobody really cares if the Vatican disappears in a fireball or the Atlantic Ocean becomes green pea soup. What they do care about is if the 'fat man' gets his just deserts or if the shady lady will go to jail because of love.
Glen T. Brock
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It's very hard compressing a novel into a two hour movie. Sometimes it works well, and sometimes it doesn't. Yes, a movie can help book sales, and book sales will help the movie, but ... There are lots of factors coming into it, including the writer of it, who can turn out a good script or a bad one, and have anything that follows ruin the script or enhance--the director, the actors, the editors, the studio.
I read Sahara and saw the film. The film wasn't very good. For all the money spent and this lawsuit, it's a b movie. It's something you'd watch once, shrug, and never watch again. The team that made the movie just simply didn't do a good job of putting together the movie, and I don't think the actors worked well as the characters.
I read Sahara and saw the film. The film wasn't very good. For all the money spent and this lawsuit, it's a b movie. It's something you'd watch once, shrug, and never watch again. The team that made the movie just simply didn't do a good job of putting together the movie, and I don't think the actors worked well as the characters.
I don't wish CC any bad luck with his lawsuit but I was never a fan of his writing. Think I've tackled three of his books, one or two of them being Dirk Ptt novels. I think Dirk Pitt is the worst name is literature. I love action novels, mystery, espionage, but CC's writing never did it for me. I'm not surprised his novels haven't translated into successful movies.
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There's a two page article in Entertainment Weekly on the lawsuit. So far, it's still wrapping up to a lot of 'he said, she said.'