Not a problem for a savvy novelizer. The novelization of SNAKES ON A PLANE was over four hundred pages long.
"Beyond" Novelization
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Not a problem for a savvy novelizer. The novelization of SNAKES ON A PLANE was over four hundred pages long.
Still not seen it then and thus working from a point of ignorance and yet still trying to give the impression you know what you're talking about. How very unbecoming of you Chris.
Well, I did see it (unfortunately), and I can confirm that Superman didn't talk much in the movie. So I can totally believe that he only had 43 lines of dialogue.
I was shocked to see SS. Once BvS didn't have one, I assumed we wouldn't be getting any for the DCEU movies other than Man of Steel.
That's surprising. After #4 didn't get novelized I figured the series was done. Turns out that #5 actually got a novelization too, albeit not by the same author as the first three...
The very first edition of the original Star Wars didn't have a photo insert, because it was published six months or so before the movie release to help generate interest. I remember being vaguely interested in buying the summer of '77 edition for the insert, but being only 14, I put the money to use elsewhere. I looked at my copy a while back and discovered something I'd forgotten: I put stickers from the Topps Star Wars trading cards on the inside front and back covers, so at least one copy of the first edition has photos.
As for Logan's Run, Bantam's first tie-in edition was missing the last page. There was a reprint with a modified cover that included the last page, but I think that one didn't have the photo insert. I remember the day I bought it. Nice summer day in 1976. I had $5 and bought Logan's Run, the latest of Alan Dean Foster's Star Trek Logs (Eight, I think), and the latest Space: 1999 book (Alien Seed, I think). In 1976 that was a good haul.
This was a movie?
I thought that I knew most of the Wolfman titles, I have not heard of this one
It was a Spanish horror movie that was dubbed into English and released theatrically in America back in 1972; it's actually the fifth movie in a long-series of werewolf movies starring Spanish horror movie star Paul Naschy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Noche_de_Walpurgis
I've never seen the movie either, but, like I said, stumbled onto the novelization years ago. One wonders what possessed them to do an English-language novelization of a dubbed Spanish horror film?
On other fronts, I'm informed by reliable sources that the new GHOSTBUSTERS novelization (by Nancy Holder) is hot off the presses and will be shipping soon.
Was wondering Greg if you have ever turned down the chance to do a novelization of a movie because you would rather see and experience it first in the cinema, rather than getting an advanced copy of the script and having it spoiled?
Hah! Good question, but that would never happen. I hate spoilers, but I would never turn down a high-profile, paying gig like that just to avoid spoilers. It's an occupational hazard, I'm afraid.
I admit it felt weird to watch the fourth UNDERWORLD movie (which was the first one I didn't novelize) without knowing what was going to happen. But it was kinda neat, too.
I have had to turn down novelizations before, but only because of scheduling conflicts.
"We need the book right away!"
"Sorry, I'm all booked up until June."
Kills me sometimes.
When I was a kid, I routinely read the novelizations of movies before I saw the movies themselves -- both because my father didn't take us to the movies very often and because it wasn't uncommon at the time for novelizations to come out before their movies. It's hard to imagine in these desperately spoiler-phobic times, but the Star Wars novelization came out months before the movie in order to build buzz. (After all, plenty of movies were and are based on well-known novels. Audiences for, say, The Grapes of Wrath or The Godfather or the like would include plenty of people who already knew how the stories played out. Putting out an original movie's novelization ahead of time was meant to approximate that same experience.)
So as I see it, if you experience a story in book form before you see the movie, you're still discovering the story for the first time. It's not a "spoiler," it's the actual, complete story, and you get to experience its events in their rightful dramatic and emotional context. Seeing the movie afterward is just revisiting the story from a different perspective, just as reading the novelization after seeing the movie would be, or just as seeing a movie adapted from a pre-existing novel would be. As long as you experience the full story, then it doesn't matter what version you experience first. And it's not that different if the first time you experience the story is in the form of a script or a raw manuscript.
So as I see it, if you experience a story in book form before you see the movie, you're still discovering the story for the first time. It's not a "spoiler," it's the actual, complete story, and you get to experience its events in their rightful dramatic and emotional context. Seeing the movie afterward is just revisiting the story from a different perspective, just as reading the novelization after seeing the movie would be, or just as seeing a movie adapted from a pre-existing novel would be. As long as you experience the full story, then it doesn't matter what version you experience first. And it's not that different if the first time you experience the story is in the form of a script or a raw manuscript.
It varies, but the security is definitely getting tighter than it used to be.
The secrecy surrounding THE DARK KNIGHT RISES was tighter than anything I've encountered before or since. All files had to be encrypted and I wasn't allowed to have any physical copies of the script or production art in my possession. I had to fly out to Burbank and read the script in an office on the Warner Bros. lot. Basically, I had three days to read the script and take copious notes--and even then I wasn't allowed to read the last fifteen pages of the script until shortly before the book went to press. I had to fly out to Burbank again, several months later, to read and write the ending.
(Confession: the last 10,000 words of that book were written in a Best Western hotel room while I subsisted on Subway sandwiches and coffee . . . ah, the glamorous life of a writer.)
Mind you, I can't blame Warner Bros. for being paranoid about spoilers since there was so much scrutiny and speculation about that movie on-line. I didn't even tell anyone I was working on the book--and hid all my notes and files after I was done working every day.
That was extreme, but becoming more of the norm. I had to fly out to read the MAN OF STEEL script, too, although they let me read the whole thing and even let me inspect some of the props and pre-production art. And, to my surprise, they actually sent me the GODZILLA script (codenamed "Nautilus") by email, although it was password-protected.
Do you save your novelization files on the computer with fake titles as an extra layer of security?
I used some fairly transparent codenames.
DARK KNIGHT RISES was "dkr"
MAN OF STEEL was "clark"
GODZILLA was "lizard"
What I really lived in fear of was my computer having problems. 'Cause no way could I take my computer into the shop with the top-secret plot of DARK KNIGHT RISES stored on it.
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