Actually, the situation was more complicated than that. The original plan was to bill the books as "by Kathy Reichs and Max Allan Collins." At the last minute -- and after solicitation -- Reichs changed her mind and didn't want that type of billing, so the book itself was only by Collins. With all due respect to MAC, he isn't as big a draw as Reichs, and the book didn't sell to the booksellers' expectations.
I'll never understand how some writers can keep churning out mindless drivel book after book while writers who actually write entertaining tales get sidelined for not being as big a draw. The truth of the matter is that there was never going to be a big marketing campaign for a novel from a series that might only have eight million people watching it in the US (which I am well aware is where TPTB think everyone who reads the books/watches the series comes from) and whose sales might be half of one percent at most, whereas Reichs herself sells in the hundreds of thousands/millions rather than the tens of thousands. I'd rather read Collins' books than Reichs and do in fact do so.
^ Same reason Hollywood churns out all those terrible movies with no-talent actors instead of a few good quality ones with people who can actually act. That reason is that people are for some reason willing to spend gratuitous amounts of money on junk instead of spending five seconds thinking ahead about quality.
Or that they don't have the same opinions as us about what constitutes quality. I really don't think devotees of tie-in fiction like us get to take the high artistic ground in such discussions.
I dunno... As an avid reader of a variety of works, which yes I admit includes novels like the DS9R, and someone who has to do publicity for movies- including movies I haven't liked... I'd like to think I'm critical and cynical enough... My enjoyment of DS9, and the DS9R even more so, doesn't make me less analytical... maybe just quieter about it. But I have been staggered by the junk in the tv and movie industry, as well as this drive to ruin good on-screen things. And I think the principal Pocket took- take more time to get more quality out of less is the best approach. Remakes, prequels and sequels are rarely better than the old versions (yes, there are exceptions). But better fx don't= better film, so in that case, people are just rehashing someone else's work. Plus those different opinions about quality should be catered too, not just those with the high ground, for the largest audience possible...
Art, schmart. Shakespeare's stuff is all work-for-hire. If you love it, it's art. If not, crap. Every jot and tittle. I learned a great deal from reading these tie-in guys (generic, non gender-specific version of guys) and a stack more from working with Marco. If the books make you happy or some positive resonant chord is struck in you from reading them, that's the end of it. I love this stuff, myself, and I stick my thumb in the eye of any man jack who says it ain't gold.
I read Shakespeare at school as well as other works from literature. My school days are far behind me and I remember very little of these books and stories I had to read. What I remember is that I found the Shakespeare play not only extremely tedious to read but I was very annoyed at the ending. The other works, I could see the quality of writing but found them very dull to read and not interesting. What is labelled as “great literature” usually puts me off. Also books that are mainly written for entertainment, no matter if it is a tie-in novel or not, can be of high quality. That is what counts for me: Do I enjoy the book or not? What label it has, if it is supposed to be “real” literature or not, doesn`t matter to me at all.
The problem with having people read Shakespeare in school is that his works weren't meant to be read, they were meant to be seen in performance. Reading a Shakespeare play is like reading the scripts to Star Trek rather than actually seeing the episodes and movies -- you're only getting a fraction of the intended experience, and not in the intended way.
Exactly. There is nothing so boring as reading a play by William Shakespeare for a class -- and nothing so enthralling as seeing a play by William Shakespeare onstage. (Well, other than being in one, anyway.) Theatre is meant to be alive.
^ We read them aloud in class when they were assigned in high school, with each of us given parts. (I was very happy with how Macbeth turned out, as Macduff. ) It made the plays seem a little more vivid, even, than they do on stage, as we were all participants instead of mere observers.
That's how we did it in my school too. Most of the students just recited the lines dryly, but I always made it a performance. I loved the chance to be a ham. So I tended to get assigned the meaty roles, like Macbeth, Iago, and Mercutio. I was disappointed when I was passed over for Hamlet and had to settle for Horatio; the teacher wanted someone else to get a star turn for a change. But she let me perform "To be or not to be" for the class. (My performance was influenced by Shatner's on The Transformed Man.)
A Midsummer Night's Dream, open air theatre in Hyde Park, appropriately in a balmy summer evening... One of my more cherished memories.
In a Shakespeare college course I took the teacher started out by saying "Shakespeare's plays were not meant to be literature or poetry, even though they are, they were meant to theater" and a requirement for the course was seeing the plays, not just reading them and writing papers on them. 4 out of the 5 plays we read were being performed by a local Shakespeare company over the summer. It was a great re-introduction after having been forced to read Hamlet as a Sophomore in high school.
We were lucky enough to actually get a traveling shakespear company come to my school to perform Macbeth. I really enjoyed getting to actually see a proffesional version of one of the big shakespear plays. But for me the best part was that since I was in a theater class at the time, we actually got to hang around backstage and help set up and then got to talk to the actors. Then for an English class we went to a local company's production of The Taming of the Shrew, so I've actually gotten to see two proffesional productions.
i too read the parts aloud in class when doing Caesar, Merchant and Hamlet, as well as other plays including Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. i got to 'play' Hamlet for 'To Be or Not to Be', as well as playing Mephistophiles in Faustus (i channelled a combo of Trailer Voice Man and Crowley from 'Good Omens') and I doubled up as Wrath of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Oh yeah, Caesar! In 9th grade, for the class reading of JC, I was "cast" as Brutus, and I played him like Shatner. But the teacher also wanted me to do "Friends, Romans, countrymen" in front of the whole class, and I did Marc Antony in a Mark Lenard style, because I thought there was a resemblance.
I saw a production of Julius Caesar in Central Park a few years back, and Jeffrey Wright played Marc Antony, and oh my God did he nail the "but Brutus is an honorable man" speech............ My favorite Shakespeare-in-the-Park production, though, was seeing Othello with the late Raul Julia in the title role and Christopher Walken as Iago. Julia did Othello in a very classic (if histrionic) style -- Walken, though, was Iago from Brooklyn. It was wonderful. (And then there was The Taming of the Shrew done as a Western, with Morgan Freeman as Petruchio and Tracey Ullman as Kate. It opened with an old guy who was a dead ringer for Water Brennan throwing a saloon door open and saying, in a deep Western drawl, "Waylcome tuh Pad-yoo-uh!")