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James Cameron reads Trek?

JarodRussell said:
"Hey, nobody told me that character was a woman!"
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So you never exchange a word with at least someone involved in pre-production and production? :wtf:

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Depends on the project. You're mostly two steps removed from the actual production. If you have questions, you ask your editor, who asks the licensing person at the studio, who tries to get hold of somebody actually working on the movie, who are often too busy filming the movie itself to worry about the novelization very much.

Because this can be a time-consuming process, I choose my battles carefully and don't bother the movie people over every little detail. In other words, I'll plead for a photo of the doomsday machine (since that's a big deal), but not worry too much about a minor character who only appears in one scene.

Ideally, you also get a stack of publicity photos, some concept sketches, maybe even an advance copy of the trailer, but this tends to be spotty and incomplete. You'll get ten pictures from one scene, and not a single shot from the next one . . . .

There are exceptions, of course. On the UNDERWORLD books, Danny McBride and Kevin Grevioux both let me contact them directly if I had any questions, but, again, I tried not to abuse the privilege.

Basically, you're trying to write a 300-page description of a movie you haven't seen yet, based on an early draft of the script and a handful of publicity photos.

It's just as easy as it sounds! :)
 
I remember Harry Knowles previewing a script for the first X-Men movie (I don't think it was the one that finally was filmed) and noting that when there was to be an action sequence, it would just say 'ACTION SEQUENCE.' No idea as to whether it was a fist fight, shootout, 'splosions or what. That would have been fun to describe in a novel.
 
IMHO,the McIntyre novelizations were terrific.So much so that I would place them far ahead of many "original"Treklit novels.
 
Cameron doesn't have time to read books. He hires someone to read them for him and write "notes."
 
Steve Mollmann said:
To be fair, novelizing a screenplay often involves less creative thought than screenplaying a novel.
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Sorry Steve, but this is total horseshit.

Cameron had a less politic quote in an MTV interview, which I talked about on my blog.

The text of that blog follows:

James Cameron provided the following gem while discussing his forthcoming Avatar novel with MTV:
I didn't want to do a cheesy novelization, where some hack comes in and kind of makes s--t up. I wanted to do something that was a legitimate novel that was inside the characters' heads and didn't have the wrong culture stuff, the wrong language stuff, all that.
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Yeah, heaven forfend a writer make shit up. That might be, I dunno, fiction or something!

More seriously, novelizers have to make shit up because a movie only has a long short story's worth of actual plot in it. If you're gonna get a novel-length story in there, you have to add stuff.

Whether or not that shit is true to the film generally depends on the level of cooperation the film studio provides the publisher of the novelization. As a for-instance, the producers of Darkness Falls were hugely helpful, providing me with a ton of backstory that didn't make it into the final cut of the movie. As another, the producers of Resident Evil: Extinction encouraged me to add a ton of material -- lots and lots of "making shit up" -- to bridge the gap between Apocalypse and Extinction, and also to fill in what was happening with the Jill Valentine character. As a third, Serenity had fourteen hours of televised episodes of Firefly as additional background.

And sometimes producers don't cooperate at all and the novelizers don't have a choice to make shit up. That's not hack work, that's writing and creating. But, y'know, it's just prose, so it doesn't count. It's not real writing, not like a script is.... :rolleyes:

As ever, I am amused by the fact that a writer who adds plot and characterization to an existing story in order to make a movie into a novel is dismissed by people like Cameron as hacks, while screenwriters who (ahem) hack away at a novel's story and remove huge chunks of it in order to whittle it down to a movie's length get their own Academy Award category.

This is why a bunch of us formed the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, to combat this obscene prejudice against our craft. Ignorant comments like Cameron's are a good reminder of how far we have to go.
 
You go KRAD. Ever since I started reading tie ins, it's really pissed me off when people talk like Cameron did there. IMO I find what you guys do a lot more impressive than what people who write their own original stuff. You guys have to come up with your own ideas, and at the same time keep everything in line with what has come before. You guys don't get to just make shit up, you have to build shit based on someone else's blueprints.

I don't mean to belittle original stuff, there are alot of original novels I love just as much as tie-ins.
 
Hear, Hear!!!

I've read hundreds of books and I have to say that most of the tie-in books are actually MORE ORIGINAL than the cookie-cutter original stuff out there.

Writers for TV and film generally rely on traditional tropes of their genre and a budget whereas writers have a lot more freedom and no budget to limit them, so they are free to push the envelope a little further, which requires great skill to make work and not come off looking pathetic.

Though I am no longer keeping up with the series (though I hope to get back into it), I am going to be picking up the Eureka books when I have a chance.
 
A point in Mr. Cameron's favor: Go take a look at Orson Scott Card's novelization of The Abyss. Now it's been awhile since I've looked at the book, but I seem to remember an interesting introduction in the book by Mr. Card where he described the process of writing the book and how he and Cameron reached a very collaborative relationship. IIRC, Card describes how Cameron was using a lot of the character back-story Card had written to help the actors with their roles on the set of the film.

Again, it has been a very long time since I read that, so I apologize in advance if I've got the details wrong.
 
KRAD said:
Steve Mollmann said:
To be fair, novelizing a screenplay often involves less creative thought than screenplaying a novel.
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Sorry Steve, but this is total horseshit.

Cameron had a less politic quote in an MTV interview, which I talked about on my blog.
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I think a way of expressing this that is closer to what I think is this: Writing a novelization is more creatively constraining than screenplaying a novel. And though constraints can make for good writing (I have been enjoying the challenge of fitting into the original Star Trek in A Choice of Catastrophes), novelizations are a level of creative constraint I find goes too far-- very few novelizations are interesting to me, since they are generally unable to take the liberties needed to turn the story into a genuinely novelistic one. Among the few that work for me are Doctor Who novelizations by the story's original writer (or at the very least, not Terrance Dicks), Matthew Stover's Revenge of the Sith novel (though not even he could salvage that film), and Steven Barnes's Far Beyond the Stars, which is one of the best Star Trek novels period.

But I'd love to see novelizations written by prose writers given as much freedom as screenwriters typically are.
 
Steve Mollmann said:
But I'd love to see novelizations written by prose writers given as much freedom as screenwriters typically are.
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Sadly, the trend is in the opposite direction. In my experience, the studios increasingly want the novelization to be exactly the same as the final cut of the movie. No more, no less.

I've had to argue to keep in scenes from the original script that were cut out of the film . . . . .
 
I'm naturally intrigued by this very subject . . . .

Novelizations have been around since the silent days. I once saw a novelization of "The Jazz Singer," starring Al Jolson, that actually used the world "novelization" on the cover, which implies that the term was in use by 1930 at least.

There were also novelizations of the old, silent "The Thief of Baghdad," "The Master Mystery" starring Houdini, "Metropolis," and the original "King Kong." (The latter, by Edgar Wallace, tends to get reprinted every time someone remakes KONG.)

Not sure what the very first novelization was . . . .
 
KRAD said:
James Cameron provided the following gem while discussing his forthcoming Avatar novel with MTV:
I didn't want to do a cheesy novelization, where some hack comes in and kind of makes s--t up. I wanted to do something that was a legitimate novel that was inside the characters' heads and didn't have the wrong culture stuff, the wrong language stuff, all that.
Click to expand...
Yeah, heaven forfend a writer make shit up. That might be, I dunno, fiction or something!
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Dude, this is just what Greg Cox told me. A screenplay has 100 pages on dialogue only, and the writer has to make everything up all by himself, and eventually diverges from the movie. Cameron doesn't want a novel to Avatar to be like that, so he's going to write it himself.
 
I remember the novelizations for both "Unification" and "Relics" were about the same length, even though one was a two-parter.

The novelization of "Relics" had an additional subplot of an away team that transported down to the interior surface of the Dyson Sphere.
 
JarodRussell said:
KRAD said:
James Cameron provided the following gem while discussing his forthcoming Avatar novel with MTV:
I didn't want to do a cheesy novelization, where some hack comes in and kind of makes s--t up. I wanted to do something that was a legitimate novel that was inside the characters' heads and didn't have the wrong culture stuff, the wrong language stuff, all that.
Click to expand...
Yeah, heaven forfend a writer make shit up. That might be, I dunno, fiction or something!
Click to expand...

Dude, this is just what Greg Cox told me. A screenplay has 100 pages on dialogue only, and the writer has to make everything up all by himself, and eventually diverges from the movie. Cameron doesn't want a novel to Avatar to be like that, so he's going to write it himself.
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It's worth remembering, though, that the final manuscript has to be approved by someone at the studio, who has, hopefully, seen the actual movie. This keeps things from diverging too much . . . .

It's not uncommon to do last-minute rewrites to make the book more like the movie--especially if there were last-minute changes to the script.

"Bad news, Greg. They shot a new ending. How fast can you rewrite the last fifty pages?"
 
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