Adapting Foundation

[james_davis_nicoll]

John Rogers on an attempt to bring Foundation to the big screen.

Something I am going to go ponder is this comment:

the canny executive's thinking was that the future, to a great degree, is a costume drama in the opposite direction.

More specifically, I am going to ponder whether there are techniques the costume drama types use to quickly bring the audience up to speed that SF can steal.

Nicked from shimgray

Comments

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

It's interesting. Non-historical costume dramas (by which I mean ones simply set in the past, not about historical individuals - Austen adaptations being a perfect example) can get away with absolutely none; just present the situation, maybe quote a date, have the occasional passing reference to Napoleon or Pitt or "the King" but not worry about people not noticing.

Maybe we're partly expected to know the scenarios, but you can present it and not worry about backstory; when the entire story is a dozen people in a village, you don't need to worry about explaining the geopolitics of why they're there. You could say "oh, people have a basic understanding of eighteenth-century social history" - but, then, you could say "oh, people have a basic understanding of Battleships In Space TM", which is about equally true.

For "historical" ones, the traditional solution is a quick voiceover. "In the thirteenth century..." - perhaps the most obvious comparison in sf films is the start of Star Wars? I'm not really well-acquainted enough with the genre to make competent analysis, though, I really don't watch many films...

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Well, the original Star Wars basically worked like that, dinnit?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

And Phantom Menace, IIRC.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing about the 'costume drama' comment is that it has been my impression that costume drama (which I love) has a very low esteem among movie-makers and isn't particuarly big with the public; while SF is very big with both. So it seems odd that they would use that as any kind of measure.

Maybe they are looking at "The Lord of the Rings" as both money-maker and costume drama, as sell as being speculative fiction?

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Going by history_spork, there are. Namely, dropping accuracy, eliminating consistency, and generally turning it into a modern-world-in-costume thing. Historical costume drama, just like sci-fi costume drama, tells you more about the modern world than it does about its setting.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

What, like Elizabeth vs the Roman Catholic Mutants of Ye Olde Englande did?