And I will definitely hit it as I move forward. Thanks, Pinky.

I would definitely like to see you post your analysis again once you are caught up, esp surrounding the war themes (as, i believe, the message changes), and also if you think that the messages in bsg are as pro-imperialist and colonizing as star trek. plus, you’ll prolly be able to have a bit more racial analysis once you learn who all the cylons are.

thanks for this, though, bc i hadn’t necessarily caught on to what bothered me about boomer’s portrayal in the series.

before i made film or learned about visual storytelling, this sort of thing made me mad. i wanted bands to stay sounding as i first heard them, and i wanted movies to exactly reflect the book. for different reasons, both these reactions and thought structures/expectations changed once i became a maker of both. with music, i realized that if you are the artist, you want to grow. for you that is the joy. finding the next voice or way of speaking your heart. you want your art to be as much a surprise to you as it is to people finding it. but as a listener, you dont want creeping death to slow down, or get a bagpipe in it, or lose its high notes, etc.

with film i learned the obvious to me now, that a book is a different medium than film and because of that, simply has different powers. different weak spots. different handles. you simply cannot use it the same. and if you ever get a director/writer with enough fame and money to insist upon their own direction when they have no idea of what it really means to create visual narrative art, you get terrible cinema. there are myriad reasons why.

books allow you, for one thing, to occupy the characters’ minds in a way that movies cannot provide. unless you get a hammy director who needs to stick a voiceover on everything (or a marketer/distributor/producer who re-releases a new version with one dubbed over because they decided the Dumb US Masses need it to get what the hell is going on in the film), you must infer the characters’ emotional states by other means. books don’t have music. or sound. they don’t have light that springs out of the screen and hits the humans in front of it. they can’t get your heart pounding with masses of shadow that move certain ways. yes, they can describe it all. but its not to be used the same. a description of a shadow is not a shadow.

books have different pacing. in a book you can take a sidetrip out of the main story for much longer and it will be acceptable. a person can put down a book and pick it up a hundred times. in a theater, a person sits for 1.5 or 2 or 3 or more hours and that is all. you cannot pace a movie the same, and sometimes you have to yank a scene just because it slows everything down and ruins the momentum that th editor is tasked with creating/finding/fleshing out.

the examples go on. but basically, as a writer you have a different toolbox than a screenwriter, and even the tools with the same names work differently and so must be used differently. i’ve written novels, i’ve written short stories, and i’ve written screenplays. they most definitely are different motions and while some skills required overlap (many), you definitely must adjust your use and angle. personally i found the art of screenwriting an amazing one. at first it was very weird. to leave out so much editorializing (which novels do and do and do) and simply show through the character’s deeds and placement and half-spoken words and clothes and such what they were feeling. i felt as if i were at a disadvantage. especially since i can come up with so many damn words and rather easily. but in time you learn the economy of cinematic writing, the beauty found in the spare format. you learned to compress massive amounts of intent/emotion/theme in slight motions, short moments, a style the character insists on using to hold their grocery bag over the arc of the film, how it changes as they change….

one of the reasons i hated Atlas Shrugged, even before i knew it was political or a canon, was because the author has no art. they just stuff huge chunks of their own beliefs into characters’ mouths, almost indiscriminately. i kept feeling like i was being lectured to. the characters weren’t really alive for me. it all felt like Rand with different heads, blasting me with propaganda from all sides of a dinner table. no art. just agenda. i point this out because it is an extreme example of what a screenplay is not. (or even a good book!)

Blade Runner works amazingly well. and without the voiceover it does this. so i’d say it is a success as a film. if you feel the book is “better” (i dont know that you do, you didnt seem to place a value judgment on the way the book was converted, just called yourself a “dickhead” for wanting to point out how it had been changed, so i’m assuming you don’t care for how it was changed) then i’d love to hear why. it may have to do with how film works vs how books work. doesnt mean it wouldnt disappoint people who love the book as-is. then again, the changes may have been the director’s personal choice, and not related to mechanism of medium. i, too, would be interested in figuring that out. so if you do post on it, please let me know.

…in one sense—in the sense i speak of here, where you reshape and remake a work to make it fit into the new format, or to use the new format to its best potential—the Blade Runner i speak of here (film) does belong to Scott. at least as much as a movie adapted from another’s work can ever belong to the appropriator.

And thanks for dropping the backstory/info on the novel, yes I knew and I also knew I’d be in danger even skimming over the mention, as you can probably tell! Because again, it’s a story that needs to be given its own attention. From a few different angles, I think.

I love your thoughts on implanted memories/brainwashing by dominant culture. Great thread.

I’ve got to catch up on BSG! And soon!

Good to see you here.

Excellent comments on BSG… can not say any more unless I talk about the last episode I saw (Friday)…and my deep identification with the religious fanatic President Roslin.

Going back to the original “Star Trek”, everyone knows there are no Chicanos in space!

Hmm. I haven’t seen Dr. Who in ages. I’ll have to put that on my list.

Thanks for reading and commenting! Good to see you, by the way.