Wednesday, December 22, 2004

A Whitewashed Earthsea

The Farthest ShoreUrsula K. Le Guin is not happy about the SciFi channel's representation of Earthsea. On her webpage she disavows any responsibility for the mini-series and more specifically in an essay in Slate sounds off about the way her rainbow races have been whitewashed by the SciFi channel, who she charges with producing "a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence".

The current mantra is that it's not possible to remain faithful to a book because a) what works in a book does not translate well to the screen and b) commercial realities require the product to be marketed to the widest demographic possible.

To my mind these are just weasel excuses for sloppy work and lazy scriptwriting, a banal justification for the marketeer's obsession with turning art into product. So what if TV is a different medium to literature? That doesn't mean you can't use it to tell a powerful and compelling tale.

There's no point kicking against the pricks, ain't nothing gonna change till advertisers start targeting their products at an older demographic that really doesn't want to be spoon-fed baby pap any more. And I'm not holding my breath for that, as marketing appears to be largely staffed by fresh-faced accountants, incapable of imagining anything more exciting than getting paid, laid and trashed.

But as a personal gesture and out of respect for Le Guin I will boycott the Earthsea remake and instead re-read the books. It'll be interesting to see how they hold up 30 odd years later.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Frankie here posting anonymously because of that horrible BlogSpot interface I mentioned that just won't let me log in easily, and I can't be fucked using it.

I'd disagree with the both of you about not being able to do something about this. People are beginig to realize that the old network TV paradigm is dying, and will die completely if it doesn't keep up with what people want.

Here's what someone much closer to the coal face than I said recently :

"I don't think that network programming will die but I do think that the means of distributing it will no longer be locked into the old networks. That wouldn't happen if all we were seeing were the advent of an alternative pipe: the internet v. cable. What we will see at the same time is the growth of alternative content that will be produced at a MUCH lower cost, FAR better targeted to niche interests (the mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches), providing, as a whole, new competition to the old networks. The old networks and their programmers and advertisers will see that they can get BETTER distribution via the new, distributed network and consumers will DEMAND to get material that way -- because it puts them in control -- and so we will see the hegemony of the old, centralized network start to fall away and break apart: explode."All any author has to do is refuse to sign over exclusive rights to any story, and then if they don't like what the network is doing, they can get someone else to do it better.