Is there anywhere to read more about this?
Vonda N. McIntyre's Adaptations: Any notes or letters?
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I did one of the TERMINATOR SALVATION prequels. As I recall, I was not provided with the script to the movie, but did receive a nice packet of artwork illustrating the look of the movie: the post-apocalyptic future, the various models of Terminators, etc.
I came up with one idea for the plot, the studio suggested another, so I ended up combining them.
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The only bits I've seen of Alley's pre-ADR performance are the ShoWest preview reel. I don't know if there's any more available publicly, though there is a rough cut of TWOK at a university archive that a couple posters here have seen.
Not very much. I've seen Alley undubbed (in TWOK) and she's awful. I'm trying to recall where I read / heard about the acting classes that Alley took in the middle of filming. It might have been in an interview with Robert Salin?
The Darkness Falls were unusually cooperative, providing all kinds of backstory and other material. It was a great experience. Too bad it was for a mediocre horror movie (the backstory they gave me was way more interesting than the frontstory that was in the actual movie) that only four people saw.......
I was truly astounded at how flat her on-set performance was in the workprint! Goes to show just how important the ADR process is in film production.
Surprisingly, most of De Kelley’s performance was redubbed as well, even though he was perfectly good on set.
Since they're novels, and not scores, they have lots and lots of letters, but not a single note.
(I've been looking at this thread title for days, and I just couldn't resist taking it as a straight line.)
(I've been looking at this thread title for days, and I just couldn't resist taking it as a straight line.)
We used to have a spiel at the Printing Museum about one of our movie rentals:
I don't know that I'd ever watched that before. That was... certainly a thing.
It's amazing how much an actor's performance and delivery can affect the end result, in ways hard to anticipate when you're just working from the script.
Case in point: My GHOST RIDER novelization fails to capture Nicholas Cage's quirky take on Johnny Blaze. The plot is the same, the dialogue is the same, but Cage puts his own loopy spin on the lines which makes the character much goofier and more eccentric than I wrote him.
But I had no way of knowing this until I sat down and watched the movie at our local muliplex, after the book was already in print.
The Johnny Blaze in my book is basically the guy from the original 1970s comics, which I reread when novelizing the movie version. More of a straightforward, angsty Marvel superhero type.
Case in point: My GHOST RIDER novelization fails to capture Nicholas Cage's quirky take on Johnny Blaze. The plot is the same, the dialogue is the same, but Cage puts his own loopy spin on the lines which makes the character much goofier and more eccentric than I wrote him.
But I had no way of knowing this until I sat down and watched the movie at our local muliplex, after the book was already in print.
The Johnny Blaze in my book is basically the guy from the original 1970s comics, which I reread when novelizing the movie version. More of a straightforward, angsty Marvel superhero type.
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But if I could name a name, would the name be “Norman”?
I once novelized a movie that opened in exactly two theaters in the USA, in NYC and L.A., with zero publicity, before going straight to video. Some sort of contractual obligation, I assume.
The movie's opening-weekend grosses were smaller than my advance for writing the book -- which is not the way it's supposed to work.
According to your bibliography in that book, you used the Movie Companion, The Art Of, the novelization, the comic, Zahn's prequel, Stirling's second T2 book, and the T3 novelization.
"You can use anything that other people wrote, but you can't have what the screenwriters wrote." So weird.
I saw it! ...on DVD.
I had known that they retooled the movie beforehand, and when I saw the runtime was like 78 minutes I knew I was in for a very average movie at best. (And they even had a very long credit sequence too, which felt like trying to get that runtime up as much as possible.)
Speaking of Vonda McIntyre, another memory:
Decades ago, when I was young and clueless about how such things worked, I asked Vonda what she'd thought of the the movie THE BRIDE, which she had recently novelized, and was genuinely surprised to discover that she hadn't seen the movie yet.
I know better now.
(Her book was better than the movie, BTW.)
Decades ago, when I was young and clueless about how such things worked, I asked Vonda what she'd thought of the the movie THE BRIDE, which she had recently novelized, and was genuinely surprised to discover that she hadn't seen the movie yet.
I know better now.
(Her book was better than the movie, BTW.)
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Ironically, the publicity shots of Kirstie in the stage play, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", were taken on 1st August, 1983. This was the play that she had been offered around the same time that she was given a lower pay offer to return as Saavik in ST III. At the time, her agent suggested that being the lead in a play in Los Angeles was probably better for her acting career than accepting less money in a science fiction movie sequel.
Houstoncon '82 ("The Ultimate Fantasy") was held on June 19-20, 1982, at the Summit Hotel and Civic Center Auditorium in downtown Houston. It had marked Kirstie Alley's last time playing Saavik, on stage in Walter Koenig's "radio play", The Machiavellian Principle. At that con, it was still assumed that she would be returning for ST III.
For me in Australia, ST III was delayed in cinemas for six months! I was so grateful to get my airfreighted copy (and two for my friends).
I knew from the ST II novelization that there would be likely be added original scenes, so part of the fun of reading ST III was trying to work out what would get featured and what wouldn't. I was puzzled a few times -- Jedda was a Delta and he had female Deltan partner. Drs March and Madison were barely glimpsed in the movie. Amanda was in the book, but had not been mentioned in any publicity. Snnanagfashtalli was only in the extra scenes of the ST II novelization, so I correctly guessed that ST III novelisations Farrendahl, of the same species, would not be in the movie.
I'm just as glad that TWOK didn't actually show Khan boarding Regula One (I can't really imagine that not ending in an R-rating for the film), but otherwise while there's stuff I don't miss from both novelizations, there's a lot of things I would have liked to have seen. TSFS just jumps out more because so much of it occurs before the film even starts.
Thank you for the heads-up. It's just the kind of niche thing I'm into for an easy listen while walking.
I found my copy of the Terminator Salvation download-only ending. Interestingly, it's not just an add-on to the end of the book, it actually also replaces the last nine pages. Lots of little changes and even some incidental corrections.
And the ad at the end calls your book Dark Sky instead of Cold War.
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I confess that I had completely forgottten that I'd included a bibliography in my Terminator book.
And the title thing is weird. I don't remember it ever being titled Dark Sky, which doesn't fit either of the two storylines: the one in the submarine or the one in snowy Alaska.
And the title thing is weird. I don't remember it ever being titled Dark Sky, which doesn't fit either of the two storylines: the one in the submarine or the one in snowy Alaska.
Maybe it was a reference to Skynet instead of any physical location's attributes.
At this point, I'm definitely only in it for the novelizations that add considerably to what was in the final cut of the movie. The Star Wars novelizations from Rogue One to The Rise of Skywalker gave a lot of good expanded material for readers to enjoy.
At this point, I'm definitely only in it for the novelizations that add considerably to what was in the final cut of the movie. The Star Wars novelizations from Rogue One to The Rise of Skywalker gave a lot of good expanded material for readers to enjoy.
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