George R.R. Martin Doubles Down on Issues With Screenwriters Making Adaptations Their Own: ‘999 Times Out of 1,000 They Make It Worse’
variety.comZack Sharf Digital News Director George R.R. Martin recently took to his personal blog to double down on his issue with Hollywood adaptations and screenwriters’ attempts to make source material their own.
Martin previously spoke out on this issue in 2022 during a discussion with fellow author Neil Gaiman in which he lamented over the majority of writers in Hollywood thinking they do not need to be faithful to written works they’re adapting for film or television. “Very little has changed since then,” Martin now wrote on his blog. “If anything, things have gotten worse.
Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K.
Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone.” “No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it,” Martin added. “‘The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound.
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