To Catch a Falling Star
“I’ve been trying to get my kids to read that”, the clerk yelled from the register.
I looked up, around, and then back at him, uncertain if he was talking to me.
“Read what?”, I asked.
“Your shirt” he replied. “Where the Wild Things Are.”
Oh! OK. Now I’m tracking. I was wearing one my spring ’95 Dead tour shirts with a picture of Max over the left breast saying “Let the royal rumpus begin!”
Before I could say anything – “I loved that book!", he blurted.
“Me too. You know they are supposedly making it into a movie.” I responded.
He mentioned that he’d heard something about that to which I said that I was really getting tired of Hollywood just rehashing stories from our past instead of coming up with something original.
He agreed and we “geeked” out for another five minutes before I had to return to work on Operation Restore Garden Splendor.
But what reminded me of this conversation was something I read from an interview with Neil Gaiman this morning regarding the movie adaptation of his novel Stardust.
Occasionally I grumble about Paramount’s intensive marketing, but I’m incredibly aware that this isn’t an easy film to market, because it’s not something you can point at and say “Well, it’s like that” and there’s not really been anything else like it and not even PRINCESS BRIDE is much like this…It’s the only other thing, it’s the other thing in the genre… that will be like saying “Well, the Wolfman was kind of like Dracula… and well no, no it really wasn’t,” but they were the same kind of genre.
And here there isn’t anything out like this and I’m very aware how hard it is to market that and how hard it is to tell people that they really do want to see this, because it will make them happier.
So maybe all hope is not lost, and maybe just maybe, we’ll start to see some original ideas make their way to the big screen versus the soylent green, mind numbing, less than stellar entertainment thats been passed off by Hollywood over the last few years.