Damon Lindelof's Watchmen

Yes, of course.

Ugh, why.

The film was great! The film was recent! Whyyyy

Because.

I'm interested, hated the movie. This will actually be 10 hours long instead of just feeling like it is.

I suppose everyones seeing the $$$ in current "golden age" TV so I suspect we're gonna see a lot more of this.

Can't wait for the gritty retelling of Napoleon Dynamite.

sorry everyone but Lindelof is good now

if this actually happens it will be 10x more interesting than the movie.

I just wish Noah Hawley would do everything ever.

oh god no

Leftovers is so much better than any Hawley thing

sorry everyone but Lindelof is good now

Admittedly he had nowhere to go but up.

Anyway I'm glad for this dark and gritty reboot of a...well no it's a dark and gritty reboot of the original comic which...never mind.

Think shadowy and rough

also bear in mind this could just as easily go the way of the Paul Greengrass or Terry Gilliam versions

iirc for a long time the consensus on the comic was that it was unfilmable before zack snyder proved that was indeed true

a longer adaptation isn't the answer because a big part of what makes the comic special is that the content is inextricably bound up with the form. any attempt to translate it outside of a comic-book will inevitably be unable to include the way moore and gibbons constantly play with time, both as a story theme and in the design and layout of the pages themselves

part of the magic of the book is that it literally allows readers to experience doctor manhattan's unique perspective on time for themselves - all you need to do to see the past or the future exactly like he does is flip back and forth in the book

and the fact that the first panel and the last panel mirror each other perfectly make the story a perfect closed loop, so readers will only ever see as much as doctor manhattan will (admittedly dc's bloodyminded insistence on creating more watchmen material kinda makes a mockery of this but, as ever, fuck dc)

you can't do any of that in anything other than comic books. all you're left with to adapt a whodunnit set in a world of gritty, 'realistic' superheroes, which is a trope that has long since been beaten into the ground in both comics and films, so why fucking bother at all

signed, butthurt in glasgow

Pls to make a Watchmen tv show in style of adam west batman

Watchmen is the best superhero movie fyi

Lindelof is a cheap cunt

tbh if they must do a watchmen tv show i'd prefer they did something like that with it rather than a slavish adaptation of something which is custom-built to resist slavish moving-image adaptations

Watchmen is the best superhero movie fyi

you're aff yer chump

Lindelof is a cheap cunt

this is otm tho

I was tentative at first, but then I remembered that every previous Moore adaptation has been an unmitigated success, and when coupled with Lindelof's unblemished record, why, I don't see how this could possibly go wrong. I think we're in for a treat, folks.

I would again remind Lindelof-bashers that his last project *was* basically an unmitigated success.

what better way to spend that newly-earned goodwill than on a quixotic effort to re-film the recently filmed, which proved the source material unfilmable

Would be very surprised if this actually happened, sounds like typical rumour nonsense

Otherwise, seems like the definition of a pointless project

Halo Jones, on the other hand

it's only unfilmable if you decide to be slavish about it to appease comics nerds. he literally just proved he can take high concept source material and expand it for TV productively

I mean snark all you want but it's pretty clear to me from interviews and his recent work (as well as his willingness to, for example, help guide Micheal Schur in planning for disaster when he was mounting The Good Place) that unlike a lot of other pissy creatives he actually recognizes and learns from mistakes

i'd be snarky about another adaptation of watchmen no matter who was behind it!

as i said, slavish fidelity to the source material or otherwise isn't the issue - the issue is that watchmen's content and form are so vitally interlinked that presenting it as anything other than a comic-book is going to miss much of what made it special in the first place, and all you're left with is some folks in costumes trying to solve a murder

and a blue penis

I think there are ppl who could find cinematic analogues to the way that Watchmen treats time (hello, Nic Roeg!), not sure that a guy w/ a scripting credit on Prometheus would have been my pick tho.

Robert Altman's Watchmen would've ruled.

I now feel a lot less bothered about darraghmac hating GotG 2

bizarro otm. There are certain works which are so inextricably tied to their native form that adapting them to another medium is a fool's errand. Doubly so when the attempt has already been made in the past decade.

XP you went off on one when I let you know that hellboy was total crap, I think we have a pretty good idea about our respective positions on comic adaptations at this stage tbf

guys maybe it is actually based on this and not the comic book
the titles are the same I'm just saying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAadbwAtg9Y

Watch men? Don't mind if I do, ooh err

Watchmeh

not sure that a guy w/ a scripting credit on Prometheus would have been my pick tho.

Prometheus is bad but tbf he was brought in for a polish/rethink after Jon Spaihts wrote the original screenplay. it seems like it was poisoned from the get-go.

as for this project, I would be happy with a show that uses aspects of the characters/worls/mmythos but goes completely different directions with it, somewhere between Hannibal and Fargo levels of faithfulness. only not bad like Fargo is

serious question, no judgment: have you read watchmen?

what everyone is deaf to here is that the badness is coming from inside the moore

lol yes I have read watchmen and seen the movie

okay, cool - just having some trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of enthusiasm for seeing the watchmen characters outside of the context of the comic book, especially since efforts so far to do so have been, um, largely poorly-received

you might as well just commission a series starring the charlton heroes the watchmen are based on tbh

mark don't think i don't see you trolling btw

The series is going to be based on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w

as for this project, I would be happy with a show that uses aspects of the characters/worls/mmythos but goes completely different directions with it, somewhere between Hannibal and Fargo levels of faithfulness. only not bad like Fargo is

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Wednesday, June 21, 2017 8:35 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would not be happy with this. I don't really see what additional material is left to mine from the original story (although that certainly hasn't stopped a number of parties from trying). There are stories which seem to just scratch the surface of a rich and varied world of the author's creation, but Watchmen doesn't strike me as that type of story.

Like, Moore already pretty much laid out the varied richness and explored it to my satisfaction.

yeah - like i said upthread, it's literally designed to be a closed-loop narrative, there's not much reason to flesh out what nite-owl's glory days were like or whatever

to put it in more concrete terms, Leftovers proved that Lindelof has figured out (with the help of good collaborators) how to juggle character, plot and world-building in a really considered way that takes advantage of the form,instead of having it be a "10-hour movie" every season or whatever (one of the plagues of big HBO shows especially). It's really not that hard for me to imagine a worthwhile adaptation that uses the book strictly as a starting point to pluck ideas from.

to put it another way, it would not make fans/pedants happy but it could be a Pretty Good TV Show

Watchmen is like this perfectly balanced and efficient storytelling machine. Expanding on the story is like saying, but what if there were rhinestones and a racing stripe?

guys skip to 4:40 in that youtube I posted, shit is straight out of the Wire

let me try this again. I do not think this will "expand" Watchmen. I think it will use a few points of plot/character inspiration then fuck off and do other things with them. at least this is my hope.

yeah, i can see where you're coming from for sure, but the key difference here for is that the leftovers aiui was an adaptation of a relatively little-known property which offered a good jumping-off point

for good or for ill, watchmen is a considerably better-known place to start from which imo doesn't offer much scope for expansion beyond what's already there. it's a little bit like optioning oliver twist and proposing to spend most of your time developing sidequests for oliver, fagin and the artful dodger

the episode where they cover the black freighter should be wonderful don't you think

it should feature young fagin IMO

Everyone remembers how well-received these were, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Watchmen

the episode where they cover the black freighter should be wonderful don't you think

zack snyder's version did this as like a half-hour animated short iirc

with gerard butler as the voice of the protagonist because zack snyder, that's why

instead of dr. manhattan obliterating Rorschach he just conks him on the head with an oar which causes him to pass out. he does this every time rorschach wakes up.

instead of the monster destroying new york it just rolls over the city like a giant penny and good people can avoid it by ducking into holes in its side

instead of one scene on mars the characters constantly shuttle between the two planets and when asked why they say do you have a better idea?

the nite owl is black
ozymandias is gay
rorschach dies in the first episode

none of the characters are superheroes, it's a workplace comedy set in a watchmaker's workshop

their boss is naked and painted blue but no-one ever comments on it

for good or for ill, watchmen is a considerably better-known place to start from which imo doesn't offer much scope for expansion beyond what's already there

I don't agree with this premise at all

Can u let us know again that iyo lindelof is now one of the infallible greats despite a CV of absolute steaming shite, including spraying his cum over several probably worthwhile besides projects

Heh hostility there for lindelof not you tbh

should have him develop Speed Racer for HBO instead
adapted by blockbuster auteurs less than a decade ago
concerns a super hero without any actual super powers, just a sweet ride and a crazy family
also: chim chim

I get that he has a spotty as hell CV and inspires loathing/suspicion and I get that. I just wish more detractors had actually watched, y'know, his last major project for the company that will be producing this (if it even happens, again, I'm skeptical).

what would you like to see an hbo series do with the characters beyond the original story? moore and gibbons' piece is, to borrow a metaphor from the book itself, like an intricate mechanical watch, with every piece meticulously placed and designed to play a specific part in the overall structure

taking some of those components to, i dunno, make a toy car or whatever just seems pointless to me, but i'm genuinely interested in what you see the potential for this is beyond lindelof having recently hit his stride with the leftovers

if I knew what I wanted out of things I'd be writing TV shows. there's a whole set of movies devoted to giving comics nerds exactly what they want and they're boring as shit to me

also I like the book and all but y'all talk about it like it's some sacred text

tbh i think it's a bit airless and po-faced, and its influence on superhero comics has been largely utterly woeful

however, it is one of the few superhero-adjacent series which tells a complete, satisfying, self-contained story and it does it with a impressive unity of form and purpose

a lot of what works about The Leftovers is that it's *not* very contained, not in any way a "closed loop". it's purposely messy and elliptical, and cares more about theme and tone than anything else. that could be a good starting point for divergence. I think comics fans would probably be happier with someone like Vince Gilligan, a strong stylist with a masterful conception of plot mechanics and momentum - his shows run like, well, clockwork. lindelof seems to have a very different set of interests that runs counter to what you might expect someone taking this on would have and I think that's cool!

a longer adaptation isn't the answer because a big part of what makes the comic special is that the content is inextricably bound up with the form

this is all that needs to be said tbh. I guess it needs to be said repeatedly and loudly though.

I think Mark S has a point about Moore. At this point Watchmen is such trodden-over-territory, I would distrust *anyone* who wanted to adapt it - great book, but it's not a very interesting choice for adaptation, y'know? I'd feel the same about someone who wanted to adapt 100 Yrs of Solitude, or Captain Corelli's Mandolin or whatnot.

fuck this, where is the Camelot 3000 adaptation

would watch

could see the racial and gender stuff providing some good content in current climate

I'm really surprised there's never been a Top 10 series adaptation, "cop show in superhero town" sells itself.

certainly a better, more open-ended premise than Watchmen.

can't imagine Moore being ok with option-ing it though

bizarro once again preemptively voiced my exact response, re: Simon's 'sacred text' post.

My feelings about The Leftovers basically mirror those I might have about an ex-friend who I'm glad to hear is doing well now but who I think I'm going to still keep at arm's length after that thing he did that one time before he cleaned up his act. I'm still paying off the damages and apologizing to the neighbors.

I'm really surprised there's never been a Top 10 series adaptation, "cop show in superhero town" sells itself.

after the stunning non-success of powers I doubt anyone will be in a hurry to adapt it, although I agree it has a lot of potential as a TV show

I'm really surprised there's never been a Top 10 series adaptation, "cop show in superhero town" sells itself.

I'm really surprised there's never been a Top 10 series adaptation, "cop show in superhero town" sells itself.

I've said it before, but Sandman Mystery Theatre would be my number one choice for a comics-to-TV adaptation.

people are mostly mad at Lost because of the last season, two seasons at most, right? cause the only reason people are *still* mad about all that is because there were quite a few good bits before that, which is maybe worth noting. (and, I daresay, some good stuff even amidst the muck.)

It's easy to blame the last season, but the entire series was a con and the last season was just us marks slowly realizing what we'd bought as the con men made their way to the next town.

lol I guess that's one way to watch TV

I've said it before, but /Sandman Mystery Theatre/ would be my number one choice for a comics-to-TV adaptation.

an hbo judge dredd with a game of thrones budget would be mine

I could've rolled with it if they were honest about the shaggy dog nature of the show rather than insisting at every opportunity that they DEFINITELY knew what they were doing, and OH MAN you won't believe how this all ties together, prepare to have your mind BLOWED.

bizarro! Had you not heard? There's a Mega City One show in development, possibly at Netflix, possibly with Karl Urban reprising his role as Dredd! You're welcome.

*choke*

old lunch i love u

okay that could rule (only Netflix's extremely lax quality control has me concerned)

yeah not sure why people would assume this would be bad. the movie wasn't too hot. there is more in the comic than comfortably fits in 2 1/2 hours; the movie was both overstuffed and felt overly long and turgid while still not covering all the ground of the comic. a 10 hour pace would suit this just great.

Not so much 'this will be bad' as 'just...why?'.

(I mean besides that whole 'making $$$ for a bunch of people excepting the dudes who actually created it' thing.)

enh, i'll throw my hat in the ring and predict this will be bad

I guess I feel slightly more optimistic about this than when it was rumored to be a Zack Snyder project, but it's really just the difference between being anesthetized before having all of your teeth removed vs. having someone smash them out with a length of pipe. The end result is still gonna be sucky and toothless.

mainly i'm just psyched to find out what superheroes would be like if they existed in the real world

makes u think

"Not so much 'this will be bad' as 'just...why?'."

because the movie was boring and the story could make a good visual experience?

Not so much 'this will be bad' as 'just...why?'.

if it won't be bad... why not

Obv there should be a moratorium on cape stuff & I won't watch this

"Not so much 'this will be bad' as 'just...why?'."

because the movie was boring and the story could make a good visual experience?

it made a good visual experience in 1986 and still does today tbf

but what if the pictures... moved

Is there something more objectionable about this being adapted than an ordinary novel?

I am interested in the "lindelof is good now" narrative, so many people I trust are raving about the leftovers

tbf i basically took the "lindelof is bad" narrative on faith because afaik I haven't seen anything he's written except for Prometheus (which is v v bad for sure)

yes as bizarro and others have detailed repeatedly

xp

the novel-analogy would have to draw correspondences to a novel about novels, that also takes advantage of the unique physical properties of books and structured, written narratives (first paragraph would have to be identical to the last paragraph etc.)

feel like metafiction has been adapted to other media before

also adaptations have maybe been good without doing the exact same thing the original did

Cloud Atlas (the film) sucked btw

has anyone ever filmed Hopscotch

best ex I can think of is Cronenberg's "Naked Lunch", which is more like a biopic of a specific period in Burroughs life overlaid w fantasy sequences than an adaptation of the book

somewhat similarly: The Orchid Thief -> Adaptation

anyway my main point was that Watchmen is not equivalent to "an ordinary novel" and thus presents a different set of problems re: adaptation (which I, obviously, don't think can be fully overcome)

If someone was really going to run with the adaptation and stay true to the *spirit* of the source material, they would make a meta-movie about superhero movies that doesn't reference the original book at all

best ex of the first thing or the second? Xps

Cock & bull story another imo successful example of a film adaptation of a self-referential novel

As far as good adaptations that don't keep to the spirit of the original but are in dialogue with it nonetheless, too many to list tbh

re: Naked Lunch, I was referring to this

adaptations have maybe been good without doing the exact same thing the original did

the shining, dr strangelove, ok maybe just all Kubrick films lol

haha otm

One weird trick turn everything into a comedy

But I mean it shouldn't be necessary to list examples for you to conceive of the possibility

oh it's possible, but it isn't the most common course for adaptations, and certainly jackasses like Lindelof and Snyder aren't capable of it

I would watch an Adaptation-esque Watchmen show that's all about a fictionalized Lindelof wrecking the entire endeavor.

Hopefully with an episode centered around a fictionalized Moore breaking into the HBO offices to beat him senseless.

'Forget about who's watching the Watchmen, Lindelof, and start worrying about who's watching your ass!'

I guess I'm not convinced that some of the structural elements are that important to retain. I certainly wasn't flipping back and forth to experience Doc Manhattan's view of time as I was reading. And something like the closed loop can be done in film.

Chapter 6 (the Rorschach chapter) being symmetrical still amazes me after all these years (the midpoint is Adrian whacking his assassin).

Once they announced this I could immediately see what they were thinking by talking about this project:
- The book's structure is so important, episodic TV would be able to handle this so much better than a film. We were all saying this back in 1985
- The superhero-IP frenzy in movies will not die down for a long time, I think Marvel has stuff planned out until, what, 2025 or something
- HBO specializes in putting the reader in a somewhat familiar environment/genre and then ladleing on tons of sex and violence (it's Rome, but with tits; it's the Old West, but with tits; it's sword-and-sorcery, but with ...) - this would extend the same pattern into the superhero genre
- I can only imagine the panic in HBO offices as Thrones gets closer to its final air date

... 1986, not '85

... and 'they announced' = 'Variety reported'. I need an editor

If someone was really going to run with the adaptation and stay true to the *spirit* of the source material, they would make a meta-movie about superhero movies that doesn't reference the original book at all

yeah, this is otm

best metafictional comic book movie remains american splendor, of course

I can only imagine the panic in HBO offices as Thrones gets closer to its final air date

I'm sure this is true but given the recent failure of Snyder's Watchmen I wouldn't think this has much built-in cachet. They are def worried about not having a cash cow in the Sex and the City/Sopranos/Thrones mold in the hopper though. Westworld was garbage.

they have a couple decent comedies at the moment (Silicon Valley, Insecure) but they don't have their next prestige hour-long drama. RIP Vinyl...

Well, there is The Deuce coming up in Sept.

I thought Westworld was amazing and adored it, but ymmv

Also from what I can tell something being 'recent' does not prevent anybody from adapting it again right away, the Spiderfilms gave me whiplash

they would make a meta-movie about superhero movies that doesn't reference the original book at all

isn't this Birdman?

Well, there is The Deuce coming up dropping in Sept.

fixed

But yeah I guess the point I'm trying to make is the marketing for this show would write itself and have the benefit of being congruent with the present superhero market saturation.

Remember HBO was really playing on the edge with Thrones, as there wasn't exactly a sword-and-sorcery thing going on in the culture at the time.

Lindelof is really made for stuff like this, too, I would not mind him being the guy rather than Gilliam to have a crack at it as a TV show.

As to whether we *need* it, no, we do not need these endless reboots. But that's exactly what I thought before Westworld aired

as there wasn't exactly a sword-and-sorcery thing going on in the culture at the time.

all those kids that loved Harry Potter grew up and were excited about prospect of murderboobs

Ha yeah I did forget about Potter

and immediately prior to that: LOTR

(actually those probably overlapped a bit, I forget?)

That was 2001-2003, I think - S1 of Thrones was 2011

no I meant LOTR and Harry Potter overlapped

can't imagine Moore being ok with option-ing [Top Ten] though

if we're concerned about Moore's objection to properties being optioned, why does this thread exist?

"Lindelof is really made for stuff like this, too, I would not mind him being the guy rather than Gilliam to have a crack at it as a TV show."

yeah it's too late for Gilliam to do this and do a good job. His last several films have been awful and I'm not holding out hope that Don Quioxte is going to be any good either. This would have been a good project for him in the mid 90's.

if we're concerned about Moore's objection to properties being optioned, why does this thread exist?

does Moore not own Top 10 anymore? I can't remember. I was only bringing it up in terms of the likelihood of projects moving forward (since he doesn't own Watchmen obviously his opinion on that one is moot)

I hope they're saving Terry Gilliam for The Incredibles.

Terry Gilliam's latest films haven't been awful. Zero Theorem was decent but it felt like an xeroxed copy of Gilliam's usual tics

does Moore not own Top 10 anymore? I can't remember.

Jim Lee has been a vice president of Warners' third-largest IP farm for 18 years because he got Moore to create a line of four series work-for-hire and then sold his entire company to DC, who couldn't get Moore to work for them any other way, because they'd behaved so deceitfully around the copyright to Watchmen

https://www.streetlib.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/capitalism.gif

I'm torn between respecting the wishes of the creator (don't make movies of my comics, please burn all my novels etc) and the desire to see 'protected' texts played with, transformed, desecrated.

Certainly agree w/ Moore that DC's constant returning to comics he created thirty or more years ago indicates a certain amount of creative bankruptcy.

as opposed to Moore just riffing on shit that was created a hundred years ago

^^^

Someone should make a comic about Moore getting increasingly pissed off about the shitty adaptations made of his work and after investigating and pulling strings he finally discovers that the responsible party is a cabal of the fictional characters created by others which he built his career around.

After he hangs himself to dispel the hallucinations we find out the real culprit was guy fawkes all along

He speaks! Sorta.

“All I can say at this time is, as of right now I haven’t had any meetings at HBO about Watchmen. I’ve been very vocal about my love for those 12 issues that eventually became a graphic novel, that they were completely and totally inspiring for all the storytelling that I did subsequently, and that I owe a debt to it. So is that piece of material something that’s really interesting to me? Yes, but I do feel like I have to weigh the balance of ‘Should it exist?’ before I decide to take it on, and I’m sort of in that process now. I hold the source material in such high regard it would literally be the worst feeling in the world to screw it up. So I take it very seriously, there’s a lot of responsibility. All I can say is I’m thinking about Watchmen a lot right now, nothing official.”

It's happening! Or something.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZO0ijeDh43/

...uh huh.

http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/watchmen-hbo-damon-lindelof-1202818921/

“We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago,” Lindelof wrote. “Those issues are sacred ground and will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted.”

“They will however be remixed,” he continued. “Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with ‘Watchmen.’ The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica.”

He went on to say that the show he is creating will not be a sequel to the original either.

“This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built…but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original,” he said. “It has to vibrate with the seismic unpredictability of its own tectonic plates. It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary. The Old Testament was specific to the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev. Ours needs to resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless. And speaking of Horsemen, The End of the World is off the table…which means the heroes and villains–as if the two are distinguishable–are playing for different stakes entirely.”

lmao Lindelof you crazy asshole

Need a Mendoza.gif except the scream is "LINDELOFFFFFFF"

honestly based purely on The Leftovers and the fact that this is guaranteed to piss off funnybook nerds I'm convinced it's going to be great

god give me strength

I mean you already got a hyper-faithful screen version so why not just get real fuckin weird with it

this will not be "real fuckin weird"

it will also not be good

the way he ruined the last few seasons of Lost does not make me confident that this series will be good.

I mean you already got a hyper-faithful screen version

ban Simon from having opinions

imo a hyper-faithful version would have had an embedded pirate television show

A director's cut with 24 minutes of additional footage was released in July 2009. The "Ultimate Cut" edition incorporated the animated comic Tales of the Black Freighter into the narrative as it was in the original graphic novel, lengthening the runtime to 3 hours and 35 minutes, and was released on November 3, 2009.

nah you're alright

hyper faithful version would have just been static shots of the comic book pages

if it's half as weird as the leftovers it will be real fuckin weird

honestly based purely on The Leftovers and the fact that this is guaranteed to piss off funnybook nerds I'm convinced it's going to be great

― Simon H., Tuesday, May 22, 2018 3:43 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think someone might've misled you on how liking things works, but whatever does it for you, I guess.

This sounds dumb and bad and unnecessary and I can't understand why anyone beyond the people making money off of it would want it to happen.

Those issues are sacred ground

"The wishes and moral rights of Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons, however, are worthless shit that I will spend many, many millions of dollars to disrespect and dishonour."

word

This is basically 'okay, I know there was already a film adaptation of (let's say) A Confederacy of Dunces a decade ago, but I think it would make a really great TV show. No, we're not re-adapting it or formulating a sequel. We're taking the beats, the essence of the novel, and we're gonna shake things up a little. Like what if Mr. Ignatius J. Reilly was actually disgruntled blogger Ms. Ignatia ORLY? What if that? I envision a minimum of five seasons. I've already picked out a yacht. Thank you, HBO.'

he explicitly says Gibbons has given his blessing (although I don't blame you for not reading the entire thing)

Watchmen is an obsessively-detailed, hermetically-sealed world where pretty much everything worth exploring is explored within the text itself and which is tailor-made for its specific medium. I'm hard-pressed to think of a work less in need of adapting, let alone adapting twice (and let alone everything DC has done to strip the corpse down to the bone over the past several years).

he explicitly says Gibbons has given his blessing (although I don't blame you for not reading the entire thing)

I didn't know there was anything to read, but am doing so now. "Dave said he would offer me his blessing if I really felt I needed it to calm my soul" is even less of an endorsement than Gibbons' PR statement on Before Watchmen, "You know and I know that these are worthless wastes of paper, but I got paid already."

speaking of which, some high-quality endorsements on Lindelof's instagram:

jimmypalmiotti RED THE SILK SPECTRE MINISERIES that came out a few years ago...you will fall in love with it.

we all know what happened to Jack Kirby and yet we're first in line for every Marvel film

uh no, ppl who know what happened to Kirby explicitly refused to see even Marvel films by directors they were intersted in while Marvel was actively suing Kirby's heirs

yeah I was not down with that shit.

I saw Guardians out of interst in Gunn, but only once Mantlo's brother had made press statements of "I'm not allowed to publicly say that Marvel gave any money towards the care of my permanently brain damaged brother because they will not create any kind of precedent for creator credit or royalties or charity or health care, but WINK WINK Bill would be happpy WINK WINK if you go and see it WINK"



we all know what happened to Jack Kirby and yet we're first in line for every Marvel film

^ this is an open declaration of "I don't actually get it"

I read it as an admission of guilt

Lindelof's description of this make me think of the first season of Fargo, which was quite good.

On the other hand, Damon Lindelof is not Noah Hawley.

Correct, his last series was way better than any Hawley stuff

Tbh FARGO probably is a great comparison point in terms of spinning off a great isolated, self contained work into a longer, expanded format, I just personally think it sucks shit

in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original

chef kiss

Nice catch. Although maybe Lindelof is totally aware of what he's saying and the show will actually feature slightly altered Watchmen characters in the same way Watchmen features slightly altered Charlton characters.

(Narrator: Lindelof has no idea what he's saying.)

not here for the lindelof slander by people who haven't seen leftovers

like the mother of a murderer cryin that hes changed hes changed hes a good boy my boy, mfers sitting here in 2018 telling me i have to see the latest thing this cunt was involved in before i judge

a lot of people whose opinions i respect tell me the leftovers is good and i’ll def get around to watching it at some point but if u don’t think this next project will be the perfect catalyst for lindelof to get right back on his bullshit and then some u are frankly out of ur goddamn mind

not here for the lindelof slander by people who haven't seen leftovers

voodoo knows what's up

Damon Laurence Lindelof (born April 24, 1973) is an American screenwriter and producer. He was the co-creator and showrunner of the television series Lost (2004–10). He has written for and produced Crossing Jordan (2001–04) and wrote for Nash Bridges (2000–01). Lindelof also co-wrote the science fiction films Cowboys & Aliens (2011), Prometheus (2012), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Tomorrowland (2015). He wildly smacked his ape paws against the keys for long enough that he eventually and wholly accidentally co-created the TV series The Leftovers for HBO, adapted from the novel by Tom Perrotta.

it's almost like he writes for money!

Exclusively so, even!

The Babaloo Mandel of our generation.

how quickly we forget akiva goldsman

what really haunts me about Goldsman is that he's credited with most of the best episodes of Fringe

i choose to believe that fringe was orchestrated by alternate-universe versions of goldsman, abrams, orci and kurtzman, who all returned to their dimension after their work was done

lmao

anyway to sum up The Case For Why I Think This Will Be Good so I can just lie down and die on this hill

1. the vast majority of the stuff that was bad about Lost mostly comes down to poor planning and production mishaps, which Lindelof has pretty freely acknowledged and taken his knocks for (hell, he even consulted Mike Schur on What Not To Do when planning a high-concept TV show)
2. The Leftovers slaps and I would put money down on this using a bunch of the same creatives. lest we forget TV is a deeply collaborative medium and if nothing else the dude has proven he can put together a very talented bench
3. the direction laid out in the letter (diversify, find new angles, no more apocalypses) all sound good and productive to me

Of all the terrible ideas about Watchmen, this one sounds like the least terrible

The best idea remains: do nothing, give Alan Moore rights back

I'm willing to buy bg's theory on Fringe

Nash Bridges was good, this is the hill I'm going to die on

i do apreciate simon's argument that lindelof's watchmen's gonna be good because he'll hire writers who are better than he is

Trying to think of things that are easier than hiring writers who are better than Damon Lindelof. Eating, breathing...I'm sure there's a third.

Ahem, excuse me, just burped out a writer who created Lost and The Leftovers, my bad

anyway to sum up The Case For Why I Think This Will Be Good so I can just lie down and die on this hill

none of these explain why it is a sensible, useful, or not-offensive idea to do

The sensible and useful reasons are "to make money, because capitalism" and the not-offensive reason is "gtfo with your hand-wringing on behalf of a relatively small number of malcontents, because capitalism."

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are malcontents?

"because capitalism" really carries a lot of weight eh

lmao "offensive"

would you have preferred unethical

Who knew that a little Lindelof was all it would take to get Simon to finally champion capitalism.

(Lindelof or the notion of butthurt nerds, not sure which really.)

on the list of capitalism's sins, the violating of old intellectual property is reaalllly low

also realllly easily remedied

You're moving those goalposts like an old pro! Welcome to the dark side, Simon, we've kept a seat warm for you.

if you want something less dramatic, "because we think it will make money"

lmao moving goalposts, I already said I think the show will be good and don't care about Tarnishing The Legacy or w/ever, p sure zooming out to get mad at capitalism (which, yes, is absolutely my jam) is when the goalposts moved

"old intellectual property"

DC's #2-seller for 2017

if I read Simon right he thinks that the quality of the final product will trump all ethical concerns. Both propositions are highly suspect, but for different reasons.

what's more annoying: unironic sneering at "funnybook nerds" or saying "lmao" at the start of every post

i vote both

(ie 1) that the product will be any good and 2) that the quality of a product overrides all other concerns about how it is made)

xp

btw I totally think it was unethical and lowdown for DC to fuck Moore and Gibbons, I'm just imagining the reasoning at the other end, not agreeing with it

I can't speak for sic, but I give a hearty lmao to anybody that would consider me a "funnybook nerd"

xp

lmao funnybook nerds

zooming out to get mad at capitalism is when the goalposts moved

Moore walked from DC over matters including the violation of contractual rights and threatened violation of IP rights on Watchmen in 1987. those goalposts have been in place longer than this thread revive.

That Moore sure sounds like a nerd to me.

idk guys I take it as a given that art produced under capitalism is inherently exploitative at some point (or more likely dozens) of the production line, idk why I should shed tears for Moore and Gibbons in particular, I'm sure they're doing fine

but anyway I'm sure everyone itt boycotts all the marvel movies and didn't shell out for the first Watchmen movie

i don't watch any of the marvel movies and regret having watched the watchmen movie, how's that?

Marvel garbage is easily avoidable and yeah I didn't pay to see anything in between the first X-Men movie and the most recent Thor movie (which, as sic notes, was after the settlement)

if you think I shelled out for the first Watchmen movie, I refer you to the ilx thread where I actively told people not to go see it and you championed it, so speak for dumbass self

xp

I mean I was about 20, I probably championed a lot of dumb shit

not like now, of course

idk why I should shed tears for Moore and Gibbons in particular

it's not a zero-sum game: I can have objections to the treatment of Moore and Gibbons AND Kirby and Ditko and Veitch and Mario and Beto and Xaime and Templeton and Gerber, and make consumer decisions accordingly

but anyway I'm sure everyone itt boycotts all the marvel movies and didn't shell out for the first Watchmen movie

"everyone"

"ethical consumption" is a farce

I've paid or Moviepassed for 76 cinema presentations this year, and none of them were Marvel productions (I did see New Line's Blade for the first time, rescored by touring industrial / techno artist Kilbourne, though)

I bought comics from over 40 different publishers last year: only two of them (1 one-shot, 1 mini) were from a publisher large enough to have an accounting department (the same one in both cases).

Some of our spending in modern society goes towards entities and principles that we don't actively support. Some of it we are able to exert control over, and art is the area where this is easiest to do.

acknowledging that there are degrees of ethical consumption is not farcical, esp when we're talking about non-essential things like art (as opposed to, say, food, clothing, means of production, etc.) It isn't very hard to find art directly from the people that created it and compensate them appropriately, it's really easy. Conversely, it is really easy to avoid consuming shit from a shit factory.

you can acknowledge it all you want but (with the exception of sending independent/local artists yr money directly) none of your choices make any difference at all to anybody but you

1) that's a p big exception there, 2) welcome to ethical behavior

not that big an exception, most people never do it

glad to see an admission that the point of ethical consumption is purely ego stroking and not actually changing anything

not that big an exception, most people never do it

this is totally untrue

we create change instead by arguing on the internet

as far as "purely ego stroking and not actually changing anything" idk what to tell you dude. Read Kant?

we create change instead by arguing on the internet

probably more effective than not buying an HBO subscription tbh

unless of course you give the money you saved to some socialists or something

SO ANYWAY

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-cast-of-hbos-watchmen-has-been-revealed-and-the-fan-1826269382

Variety reports Regina King will play the lead character in the series, and she’ll be joined by Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Adelaide Clemens, and Andrew Howard. Deadline adds that “King is believed to be playing Angela Abraham, while Gossett Jr. likely is Old Man. Howard is said to be playing Red Scare, Clemens could be Pirate Jenny,” but none of that is confirmed.

Don Johnson IS...Miami Rorschach

Maybe it's a bunch of superheroes playing the Watchmen for a costume party.

HELL YES to Regina King.

FTR, I don't deny that I give Marvel/Disney hella $$$ (and, while recognizing at least some of the ethical dilemmas of doing so, opt to draw my ideological red lines elsewhere) but then also I don't champion the downfall of capitalism.

"no ethical consumption under capitalism" is loony left speak for "i like to eat at mcdonalds"

hey at least he's not stroking his ego while not actually changing anything

"no ethical consumption under capitalism" is loony left speak for "i like to eat at mcdonalds"

and ethical consumption is useless lib speak for "my consumer choices matter" are we done now

(FPing myself for posting way too much itt)

too bad this list isn't legitimate https://www.imdb.com/list/ls027731450/ I would be excited by more carrie coon.

"no ethical consumption under capitalism" is loony left speak for "i like to eat at mcdonalds"

and ethical consumption is useless lib speak for "my consumer choices matter" are we done now

(FPing myself for posting way too much itt)

― Simon H., Wednesday, May 23, 2018 4:58 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As it generally comes from hyper privileged first world marxists and it is frequently allied with making clearly unethical and deliberate consumer choices it's the equivalent of a dude saying "ethical relationships between the genders is impossible under patriarchy" while leering at a woman

Also capitalism will exist for the rest of our lives

Ok.

Your incredulity is touching.

No I mean he's right, I just don't see how it changes anything.

anyway good talk everyone

I'm struggling to reconcile the apparent enthusiasm for 'the leftovers' on here with the following plot points gleaned from wikipedia:

Kevin is plunged into the realm of the undead; a hotel full of people stuck between life and death. In this world Kevin is an international assassin

he is told by a familiar face that he must sing karaoke to get back home

The vessel is hosting a "pride" of people that celebrate the linage of "Frasier, the Sensuous Lion", through mass copulation

Patti and President Kevin watch the nuclear apocalypse as Kevin returns to the world of the living, where the rain has stopped.

Hey uh maybe don't post shitloads of spoilers for no good reason

Super great and honest form of critique tho

If you want to know why people like the show maybe try watching it

life, short. sorry for spoilers tho.

Does give me an excuse to post this tho

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Country_Safari#Frasier_the_Sensuous_Lion

All joking and teasing ITT aside, spoiling any TV show is unconscionable and you should be ashamed of youself, ledge.

I'll make my peace with those whose enjoyment I've spoiled in heaven.

Am willing to accept Leftovers is good without watching it, but Lindelof has been involved in a lot of things, and only one of them was good, so perhaps with that track record it's reasonable to expect Watchmen to be shit, especially given the screwing-over of the creators and the staleness of going back to this stroy AGAIN when it requires no expansion.

just cause Lost had a bad final season doesn't mean it wasn't an all-time great show

no, there are other reasons

I think it's reasonable to expect this will be good since Leftovers was the last thing he did, for the same company, probably with some of the same writers (and at least one shared principal actor). no idea why the creators getting screwed over makes it less likely to be good, and it seems like the story is going to be significantly different, if not unrecognizable

Watch Men will be like Mad Men except about watches instead of madness or whatever that show was about.

no, there are other reasons

― we used to get our kicks reading surfing MAGAzines (sic)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The integrity of Lost depended pretty much entirely upon the satisfactory resolution of its intricate latticework of mysteries. That it had a shitty final season was almost incidental to the fact that the entire thing turned out to be a shaggy dog con job. Like who gives a fuck about a Miss Marple if Christie decides on the last page that some incidental schmuck introduced on the page before was the killer all along and also everyone is in heaven for some reason.

The integrity of Lost depended pretty much entirely upon the satisfactory resolution of its intricate latticework of mysteries.

Lost was an ensemble drama and its "integrity" depended upon the characters, their relationships, and their struggle to survive. For five years, the show managed to ground the intrigue with emotional stakes, but as it approached the end, the intrigue overwhelmed the stakes and the character beats didn't land as hard.

I don't quite understand how that final season invalidates the thrill ride of the first five years. i guess it's a basic philosophical question of tv criticism. is the destination more important than the journey? i would say no.

anyway, the leftovers managed to avoid the issue by stating outright that none of the mysteries would ever be solved.

Kate and Jack were so damn boring tho

kate, yes. jack was horribly annoying at times, but i wouldn't say boring. his conflict with locke was very compelling and one of the thematic engines behind the series.

The destination isn't more important than the journey unless the narrative in question is all hints and allegations about the destination and oh man, this destination, just you wait, it'll blow your socks off, boy oh boy.

And everyone who ever said it was all about the characters was lying to themselves. There were some fun performances but as characters they weren't were cardboard pawns being moved around a Rube Goldberg chessboard. Events were more often motivated by someone's incoherent intrasigence wrt revealing a key truth than by like actual human emotions or desires. What were anyone's motivations beyond the two or three broad personality traits that defined them in toto?

weren't

The integrity of Lost depended pretty much entirely upon the satisfactory resolution of its intricate latticework of mysteries. That it had a shitty final season was almost incidental to the fact that the entire thing turned out to be a shaggy dog con job.

And everyone who ever said it was all about the characters was lying to themselves. There were some fun performances but as characters they weren't were cardboard pawns being moved around a Rube Goldberg chessboard.

yeah, this is just wrong.

guess i'll keep lying to myself about why I loved the show

I would never deprive you of that.

yeah there were lots of good characters (and performances), even if they weren't always well served by the plot or, y'know, were unceremoniously killed off cause the actors wanted out (RIP Mr Eko).

one under-appreciated reason for the stuff that didn't work is the old-school network model of super long seasons, which made for a lot of draggy, shaggy storytelling and made them feel the need to throw in all kinds of stupid shit they then ALSO felt the need to try and resolve later.

aka the chris claremont model of longform serialised storytelling

The flashbacks in particular, at least in the earlier seasons, were mostly useless filler they used to pad out 60 minutes.

'Aw, sweet, finally an hour devoted to Sawyer having an argument with his half-brother about whether they should sell their dead father's house! Crucial backstory, bruh.'

(Made-up example, obvs, but the point stands.)

lmao that's basically all the Kate episodes

Speaking of cardboard pawns - watching Westworld makes realise how memorable and distinct the characters on Lost were. Almost everyone on Lost is someone's fan favourite. Even the good performances are kind of neutered in Westworld.

^^^^yep. which reminds me that the worst thing about Lost isn't the ending, it's the dozens of shows that have followed trying to one-up or even just ape it. there were lots of especially dire ones directly afterwards (Wayward Pines, anyone?)

I'm scanning through the old Lost threads atm, trying to find the point when the wheels decisively came off and splattered my previous gushing fanboy luv across the road.

pls keep discussions of splattering and/or gushing fanboy luv to i love tmi

For me, Lost was more disappointing for failing its great characters with silly endings than for failing its mysteries.

The two off-the-rails bits for me were:

* "Let's all nuke ourselves and go back in time" - you know, even on a show about a magic island, this didn't really make sense
* The Alison Janney episode - like, the most full-on terrible nonsense since the Jack tattoo story
* Sun deciding to die with Jin on the sub - the point where the characters turned into cardboard pawns

er sorry bg

idc about discussing lost itt, i just wanted to make a jizz joke

sorry bg

sorry chuck

Ha, I just found an eight-year-old post in the Lost season 6 thread which is basically a clone of my harangue a few posts up. Although I referred to the characters as 'cogs in some big Rube Goldberg machine' not cardboard pawns, so clearly our thoughts and ideas are capable of evolving over time.

'devolving' surely, cuz cogs makes more sense in the context of rube goldberg than cardboard pawns

U clearly have not witnessed my Rube Goldberg machines, friend.

Also my previous thoughts on 'it's the journey, not the destination': it's like you had massive diarrhea throughout the entire last day of your otherwise amazing six-day trip. And then you arrive to find that your destination has been razed to the ground. And the architects are peeing on the rubble.

I think Westworld is the first high-concept show I've started watching since getting burned on Lost (aside from Orphan Black, I guess, but that always felt like sorta trashy and meandering fluff which existed mostly as a performance showcase). I've enjoyed it thus far but I've been hurt too badly in the past to give it the whole of my heart.

I don't think Westworld is really built for emotional investment in the same way anyway

Or if it is, it's a complete failure

xps yeah, but still, most of the trip was good

"* The Alison Janney episode - like, the most full-on terrible nonsense since the Jack tattoo story"

I don't even remember this at all!

LOST is actually way more fun to rewatch than it was to watch initially when I thought things would be explained

I'm mostly just worried that the children of today will stumble upon historical records of our positive feelings toward Lost without fully understanding the gravity of the ultimate lesson we learned. It keeps me up nights, sweating profusely and weeping.

Alison Janney ep was I think the penultimate episode which flashed way the fuck back and revealed that many of the island's mysteries revolved around characters we didn't meet until the penultimate episode. Like all good fiction, really.

Alison Janney ep comes right after the one where Sayid, Sun & Jin all die - all the remaining Not White People in one convenient batch! - delaying the followup to that for another week, which was super annoying.

While we're on this train, the parallels between the beginnings of S2E1 of LOST and the most recent Westworld were definitely on purpose, right?

The destination isn't more important than the journey unless the narrative in question is all hints and allegations about the destination and oh man, this destination, just you wait, it'll blow your socks off, boy oh boy.

by the end of season 1 i had realized that JJ's big trick was in hyping things up. every single episode had the most important event happen at the very end, at the very last shot, so that anticipation built for the next one. maybe it's like that trick of not showing the monster until the last frame or whatever. the anticipation will always be better than the reality cos it is the point where the viewer's imagination goes off.

as for the story, i didn't mind it, in fact i loved the pulp time skipping and all that. it was quite clear that they never had a grand plan or overall story, but the way it was made it made you THINK they did. he pulled off the same trick with TFA (the follow up of which was similarly unsatisfactory).

JJ's involvement with Lost ceased halfway through the first season

Forget it, he's rolling.

He definitely helped set the storytelling template for the rest of the series, but yeah for specific character and plot decisions the blame lies with Lindelof, Cuse, and to some extent ABC

well yeah not just JJ but he likes that style of storytelling and he did set the tone for the series. ofc they continued w teasing interesting ideas past his involvement.

like somebody gets shot in the very last scene and it doesn't even show you who it is. they do this all the time. it's exciting but the answer is not gratifying (hence the need for the next episode to end on another enticing cliffhanger). i often feel like they wrote episodes by first writing the cliffhangers and working backwards from there.

That would suggest a degree of planning and forethought went into the endeavor.

Not to reopen old wounds, but what was that thing with Locke being shown the box? Did that ever get resolved?

It was locked.

Spurgeon notes:

* the "Who's Alan Moore?" part of this open letter is hilarious in a punch yourself into unconsciousness at the way art is treated kind of way. Which I guess is its intention, after a second read. Hm. If they had just waited another ten years people would have split with the material more fully and an adaptation wouldn't have seemed such a gold mine -- let alone multiple adaptations. I'm just going to be shitty and weird about this particular thing for the rest of my life, so apologies in advance. We've reached the point where I'm pretty sure people think they're improving on what for all its faults is a wholly realized expression of personal belief about art and politics. The idea of fixing art is always worthy of contempt. A potential Stoppardian take, even projected as good, doesn't seem to change the original, unnecessary treatment of the writer.

There's nothing inherently wrong with remakes or reinterpretations imo. What is inherently wrong imo is the naked cynicism of remaking a thing solely for the sake of capitalizing upon whatever marketable appeal the original work still possesses while not actually bringing anything worthwhile to the table or even trying to improve on what came before. It could be argued (and I have argued) that remakes should maybe be reserved for works with promise but whose execution was dicey.

agree w all that

it's also inherently wrong not to compensate the original creators, but we've been over that

What is inherently wrong imo is the naked cynicism of remaking a thing solely for the sake of capitalizing upon whatever marketable appeal the original work still possesses while not actually bringing anything worthwhile to the table or even trying to improve on what came before.

That would be wrong and craven, yes. Let's see if that's the case in 1.5 years or so.

Sometimes it's surprising what remakes end up bringing something new or worthwhile to the table - sometimes even remakes of already-good-or-even-great things. The Crazies, Let Me In, Fargo (again, for people who aren't me), arguably Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (I didn't like it much but it has plenty of defenders), probably lots of others I'm forgetting.

those all suck

cool argument tho

I prefer The Crazies' remake to the original tbh, though it was never even close to my fave Romero

and like 'em or not Let Me In and (ugh) Fargo are broadly well-perceived

Ah, is there any more solid argument technique than simple gainsaying?

well we're down to taste (since Simon rejects any ethical arguments about what's being done here) and Simon's taste is terrible, how else should I argue it?

Simon's argument is essentially "sometimes remakes are good, and I like Lindelof's latest project. Ergo, this most recent project of his (which exists solely for the crassest and most cynical of economic reasons) has a reasonable chance of success at being something I might enjoy, therefore it should be made"

The only thing to argue with there is his estimation of the likelihood that he will enjoy it. And he probably will enjoy it! I probably won't. And I object to it being made at all on the grounds that sic has laid out.

I would likewise argue that the ratio of good:bad remakes is slanted much more towards the latter than he would admit (all I can think of is the Fly and the Thing at the moment), but again this is a matter of taste.

Lots of remakes are bad! IIRC most "new" movies are also completely terrible (and nearly as derivative).

xpost Body Snatchers

But yes, that trinity of horror remakes, basically. If you can't do what they did, maybe don't bother.

ooh yeah Body Snatchers is def good. idk if it's better than the original (which is also great) but it's close.

The wild success of Disney's live-action carbon copies of its animated library is like the most dispiriting thing. Shit's just gonna get grosser now that they've figured out just how little effort they need to exert.

I can safely say even if this is terrible it will not be a carbon copy.

But anyway ultimately this whole stupid argument rests on the fact that you either think Lindelof can pull off something interesting with this or you don't. I'd be curious to know if anyone watched Leftovers but still thinks this is a hopeless prospect.

I did not but I do.

:)

I'm sorry he hurt you.

It's been a difficult recovery but the sun is on the horizon.

If nothing else I'm always happy to find someone else who thinks Fargo the series stinks.

U should check out the second season because I also thought the first kinda stunk but was pleasantly surprised by the reprise.

I thought the second season was worse lol

But I would consider watching the third purely because Carrie Coon was so incredible on....yes...The Leftovers

uhhhhhhhh http://www.slashfilm.com/watchmen-set-photos-new/

Wow, first I was shocked, though I shouldn't have been, that anyone didn't like Mr. Show. Now I am shocked to learn that people didn't like any of those three seasons of Fargo, which were all I thought very different and all equally exemplary.

Though, yeah, season two and three were my favorite.

They're kinda spoilery if anyone cares about that sort of thing but the implications in those set pics seem fine to me lol

my main issue with Fargo is that it feels like Hawley treads pretty much the same thematic ground as various Coens films (not just Fargo), only with less wit or economy

Economy, maybe - in total each season is obviously longer than any movie - but I thought the elliptical relationship between the first two seasons was pretty awesome, and the science fiction elements that crop up pretty novel. And I think the casting and acting across the board is pretty top-notch, considering all the goofy accents.

Yeah, if you dislike the Fargo show because it's too much like the Coens you might be disliking it wrong.

that's not exactly it but I don't really care enough either way to eludicate further, I find Hawley's stuff too schematic and overly pleased with itself

FWIW I couldn't get into Legion for that reason. Just think Fargo is A+ peak TV, everything I want from a series.

‘too schematic and overly pleased with itself’ would probably be my main criticism of the watchmen comic nowadays, ironically enough

I will agree in retrospect that it was a misstep for the last panel to feature a smug portrait of Moore with arms crossed asking, 'Do you see?' (he should've gone with 'You're welcome' imo).

Watchmen is a very self-confident piece of work, but I think "pleased with itself" is unfair, if only for comparison's sake with From Hell, Providence, and the later series of LOEG, which are all super-smug works of art (even though I like From Hell).

agreed re both smugness and goodness when it comes to From Hell

that said I never picked up *quite* the levels of self-serious portent from the comic that Snyder's movie contained

The film is something else. The book has smugness by association for me - From Hell is Moore "doing" Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock (in a way), but I find them both annoying old gits.

confusingly enough, I was talking about the Watchmen movie there. Never saw the From Hell movie, looked dire.

Duh, of course.

But yeah, the Snyder Watchmen is *really* something else. I can't think of an adaptation that misses the point of the original source material to such an epic scale.

("Doomsday Clock" excepted.)

I still sometimes think about the aborted modern-day Greengrass adaptation with (reportedly) Tom Cruise attached as Veidt

and Michael Moorcock (in a way)

? I don't see this connection

Sinclair though, definitely

Series ordered, coming next year. Nicole Kassell directing the pilot

https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/watchmen-hbo-series-damon-lindelof-1202908824/

Curious how they’ll step up the sex & violence beyond what the book had for HBO

With power over matter, Dr. Manhattan tossed his enlargement pills.

fwiw Leftovers didn't have much sex *or* violence

Got a 'who watches watchmen' joke ready to pop when this starts, look forward to working with you all

Hoooooly shit: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are doing the music for HBO’s Watchmen series!!! pic.twitter.com/Y7dyq6zl1Y

— Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays) September 20, 2018

just how many bad ideas can he come up with, let's find out!

this is a good idea!

scabs

Are they?

not sure I've summarized it before: Ethically, I think the Watchmen adaptations are ok bc Gibbons is fine with them & Moore doesn't like them, but the comic prequels/sequels are scabbing bc Moore actually said "please do not make any Watchmen comics." that's about the size of it.

— Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) September 20, 2018

(as already established, I don't particularly care myself, everyone involved is doing fine AFAIK, but there seems to be some dispute.)

it's not about compensation as much as it is about ownership and basic respect imo

I would say that this at least seems to be a new story/characters, unlike the MCU shit

Moore also said "please do not make any adaptation" in 1989 and the contractor hired to make the adaptation stopped.

if Gibbons owned it, I doubt he'd be as keen on the adaptations that exist in our world, but he does keep separate his attitude to them vs his evident distaste for DC's dickery

are you referring to Gilliam there

yah

not so much "please don't" as "I wouldn't," and Gilliam choosing to treat him with a tiny fraction of respect, but the analogy holds

I've never heard that as being the reason Gilliam's adaptation didn't happen

It’s the reason Moore gave in the big three-issue Journal interview, corroborated by Gilliam in C21st interviews - I’ve never seen another.

I can't find TCJ interview but Moore says this to Wired

Mr. Gilliam did ask me how I would go about translating Watchmen into a film, and I said to him, "If anybody had asked me, Terry, I would have advised them not to." I think Terry is an intelligent man and came to that conclusion himself. And I think he said something to that effect, that he thought it was something probably best left as a comic and shouldn't be made into a film

which implies it was an aesthetic decision rather than a moral one. And Gilliam said this

In the end, I just felt Watchmen was unmakeable because when you reduce it down to a 2-hour film you're taking so much textured detail out that it kind of loses what it's about.

yes, an artist is able to make an aesthetic decision about a piece of art they created.

the TCJ interview was in TCJ, but it’s 2:30am in Seattle so they’re closed right now

An interesting new batch of Instagram teaser stuff was posted today. I have to say, it looks pretty darn cool (I’m not a big fan of the “property” or Lindelof or any of it, but I may sign up for HBO to check this out when it airs).

masked cops make just a little bit too much sense

https://i.imgur.com/hBL9KP0.jpg

lol

There’s something creepily compelling to me about the images... plus I’m kinda intrigued by the idea of doing a totally new story, with its own aesthetic, rather than trying to ape the original (though I know Doomsday Clock has taken some of the bloom off that rose).

we got a teaser, ft. a lot of Don Johnson.

https://youtu.be/zymgtV99Rko

Please tell me he's playing a flagrantly dong-flaunting Dr. Manhattan, please.

I wouldn't bet against Justin Theroux turning up in that capacity, tbh.

Wait is Jeremys Iron playing Adrian Veidt?

Yep.

nothing about that trailer is appealing

TBF it'll probably take another 2-3 remakes of Watchmen before they finally work the kinks out.

tbh all I'm hoping for is "Leftovers with masks" and this looks like that

I still think it looks potentially c00l. But my expectations are low here, so I’m easily pleased

Don Johnson is having a decent second (third?) act these days, he's always had a particular kind of magnetism which has often been ill-used but he looks good here.

(Also, I apparently have a soft spot Don Johnson; seeing him do his schtick here was appealing 2 me)

Also, Regina King is reliably amazing.

not knowing anything about Watchmen beyond the film i have no idea what the trailer is on about there but it looks intriguing.

SImon H otm re: Leftovers with masks

This looks fun! Noticeable lack of Manhattan/NYC too

The Rorschach Army thing seems a bit Dark Knight Returns (“Eyes slideways, Spuds...”)

This looks fun! Noticeable lack of Manhattan/NYC too

shot (and hopefully set) in and around Atlanta, apparently

Not sure if I like the whole “R For Rorschach” thing going on, but I’m cautiously optimistic

There is a vast and insidious conspiracy at play. #WatchmenHBO. October. pic.twitter.com/eI0fJZB0wY

— Watchmen (@watchmen) July 20, 2019

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Looks like it's going to make a diverse group of people mad!

Not watching this trailer, leftovers was fucking great but I have a bad feeling about this somehow

Looks fun!

Looks more like a basic cheezy TV show than I was hoping/expecting it to be :/

the Hooded Justice show-within-a-show and "you curse too much" suggest they really are going to lean on the comment-on-the-medium aspect

Y'all's glowing words of praise for The Leftovers have persuaded me to give it a go at some point despite my Lindelof enmity, but this one looks like a hard pass.

it might help to see it as a Lindelof-Tom Perotta joint since the latter did have a significant role in helping to craft it. Which is why I'll be curious to see who turns up in the writing credits for this one.

lmao if Robert Redford actually shows up in this as President Robert Redford

ah yes, everyone knows the punks were like "fuck you" and then adapted a creator's work against their wishes on behalf of a couple of corporations pic.twitter.com/2s4lotaCDc

— Christopher Sebela (@xtop) July 25, 2019

Corporates, "Creatives". Gotta love 'em. Yeesh.

ah yes, the classic punk rock spirit of telling someone whose work has been stolen and ruthlessly exploited by a giant multinational to go fuck themselves

and then making millions for yourself off further exploiting that work

Will this show deliver squid-wise y/n

it takes place post-squid, so i doubt it

What with it being Lindelof I can imagine both flashbacks to it or its immediate aftermath, similar to the Vietnam flashbacks in the film - and teasing more squid a couple of times throughout the season but their emergence depending on whether this show can get a few seasons in. And in the end the squid are actually guardians to the characters entry to the afterlife.

look all i want is for doctor manhattan to fuck the squid

Lmao he is such a fuckin dork

naw doctor manhattan is cool imo

Alan Moore really needs to get his magikal curse shit together asap

"I adapted it 35 minutes ago."

— andrew bailey (@scopperil) July 25, 2019

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more sincere expression of admiration for a creator's genius and spirit than directing a hearty spray of piss into said creator's face.

my utmost respect for your work, let me show it to you
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjIyNjMzMzQ4N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODIxNjI5NA@@._V1_.jpg

Thread just made me look up the plot of “Misery” on Wikipedia for some reason

Redford now confirmed

Hollywood legend and Captain America: Winter Soldier villain Robert Redford will have to put off that retirement party for a little longer: he will play U.S. President Robert Redford in HBO's upcoming Watchmen TV series. No, not Ronald Reagan: Robert Redford. As was teased in the final issue of the original Watchmen comic book (and reinforced in Doomsday Clock), Robert Redford is president of the United States, and has been since the 1990s. As in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's comic book series, Richard Nixon saw to it that term limits were abolished around the same time he had Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein assassinated, ensuring that he would not be forced to step down during Watergate.

https://comicbook.com/dc/2019/07/26/robert-redford-to-play-president-robert-redford-in-hbos-watchmen/

Wait, is this series supposed to exist in the same canon as “Doomsday Clock”?

I'm not a comics guy but isn't that the same canon/universe as Watchmen itself?

AFAICT they're borrowing a character/concept or two from Clock but not much else

Cool -- yeah, seems it would be weird if this series were somehow awkwardly mashed into the current incarnation of the mainstream DC Universe (the way Watchmen itself has been, via Doomsday Clock). I figured it branched off from Watchmen as its own separate thing, like the standalone movies or w/e.

Also (to lay my cards on the table), I have absolutely no clue what constitutes "canon" in the DCU at this point.

I'm not a comics guy but isn't that the same canon/universe as Watchmen itself?

Watchmen itself is a self-contained novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Everything else published by DC is theft, decades after the fact.

Also (to lay my cards on the table), I have absolutely no clue what constitutes "canon" in the DCU at this point.

― the last Berry La Croix in the work fridge (morrisp), Friday, July 26, 2019 4:07 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You and everyone else up to and including the good people at DC who get paid handsomely to keep track of these things.

Oh, Lindelofpaws https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/hbo-watchmen-racism-alternate-history/

First off, Watchmen resists a traditional view of dystopian/utopian futures. In some regards, this world is “better” than our own, particularly how its version of America dealt with anti-Black racism in the 20th century. Its timeline diverged significantly after the Tulsa Race Riot in 1921, when mobs of white vigilantes attacked Black residents and firebombed the neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street” in Oklahoma, killing hundreds of people and leaving approximately 10,000 homeless. It’s a horrifying event in American history, but it’s so poorly taught (and arguably erased from the mainstream historical narrative) that Lindelof’s EW interviewer hadn’t even heard of it until he read the script for Watchmen’s pilot episode.

The pilot reportedly begins with a depiction of the massacre, which Lindelof characterizes as an educational moment: “A delivery mechanism for this piece of erased history felt right as long as it was presented in a non-exploitative way.” But in the Watchmen timeline, the U.S. authorities reacted very differently to these events, as Lindelof said:

“There’s also this legislation that’s passed, Victims OF Racial Violence Legislation, which is a form of reparations that are colloquially known as “Redford-ations.” It’s a lifetime tax exemption for victims of, and the direct descendants of, designated areas of racial injustice throughout America’s history, the most important of which, as it relates to our show, is the Tulsa massacre of 1921. That legislation had a ripple effect into another piece of legalization, DoPA, the Defense of Police Act, which allows police to hide their face behind masks because they were being targeted by terrorist organizations for protecting the victims of the initial act.”

This is a lot to unpack, but it already seems destined to be highly controversial with regards to real-life racism and police brutality.

On a structural level, Watchmen’s U.S. government was more proactive about institutional racism in the 20th century. So much so that (white) police were “targeted” for protecting Black citizens, implicitly positioning cops as the secondhand victims of racist violence.

oh god there's gonna be so many thinkpieces about this fucking show

It's like he heard about D&D's planned Confederacy show and said "Hold my beer."

'blue lives matter but also woke' was not a place i expected this to go

Can't alienate the good people on both sides!

lmao this seems precisely calculated to make literally everyone on earth mad

just to state the obvious, police have never been in the habit of helping minority victims of violence.

ahhhh but this is an alternate reality do u see

you truly can take any existing work of fiction and shoehorn in the interesting experiments in history and ethics you've been brainstorming, no matter how awkward the fit

Oh, Lindelofpaws

Imagine knowing everything DC had done to steal this from Moore over & over across three decades, and everything Snyder had said about Moore watching in his “flat” in “London,” and Moore’s reaction, and Moore’s politics, then writing this and thinking “this is IT. I’ve really cracked the nut,” and phoning Moore to tell him about it & invite him onto the writing staff. What a vast, magnificently unselfaware amount of confidence to float through life with.

I would expect nothing less from the brain behind the script for Prometheus.

Looked him up to see if anything he's done bar the first ep of Lost has entered my eyeballs, and his comic-book adaptation ethics are consistently ratshit: he's also credited on the Cowboys Vs Aliens movie.

and yet, The Leftovers

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/watchmen-hbo-nycc-damon-lindelof-alan-moore-graphic-novel-1203360041/

“The thing that makes the original perfect was those 12 issues were designed and well-thought out,” he continued. “And it was very clear that there was a beginning, middle, and end in mind. There may have been a little bit of play in terms of the route, but they knew exactly what they were doing. We knew we had to do the same. So we plotted out these episodes. We knew exactly where we were headed. And every mystery, every question that we were asking had to be resolved.”

lmao

There's nothing quite like creating a supplement to a work your readily admit is complete unto itself. Hats off to ya, Damon.

Truly the secret of creating a great work is having a beginning, a middle and an end

feel like I heard that somewhere... Aristotle innit?

he's ahead of jj abrams there

don’t get me started

Abrams has often spoken of the inspiration he took from Aristotle's Lensflarica.

A rave review! (It is not a rave review.)

https://io9.gizmodo.com/hbos-watchmen-wants-to-dig-into-the-heart-of-american-r-1838914665

That sure was a lot of words for "it's a pilot, we'll see what happens"

lol how is it you are u still in the tank for this bullshit

you mean how am I optimistic about a show almost no one's seen by creatives whose last show was one of the best ever?

did you really just use the word "creatives"

Sounds like it doesn’t have much to do with the comic.

I'm going to need a few more episodes reviewed before I even think about watching "masked cops but woke"

genuinely wondering why this is a WATCHMEN series when it seems to have no need to be, other than getting viewers

will not watch, in any case, it's all so grubby

did you really just use the word "creatives"

too much time spent on the screenwriting discord

Would he have preferred “showrunners”? Lol

Crap artists

luv 2 show my inherent respect to "creatives" by stanning for a Watchmen TV show

assuming it has an above-average chance of being good based on immediately preceding work is "stanning" now, cool

most pre-release reviews of shows are based on 3-4 eps minimum, I'm assuming the trades will have something to say soon

apologies:

luv 2 show my inherent respect to "creatives" by endorsing scabbing over and over and over

if it makes you feel any better I'll be pirating it

https://images.amcnetworks.com/amc.com/wp-content/uploads/mt-legacy/scifi-scanner/w-i5-p9-06.jpg

What about all the awful non-immediately preceding work

Though the events of the original Watchmen comics play a significant role in the shaping of the series’ world—a place where the internet and cell phones don’t exist

lol when are writers going to stop finding ways to write themselves out of the corners that the modern world has painted them into and actually start creatively engaging with them

Watchmen (at least in its first episode) frames white terrorists and cops as being diametrically-opposed groups that have no ideological overlap.

speaking of problematic writing: holy shit

lol when are writers going to stop finding ways to write themselves out of the corners that the modern world has painted them into and actually start creatively engaging with them

just because Lindelof sucks doesn’t mean that ppl who are not Lindelof didn’t write Open Windows and Cellular and Content and Sherlock and Stuber and Broad City and Years & Years and Cyberbully and Mosaic and

sorry, i don't watch anything that's not comic-book-related

I thought we already had the "writing the world as it isn't to evoke something about the world as it is" discussion on the OUATIH thread

(of course that doesn't make every alternate earth a good or sound idea)

Based on how I feel about Watchmen, almost thirty years after I first read it, I am... intrigued but not that interested by this.

But based on how I feel about all three seasons of the Leftovers, I am ****super excited****

.. and If I'd only watched Lost and Prometheus, I'd be claw sharpening. But The Leftovers is so good, guys.

The only valid excuse for technological anachronisms in fiction is steampunk.

Wait, is this steampunk, if so then steamsign me up

Y'all, looking at his corpus on the whole, how much do you think Lindelof personally contributed to the quality of The Leftovers?

considering there are only two eps he didn't have a story or writing credit on, a lot!

also sorry but most of Lost was good

incidentally, Tom Perotta has a new series of his own w/ Kathryn Hahn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Fletcher

Lost was a mesmerizing window into the world of mastercraftspeople as they devoted years to the loving assembly of a wondrously-intricate clockwork machine which, when they finally wound it up and set it into motion, ultimately twitched and heaved and collapsed on its creators and audience with a sad mechanical fart.

Why would there be no cell phones or a internet in the present-day Watchmen universe? Even if “everything changed” at the end of the book, that stuff grew out of technology that would have predated the Squid Event...

it’s because blue lives matter iirc

https://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2014/09/watchmen.jpg

see, it’s a rich metaphor, lindelof is good again

Most of Lost was NOT good, they pulled a bullshit 'the whole episode was a dream, nothing you just watched happened' move partway through the first series, which is when I abandoned it. The first EPISODE was good.

I agree it was bad but ilx certainly did not agree with that contention

I watched the first episode and went “wtf is this bullshit, are they supposed to be in purgatory?” then checked out, so the finale discourse was extremely satisfying

xxp there is no dream episode. maybe you're thinking of the episode where they gave hurley an imaginary friend, which was indeed a bad episode, but it was in season 2 i think.

only the "flashsideways" in the final season were purgatory. it was dumb.

just to go full challops, Lindelof was only co-showrunner on Lost and wrote way smaller a % of it than he did on Leftovers

Lindelhof is a walking "Do you see" meme and Lost was terrible from Season 2 on.

Nah, was an episode where pregnant australian girl died, turned out to be a dream

The trades have seen six of the nine eps. Variety is mixed, HR is pretty positive.

https://variety.com/2019/tv/reviews/watchmen-review-1203370058/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/watchmen-review-1247215

That Variety review is really well written.

oh wow whoda thunk it

Here’s where things get tricky, and why the pilot, which screened at New York Comic Con, has drawn some criticism for setting up what looks like a false dichotomy between the Tulsa police and white nationalists. But Lindelof and his co-executive producers Kassell, Tom Spezialy, and Stephen Williams quickly earn back trust with the second hour, then in subsequent episodes that are full of graceful world-building, deft characterization, nuanced writing, but little thin-blue-line boosterism.

https://tv.avclub.com/damon-lindelof-s-watchmen-is-a-reckoning-worth-waiting-1839036902

lost was awesome, the leftovers was better, lindelof is gonna have a long leash for me with this show. especially considering how much the leftovers improved from season 1 to season 2

I was under the impression that the biggest blot on Lindelof's copybook was Prometheus

https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/454df05a-c590-4bd7-b3a0-734b0f26c6ac/d5lonet-2cb6c8e0-5611-4319-a593-d8c7651d4f41.gif?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzQ1NGRmMDVhLWM1OTAtNGJkNy1iM2EwLTczNGIwZjI2YzZhY1wvZDVsb25ldC0yY2I2YzhlMC01NjExLTQzMTktYTU5My1kOGM3NjUxZDRmNDEuZ2lmIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.VZ5uz64xn2YCcZjMQ_QHm94ole0mY-wk3wvZ4WWKorU

I mean his cinematic CV ain't great

Cowboys & Aliens
Prometheus
Star Trek Into Darkness
World War Z
Tomorrowland
The Hunt

The Hunt was pretty good! Mads makes everything better by my oh wait

I gather he's kind of a studio patchwork/for-hire type dude in the movie arena. Those movies are all pretty bad (the ones I've seen) but y'know everyone liked Chernobyl and that guy's movie CV ain't exactly pristine.

But it grows wearying to watch episode after episode of a project that so heavily borrows from its source material a tone of grandiose, baroque unhappiness.

Great! It sounds exactly like the leftovers, then

The thing about moving the setting of a, er, “property” from New York City to someplace like Tulsa is that the move was almost certainly budget-driven in part (filing in NYC is hella expensive, and dressing up Toronto to look like NYC is maybe played out a bit). It’s interesting if that move also reaps artistic dividends... but reading those reviews just made me wonder (again) why they’re making this a “Watchmen” series at all, instead of its own thing (other than the obvious “built-in hype” reasons).

I wonder if an element of shame about adapting Watchmen led them to then avoid it as much as possible.

Not sure "shame" ever enters Hollywood decision-making

Lindelof has boasted of his attitude toward shame already

I am ready for the thread pivot from "this will be garbage" to "oh this is kind of interesting actually but I wish it weren't Watchmen"

gonna be a long wait

as for "why is this based on a pre-existing property at all," that's because virtually everything/anything with a big budget that gets greenlit is (in recent HBO terms: GOT plus forthcoming spinoffs, His Dark Materials, Westworld...)

and to speak to this one last time, I understand (sic)'s bone-deep objection but I can't bring myself to care when Moore is far wealthier than I'll ever be and puts out 1000+ page opuses without so much as an editorial peep from his publisher

cool I will just start stealing as much intellectual property from those richer than myself then - starting with HBO, I'm sure they won't mind, should work out real well. Have you heard about my new TV show Game of MurderBoobs?

(also lol if you think Moore is richer than Lindelof and HBO and all the other jackals involved in this stupid fucking bullshit)

a quick google puts his net worth at $10mil, he's gonna be OK

for a deeply avowed leftist your ethics are p weird

I think the situation sucks but the show will be good and I plan to enjoy it but not spend money on it, and I am comforted by the fact that the wronged party will enjoy comfort levels I never will in perpetuity. Not that weird imo

didn't you also work for a cryptocurrency firm or am I misremembering something

No, you remember correctly. I also worked for a company that made accounting software that turned out to have a contract with the US DoD. Incidentally, if you have a Netflix or Prime )account you're underwriting labor abuses of one flavor or another. (Personally I'm signed up for one but not the other.)

that's cool, I have neither

I dunno if consumer habits rise to the level of livelihood in terms of commitment but... you do you buddy

What abuses are you referring to re: Netflix?

https://www.fastcompany.com/90250828/the-death-of-hollywoods-middle-class

(btw, since we're on the subject I guess, that shitty company I worked for never got a damn thing off the ground)

https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-and-netflix-announce-historic-contract

I'm sure that's the end of them finding ways to screw casts and crews.

idk if that's apples:apples with Netflix and Amazon there tbh

also dunno why this was even brought up except as a deflection, it has no bearing on what we were talking about afaict

xp Noted that you're hanging your "labor abuses" hat on a vague, hand-waving prediction

You were the one who brought up my fucking job. xp

Incidentally there's also the small matter of Netflix generally capping series at three seasons to keep rising compensation at bay. You can argue these are pettier abuses than Amazon, that's fair and fine, but these companies are all rotten and screw artists.

the general thrust of your argument seems to be "the world is corrupt and evil to the core, therefore whatever minor abuses I encourage or engage in are ok"

that is what I meant by weird ethics

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-16/netflix-s-reputation-for-canceling-shows-too-soon-is-overblown

to bring it back to the central issue (which I can tell you love arguing about since you keep bringing it up), every time someone points out to you how messed up it is what has happened to Watchmen as an IP, your reaction is to go "But... LOOK! Over there!"

Instead of engaging with the hard facts which are a) it was wrong what DC did to Moore over this and b) everything related to Watchmen that has been produced since has not only been ill-gotten gains, but they've also all been horribly shitty purely on an aesthetic level. These are bad things, on two separate fronts, that should not be encouraged by further patronage.

the comic book watchmen is also dumb tho

tales of the black freighter my ass

the general thrust of your argument seems to be "the world is corrupt and evil to the core, therefore whatever minor abuses I encourage or engage in are ok"

nothing is OK. I support artists I respect whenever possible and circumvent paying corrupt middlemen often, and also quite often enjoy art that is problematic on one level or another. I suspect you do, too.

re the: "all this stuff has been bad" argument, well, like it or not the emerging consensus isn't panning out that way this time it seems

Tales of the Black Freighter is great both as an EC pastiche and as an echo/foreshadowing of the main narrative imo

xp

tbh I feel bad about stinking up this thread with all this interpersonal shit cause ultimately your assumption that this will be worthless and mine that it won't be is the only real distinction of note

They’re certainly promoting it (both pics taken on a walk today)

https://i.imgur.com/0VSxl1B_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

https://i.imgur.com/QSAfO3V_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

a quick google puts his net worth at $10mil, he's gonna be OK

how the fuck do you calculate this? Watchmen is his best-selling book and he's on about a 15c royalty rate for each copy. In a great year, that's been $30,000 before tax; the year the Snyder movie came out it was about $150,000 before tax; last year (as Didio continues to trash the perennials market) it was $4,000 before tx.

his overhead is presumably low because he owns his own home and allegedly gets his weed for free, but he had to pull the plug on Dodgem Logic due to losing money, and iirc has self-funded the Jenkins films since that. also, he may have bought food once or twice (as well as his home) since 1985.

Did he have any financial participation in the V for Vendetta movie?

https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/authors/alan-moore-net-worth/

All 'celebrity net worth' sites should be scourged from the earth

That was an xp but...

Yeah, those calculations are notoriously bollocks

Not unrelatedly, Eddie Campbell wrote entertainingly about what can happen to allegedly "vast" Hollywood money here:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91cRrz-NNpL.jpg

sorry, huge image argh

Just using google for you guys.

DJI, feel free to explain the methodology that got you to agree with that citation

Did he have any financial participation in the V for Vendetta movie?

He very famously rejects all financial participation on adaptations that have been made against his will, and specifically requested that his name also be taken off the book after Joel Silver lied about him at a press conference.

hardcore

Pretty sure if a website sells advertising, everything they post has to be true, right?

I wonder if an element of shame about adapting Watchmen led them to then avoid it as much as possible.

So much shame expressed.

Shame is an unconscious drive, generally!

So my therapist tells me

LOL at that bullshit estimation of Moore's net worth, and even more bitter LOLs as using it as justification for supporting DC/Warner's continuing desecration of the work of a creative person who over the years made WAY more money for these corporate entities than the creative person themselves ever earned from their work.

I thought he very famously rejects financial participation(?)

How exactly did DC screw him & Gibbons over? I’ve read ppl alluding to it but it’s unclear to me. Their contract promised that the rights would revert when the book when out of print, and then... they kept it in print? Did it say anything about derivative works etc.?

(Lindelof comes off... not well in that Vulturr interview, btw; for a host of reasons)

I think you just answered your own question re: Moore & Gibbons.

Lindelof is by all available accounts a head case and prat

oof that interview... he's not making a great case for himself or the show, is he

What are the ethical ramifications of this even existing at all when I completely and totally side with the creator? Acknowledge that the creator has been exploited by a corporation? Now that very same corporation is basically compensating me to continue this thing.

I ask, “Is it even hypocrisy?” Then I say, as a fan, “Where would I come down on this thing if someone else was doing it? If I heard someone else was doing an HBO series called Watchmen that was not a strict adaptation of the book?” I felt that I’d be really angry about it and then I’d watch it.

xxp So is “they kept it in print” literally the sum of DC’s transgression? There must be more to it than that. Were they explicitly granted the right to do prequels, sequels, adaptations, etc.?

xxpost loooool

What are the ethical ramifications of this even existing at all when I completely and totally side with the creator? Acknowledge that the creator has been exploited by a corporation? Now that very same corporation is basically compensating me to continue this thing.

This passage in particular contains worlds.

bg, what have we said to one another about hijacking the other's thoughts

which of us is Moore and which Lindelof, I ask u

worst transporter accident ever

DC apparently told Moore and Gibbons that the copyright on Watchmen would revert to them once the graphic novel went out of print. Moore took them at their word - Gibbons I think was always more sceptical - and of course the graphic novel has always been kept in print, and DC has retained ownership. I think DC also 'promised' Alan that no other Watchmen stories would be told without his consent/participation, which of course they disregarded once their relationship with Moore broke down once and for all. Moore's position, which I support, is that Watchmen was a complete work in and of itself and doesn't require more comics by other hands, or movie adaptations by hacks like Snyder, or 'inspired by' TV series by a tosser like Lindelof.

Moore is correct inasmuch as Watchmen has (IIRC) a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Or what us storytelling wonks more commonly refer to as a three-act structure. Hope I'm not talking over y'all's heads.

I don’t understand why M&G would feel confident that their masterpiece would go out of print. But I’ve also never heard of a contract with terms like that, maybe it’s the best they could get? The comics industry is weird.

it was 1985, the market for endlessly-in-print collections of american comics basically didn't exist

and it's bitterly ironic that watchmen was one of the projects that helped create it

The history of comics is basically a series of object lessons in never believing the word of the dude who signs your paycheck. Captialists gonna capitalize.

DC were especially slow in publishing wholly creator-owned comics - Frank Miller's Ronin, for example, was jointly owned by DC and a corporation that Miller had to form specifically for the project. Watchmen's origins in the Charlton heroes (owned by DC) probably meant that it wasn't something Moore or Gibbons could ever have taken to another publisher. The one I don't understand is V for Vendetta - Alan and David Lloyd were the owners of that (possibly with Dez Skinn in the mix) but still happily conceded copyright to DC on it.

His journal doesn’t out Veidt because everything that he learns in Karnak was not in his journal. So he’s not the brightest bulb.

Huh? The point is that there's enough in the journal that, if he's killed, someone else could begin piecing it together.

I wonder if Moore & Gibbons will terminate the grant of copyright, I think the window opens next year (35 years after the grant, if it was made in 1985)?

Actually it looks like the window would be based on publication date:

(3) Termination of the grant may be effected at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant; or, if the grant covers the right of publication of the work, the period begins at the end of thirty-five years from the date of publication of the work under the grant or at the end of forty years from the date of execution of the grant, whichever term ends earlier.

wasn't there a story about there being a rorschach appearance in some dc anthology or sourcebook or something (Who's Who?)?, just within a 10 year limit, so that the character ownership wouldn't revert?

That shouldn’t affect the authors’ reversion rights. When rights are terminated by author(s) or the heirs, the publisher (or studio, whatever) can keep distributing whatever works they’ve already produced under the original grant, but can’t do anything new (unless they renegotiate for the rights).

i skimmed the NYT review, lol'd at President Redford

you lol'd at a one-panel joke from the 1986 original: at the end, Redford is running against Nixon, who is still president then.

How exactly did DC screw him & Gibbons over? I’ve read ppl alluding to it but it’s unclear to me. Their contract promised that the rights would revert when the book when out of print, and then... they kept it in print? Did it say anything about derivative works etc.?

― drunk on hot toddies (morrisp), Saturday, October 19, 2019 12:56 AM (yesterday)

xxp So is “they kept it in print” literally the sum of DC’s transgression? There must be more to it than that. Were they explicitly granted the right to do prequels, sequels, adaptations, etc.?

― drunk on hot toddies (morrisp), Saturday, October 19, 2019 1:05 AM (three hours ago)

I don’t understand why M&G would feel confident that their masterpiece would go out of print. But I’ve also never heard of a contract with terms like that, maybe it’s the best they could get? The comics industry is weird.

― drunk on hot toddies (morrisp), Saturday, October 19, 2019 1:30 AM (three hours ago)

it was 1985, the market for endlessly-in-print collections of american comics basically didn't exist

― expedited frictionless convergences (bizarro gazzara), Saturday, October 19, 2019 1:31 AM (three hours ago)

and it's bitterly ironic that watchmen was one of the projects that helped create it

― expedited frictionless convergences (bizarro gazzara), Saturday, October 19, 2019 1:32 AM (three hours ago)


bg has it: they signed a contract in 1985 that gave temporary stewardship of the property to DC with an expiration date of 12 months after publication. Watchmen #12 came out on the 28th of July, 1987, so rights would have reverted in July 1988.

The Ronin paperback came out 4 weeks before Watchmen #12. The Watchmen paperback came out on the 8th of September.

If you're aware of any DC collections prior to those at all, let alone any that were masterpieces that could be expected to stay in print in a market with no returns or reorders, please let us know! It looks like The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told hardback didn't even come out until November 1987 (and immediately went out of print, not even getting a paperback until 1989).

High Society's second buy-by-phone edition didn't even come out until November '87 either, and the first had been out of print for over six months. It may not have been offered to the DM until 1991?

Anyway by 1989 Moore was not creating new work for DC, but he and Gibbons were fine with DC and Warner keeping the book available, as they weren't publishers, and neither party gave any consideration to the copyright expiry clause. (NB that it had been a VERY major issue in the publicity in 1985-86, that the creators owned it but DC were just going to mind it for them, make sure it didn't get bruised, you know.) Then DC sold a set of Watchmen badges through comic shops, and Moore & Gibbons asked where their merchandise royalties, as specified in the contract, were. DC said "oh those were promotional, selling them brought attention to the book, you don't get royalties on promotional items" and Moore went "well, you are acting in bad faith and I will never work with you again."

At some point, DC realised that keeping the collection in print was a loophole they could exploit. Moore's position is that once it became apparent that this was going to be the first comic book in the history of the US to stay in print, it would have been appropriate to acknowledge that the contract had been drafted under different circumstances, and renegotiate a book contract. DC's position was "fuck you, you do not deserve 75c a copy, 15c is extremely generous of us."

Despite refusing to treat him like an author, DC spent the next ten years wanting and asking Moore to write for them. In 1999, Jim Lee cleverly got Moore to sign on to creating a four-title line of comics for him under WFH, then sold his entire company to DC for a large amount of money and a President position before any of these had been published. Moore had taken WFH because it meant more money upfront for the artists, for whom he was trying to find work after Liefeld had crashed and burned the titles they were collaborating on. In this honourable spirit, he agreed to keep working for the ten or so collaborators' sake, as long as DC had no editorial input and his cheques came from a holding company.

DC agreed to this, and in the spirit of good faith, Moore agreed to engage in promotional activity around the 15th anniversary of Watchmen, approving a range of action figures and filming a promo video with Gibbons.

DC then set about fucking with Moore's comics, refusing to allow him to publish stories based on facts even when they had published non-fiction comics about the same facts in the same year, pulping the entire run of the final issue of League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (a creator-owned title he had allowed to come over under Jim Lee's aegis) for the most pathetic fuckery imaginable (claiming Marvel would sue them for reprinting as one of dozens of genuine Victorian adverts, an advert for a product with Marvel in the name), and so on. Moore withdrew his participation in the Watchmen promos, and the part of DC that was dealing with him on that cancelled them.

Then Joel Silver lied about him at a press conference, and Moore asked DC to issue a retraction, and they refused, and he once again stopped dealing with them, even through the arms-length holding company. DC then revenge-fucked him by sabotaging the final LOEG book that they had rights to, holding it up for months and eventually cancelling the 7" that was part of it on the grounds that the Elvis Presley estate would sue them bcz Moore was kind of doing an Elvis voice on one side.

(At this point they also published a $100 hardcover of V For Vendetta with multiple typos on the box, just for kicks)

Then the Snyder Watchmen movie happened, against Moore's wishes, and also saw Snyder bragging about his extreme respect for Moore while making incorrect statements about Moore's authorship, the nature of his objections, the nature of his domicile, what city he lives in, etc etc. Hundreds and hundreds of shitty merchandise items were produced alongside the film, down to a Rorschach toaster that grills a mask pattern onto bread. Did Moore & Gibbons receive their merchandise royalties from these? U-Decide.

A few years after that, under Nelson, DC finally offered to hand the rights to the graphic novel Watchmen back, but in exchange for the rights to do spinoffs and sequels. Moore said "this seems like a bad faith offer and you are untrustworthy." To which DC said "this dumb old hippie is never going to sue us, chocks away!" and embarked on the Before Watchmen scabfest and various other spinoffs since, from Rebirth to Doomsday Clock to Lindelof's Watchmen. Their previous actions very very clearly indicate that they know they do not have the rights to do these projects, and they do not care.

I know I type this shit out every 18 months on here, but there's new bits of dickery this year!

The one I don't understand is V for Vendetta - Alan and David Lloyd were the owners of that (possibly with Dez Skinn in the mix) but still happily conceded copyright to DC on it.

― Ward Fowler, Saturday, October 19, 2019 1:59 AM (two hours ago)

This was just a case of "we're being treated well on Watchmen, I'll let DC finish this one off too." AFAIK the same 12-month reversion clause applies.

wasn't there a story about there being a rorschach appearance in some dc anthology or sourcebook or something (Who's Who?)?, just within a 10 year limit, so that the character ownership wouldn't revert?

― koogs, Saturday, October 19, 2019 3:32 AM (one hour ago)

I don't think so, no.

sub VP for Lee or w/e

wasn't there a story about there being a rorschach appearance in some dc anthology or sourcebook or something (Who's Who?)?, just within a 10 year limit, so that the character ownership wouldn't revert?

The use of sourcebook here makes me think it's Watchmen expansion for the DC Heroes role-playing game you're talking about? Mayfair published two modules and a sourcebook, but this was while Watchmen was being published - #8 or #9, from memory - and not after the event.

There's a line in this that alludes to what I may be misremembering (it's been 3 decades after all):

https://www.cbr.com/alan-moore-watchmen-feud-dc-comics-explained/

"included a reversion clause that would return ownership to the creators if the characters were not used for a year,"

And given a 1 year period (not the 10 I previously mentioned) then The Question #17 would be the book.

Dudn't DC also fuck moore over by interfering in another ABC book, blocking a Cobweb story for allegedly being too rude or whatever?

refusing to allow him to publish stories based on facts even when they had published non-fiction comics about the same facts in the same year,

Thanks for explainers, guys. That CBR article links to a really interesting Comics Journal piece from 1987, transcribing an interview of Moore & Gibbons (by Neil Gaiman) midway through Watchmen’s run.

In addition to sharing lots of details about the series, M & G talk a little about the DC deal, as well as their optimism about a Watchmen movie in development (“I spoke to Joel Silver on the phone, and he seemed like a real nice bloke”). Also, this bit:

GIBBONS: What would be horrendous, and DC could legally do it, would be to have Rorschach crossing over with Batman or something like that, but I’ve got enough faith in them that I don’t think that they’d do that. I think because of the unique team they couldn’t get anybody else to take it over to do Watchmen II or anything else like that, and we’ve certainly got no plans to do Watchmen II.

pilot good sorry

no need to apologize - it was good

Agreed, tho I have a feeling it’s gonna be a low point of the season

I didn’t really follow much of the discussion up to this point, so I didn’t know the series was meant to take place after the comics. Pretty interesting idea, although I don’t see how any of it could be comprehensible let alone entertaining to anyone who hasn’t read the series.

Lindelof got to do the thing they wanted to do in the first episode of LOST, so that's good.

I love seeing Tim Blake Nelson in *anything*, and his seems like a real interesting character.

As much as I was a rabid viewer of LOST I also blocked it out of my mind. What was the thing he wanted to do?

i read sepinwall's recap and he included a whole bunch of superhero-like alias names for the cops that they probably didn't mention in the pilot? like tim blake nelson's character is named 'looking glass' and regina king is named 'lady night' or something. did anyone catch people referring to them by these names? i only really remember 'panda,' who seems like a fun character

I don't want to spoiler it in-thread for anyone who hasn't watched the episode yet but it's in this link.

There was something in the dialogue when Johnson was going to inform the shooting victim's wife along the lines of "Should I wake Red and (someone else)?" and he replied "No, let them sleep" or something.

The interrogation scene in "The Pod" reminded me a bit of the brainwashing film Warren Beatty watches as part of his training in The Parallax View.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhztDt7-QT8

i loved Leftovers, it was one of my favorite tv shows of the past few years, and it made me really enjoy him again. *Because* of his work on that, I think Lindelof is much more capable now of juggling suspense & storytelling & pure wtf-ery and having it pay off in really good ways that aren’t just twists or twists sake etc. There’s less gimmicks now, i think. Maturity? idk. Anyway I loved this pilot & am on board for whatever he plans to do here. Lot of interesting things built into just that one episode that have me really intrigued.

Still not ready to believe the hype here. Not really bothered about the content ppl were outraged about before seeing it, leftovers was a show where like 75% of the characters were insane jihadists and - it’s been said and said again itt - it ruled. I still can’t work out if it was ultimately profound or kind of empty but I loved it.

sic’s outline of the rights saga (which I only vaguely knew about) def adds queasy vibes but I’d steal this if I watched it anyway. Just can’t make myself enthusiastic about a “smart” superhero sequel show, I’d rather spend the few hours between work and work reading a chapter of something and watching the daft new creepshow series atm

watching the daft new creepshow series atm

― YouGov to see it (wins), Monday, October 21, 2019 1:58 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

oooh

It is uneven!

i can't wait to start it!

Just can’t make myself enthusiastic about a “smart” superhero sequel show...

― YouGov to see it (wins), Monday, October 21, 2019

fwiw based on the one episode idk that it presents itself as any of those things

it is *very* similar to the Leftovers in terms of tone, and even has some plot/world-building elements in common

The way people are talking is piquing my interest for sure, my tired brain revolts at long tv tho so it will be a while before I get to it I think (by which time everyone may have decided they hate it)

yeah I mean it's only a nine-ep season so it shouldn't take long to see how it's shaking out

Lindelof's line about only doing one season or potentially not handling it after s1 is a total lie of course

I think I’ll watch the other thing you were bigging up before this tbh

i read sepinwall's recap and he included a whole bunch of superhero-like alias names for the cops that they probably didn't mention in the pilot? like tim blake nelson's character is named 'looking glass' and regina king is named 'lady night' or something. did anyone catch people referring to them by these names?

These were in the captions of the episode fwiw

1.5mm ppl watched the premiere, across HBO's various platforms.

(Kill 'em all with a squid! Lol)

In short: NO MORE MOORE FILM ADAPTATIONS KTHANXBYE

― Deric W. Haircare, Tuesday, June 20, 2006 11:38 AM

5 minute Future Shocks on the Cartoon Network. ANIMATED BY MY BROTHER!

― Tico Tico, Thursday, October 23, 2003 7:41 PM

a lot of the shorts Alan Moore did for Doctor Who Monthly & Weekly could be readily de-Doctor Who-ised and turned into interesting horror films. I'm thinking that one about the plastic toy factory, or the one about the Deathsmiths Of Goth.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Friday, October 24, 2003 7:48 AM

two years before The Time War became the inciting incident for a Dr Who reboot, four years before said reboot gave Time Lords lighting-shooting powers

I started out hating this, then being kind of haunted by its extrapolation of where the story left off, now I'm perversely intrigued. It's such a bizarre project, I don't really know what people who aren't obsessively familiar with the source material (raises hand) experience this as. Maybe in some way it's a little like the experience of the original - you're in a world that is mostly like ours but differs markedly in large and small ways and you want to understand how all this came to be. I kind of can't stop thinking about it, it's a bit dreamlike to actually be watching a sequel.

I know there is a whole lot of world-building and exposition yet to come, and I've read the pdfs on HBO's site so I got some additional details, but there were a couple of too-odd moments among all the odd moments for me:
So the feared interrogation technique of the day is to reenact The Parallax View inside the meditation pod from Empire? And you obtain useful information by doing that?
You have Night Owl's ship for some reason, and instead of preserving it you decide to trash it - which evidently is fun for everyone? - because that's what you need to do to kill - not apprehend - two people fleeing a shootout? You probably don't have more of these things, because technology development ceased for a couple of decades.
Police go masked, because not that long ago there was some mass attack on cops - but you also prevent them from being constantly armed in a world in which everyone else is?