Journal

Friday, November 30, 2001
So this morning's mail brought with it the script for David Goyer's adaptation of my story Murder Mysteries, which he's writing and will be directing for Dimension Films. I started it nervously, having read some astoundingly bad adaptations of my stuff, and some very mediocre adaptations, and some Okay Ones With Good Bits. And some very good ones -- Like Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni's Good Omens script - that worked because they took something that wasn't a film completely apart and then put it back together again as a film.

This was different. It was very obviously the thing I'd written. It was just the thing I'd written transformed, quite brilliantly, into a film script. I got half-way through it, and then the day started, and I had to put it down, reluctantly, and deal with stuff. And then, once the day wound down, I picked the script up again, nervous once more to see how he'd wrap it all together, and read on, very happily, all the way to the end.

It's both of the stories in Murder Mysteries. He's taken the set of literary Detective Story conventions I plugged into in the angel half of the story and reshaped them to the conventions of a Detective Film, logically and effectively. He's used words I wrote wherever he needed it and wrote good stuff to go along with it whenever he went off on his own.

If I were Dimension I'd greenlight it. I suspect that, applying the Terry Pratchett rule of films, this means It Will Never Get Made.

But I think I'll keep my fingers crossed.