A Gift from the Culture – The First Culture Movie!?

[Deep Black]

Short stories do tend to make the best films. But 18 pages? Might make 30 mins at best. As for adding stuff, surely that depends very much what is being added...

[edash]

Well there's short and there's very short. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was at least two hundred pages.

The original story for Minority Report is only 31 pages and the one for Total Recall (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) a mere 18 pages.

[Deep Black]

How close were they to the original stories?
&
Did either of those story concepts have such a back story as "the Culture"? or were they one off stories.

[edash]

Philip K Dick is not really known for epic back story of Culture proportions. I can't comment on how those two compare to the movies as I haven't read them yet, but I'd guess that after picking up the central premise there's been a lot of artistic licence involved.

[charismatic megafauna]

Reread "A Gift from the Culture" last night. And I must say it's a pretty flimsy story to make into a movie. There are only three speaking parts (four if you count the gun) and the only appearances of anything having to do with the Culture are the expatriate protagonist and the gun (and maybe an offscreen Culture ambassador). It's essentially a straightforward terrorist attack story, with a bare smidgeon of conscience and sexual complications tossed in. There are only about five separate scenes. As written, I can't imagine anything more than 30 minutes.

What is going on here? Why buy such an insipid short story, when really great work is available? Did they just buy a title and plan to rewrite it completely? Will IMB have input? I have more than a little trepidation about this.

[Deep Black]

+ if it's a flop will we ever see a novel made into a film?

[charismatic megafauna]

Or worse, what if they make a lot of idiot changes and dumb it down for the movie-going public and it's a hit? Then there might be a series of really bad Culture films.

[Deep Black]

Yep, that could well be worse

[Conscious Bob]

We could all go round to the flicks waving placards.

[Deep Black]