A Wizard of Barfsea

Many fantasy fans out there who've become spoiled in recent years by excellent, fairly faithful adaptations of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films are reeling in shock at the treatment given Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea by the SciFi Channel. The kindest thing that can be said about the miniseries is that the cheap and superficial Harry Potter knockoff it turned out to be had a bigger budget than most of the other awful films produced by the SciFi Channel. Now, Ms. LeGuin has given up on the idea of biting her tongue, and sets the record straight on her thoughts regarding this "adaptation":

For people who wonder why I "sold out to Halmi," or "let them change the story" -- you may find some answers here.

The producers (not yet including Robert Halmi Sr.) approached us with a reasonable offer. My dramatic agency at that time was William Morris. The contract of course gave me only the standard status of "consultant" -- which means exactly what the producers want it to mean, almost always little or nothing. The agency could not improve this clause. But the purchasers talked as if they genuinely meant to respect the books and to ask for my input when planning the film.

Which, of course, means that the producers are going to remove the religious elements from His Dark Materials and Narnia adaptations, while turning the cerebral I, Robot into a slam-bang actioner regardless of what the authors think.

With the success of LOTR and Harry Potter, I expected a much larger flood of cheap fantasy films to hit the market before this. The fact that Earthsea is reduced to uninspired formula isn't surprising. What continues to baffle me, however, is the continued inability to see that LOTR and Harry Potter succeeded because of their respective faithfulness to the source material. Those books are popular for a reason. The idea that they're spending money to secure rights to novels they have no intention whatsoever of adapting in a remotely recognizable form is lunacy.

In any event, I doubt we'll see many more "adaptations" of LeGuin's work any time within the next century or so...

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