Posted in: FX, Hulu, Movies, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: fx networks, game of thrones, george rr martin, HBO, opinion, shogun

GRRM No Fan of Filmmakers Trying to "Improve" Books (But Loves Shōgun)

While praising FX Network's Shōgun, George R.R. Martin also called out film/series adaptations making changes just for the sake of change.

Good news, FX Networks and series co-creators, executive producers, and writers Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks' Cosmo Jarvis, Anna Sawai, and Hiroyuki Sanada-starring Shōgun! Your series has a huge fan in George R.R. Martin. Bad news, showrunners for "nine hundred ninety-nine out of a thousand" film and/or series adaptations from books that are currently in play – especially those who look to make what they're adapting "their own." In his latest Not A Blog post ("The Adaptation Tango"), GRRM flashed back to a 2022 joint event that he participated in with Neil Gaiman – and one of the big topics that the duo addressed was their distaste for film and series creators who make changes to the books that they're adapting just for the sake of being able to say that they left their personal signature on it. Spoiler? They weren't fans of it. And two years later, GRRM doesn't think that things have gotten better.

"Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and 'make them their own," GRRM writes. "It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and 'improve' on it. 'The book is the book, the film is the film,' they will tell you as if they were saying something profound. Then, they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse."

On one hand, we definitely know what GRRM is talking about. Stanley Kubrick left a steaming pile of pretentiousness all over Stephen King's The Shining, and Matthew Quick's amazing The Silver Linings Playbook was turned into a second-rate television family drama. But we're not buying into the ratio being that off-balance. Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" films spun gold from Mario Puzo's literary straw, and HBO's True Blood was a vase improvement on Charlaine Harris Schulz's "The Southern Vampire Mysteries" novels. And then there are a few factors that GRRM leaves out that should enter the conversation.

First, what should showrunners do if they're adapting a popular fantasy series but they've gotten to the point where they're caught up with where the author is in the literary series, and it doesn't look like any new material is coming anytime soon? Just to be clear? This is a completely hypothetical scenario that just popped into our heads as we were writing this and in no way should be seen as a question that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss would be very interested in reading GRRM's answer to. Second, how do you separate those with open minds from those who are such gatekeepers of the original source material (in this case, books) that they view even the littlest change as some kind of sacrilege?

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