rec.arts.movies.past-films

In article < @ >, tmk wrote:

: And, the story won't have to be fiddled with.

Yes it will, if for no other reason that the second book is, well, kind
of boring. Hence Pulman's decision to spend nine episodes on the first novel
and only four on the second. Even if the second novel had been more exciting,
Graves's decision to postpone the Story of Herod until the beginning of the
second book works well enough in the novels, but would be a terrible dramatic
decision for a film -- which is why Pulman correctly decided to tell Herod's
story in parallel with Claudius's. In addition, the novels suffer from a
problem that often plagues screenwriters, namely, a surfeit of minor
characters. In a book, you have each character's name right there as a label,
but in an adaptation, you'll just get confused, which is why Pulman wisely
eliminated some characters entirely, and combined others into single ones.

Another Point to Ponder [tm]: most of the classic lines of dialogue from the
BBC (including, but not limited to, Claudius's great speech about how he
managed to survive to middle age with half his wits while thousands died
with all of theirs intact) miniseries were written by Jack Pulman, not
Robert Graves.

-----
Richard Schultz schultr@
Department of Chemistry, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Opinions expressed are mine alone, and not those of Bar-Ilan University
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"Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad."