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JMS scripting zombie movie?

J

Joseph DeMartino

Moderator
Originally posted by hypatai to the TLT News thread in the Babylon 5 World Forum - mod. We've opened a new thread here for specific discussion of this project. - mod.

This isn't TLT news, but I didn't know where else to put this where people seeking "new" news might look.

As always, from the moderated group:

Shabaz wrote:
> I was browsing around a bit on the IMDB, and on your personal page
> http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0833089/ I saw that it has you listed as
> writing an adaptation of Max Brooks's World War Z for 2008. With IMDB's
> reputation for not always being entirely accurate, I suppose the first
> question should be, is this true? And if so, is there anything you want
> or can tell us about this project?


There's nothing I can say about it at this time.

jms
Click to expand...


Now, does an "adaptation" mean a possible pilot for a series or a possible film deal?


More secrets and mysteries. :)

hyp
Click to expand...

You can catch up on some of the background on this project by following this thread at the moderated news group. (Which has turned into a strange and funny read in and of itself, as threads over there tend to do. :))

Regards,

Joe
 
Last edited:
Now, does an "adaptation" mean a possible pilot for a series or a possible film deal?
Click to expand...

By itself the word "adapation" could mean either. You can have a TV series based on material from a book or a play (or a movie) just as you can have a movie adapted from that same (including movies adapted from TV shows.) Think The Odd Couple, M*A*S*H, practically everything that ever aired on Masterpiece Theater. :)

Anyway, to quote myself from the mod ;) :

Of course, thanks to JMS we understand the strictures of Hollywood protocol and contracts and understand why he sometimes cannot respond to certain questions or confirm certain information. Therefore I offer the following merely as interesting facts.

For those not familiar with "World War Z" (I wasn't until a moment ago), it is a novel in the form of a future history: Specifically it is an oral history of the Zombie War, when the Human race was almost wiped out by Zombies. The author assumes the pose of someone collecting eye-witness accounts of some of the major periods and events of the war.

*******************************************************************

According to the IMDB (not always a reliable source) the book was optioned before it was even published after a bidding war between production companies owned by Brad Pitt and Leondardo DiCaprio.

JMS on the moderated newsgroup, Dec 12 2006

> This week the outline for the film I'm writing for Paramount will be turned in to the studio. I'm still waiting for the PR department to announce the project so I can't yet identify it. I can say though that it's for Brad Pitt's Plan B productions. <

**********************************************************************

JMS responds to a fan's question about which version of "Night of the Living Dead" is in his video collection, which he recently posted to this newsgroup.

> > "Night Of The Living Dead"
> 1968 and 1990?

> Every iteration of every zombie film Romero has ever made. Every new release, new recut, or dvd with additional features. I'm a sucker for zombie movies. -- jms, Jan 1 2007 <

So.

JMS, who is a sucker for zombie movies, is rumored to be adapting a zombie novel for the big screen.

The same zombie novel is rumored to have been acquired in a bidding war by Paramount for Brad Pitt's Plan B Productions.

JMS has already mentioned that he is writing a script for Paramount that will be produced through Brad Pitt's Plan B Productions, but he can't discuss it because it hasn't been officially announced yet.

I think Mr. Schroedinger over at the Paramount PR department needs to check his bag. :)

As Jan put it on the newsgroup, he didn't say anything then and he's not saying anything now. :D

Regards,

Joe
 
This sounds great. If (like me) you are currently too cheap to buy the book. Read the wikki article to catch up on this rather cool sounding project@

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z

There is a lot of movie potential in this book, but it does need to be focused down into one story, or maybe an anthology movie, like Sin City or Love Actually. Although probably not too much like Love Actually...
 
darth_librarian said:
There is a lot of movie potential in this book, but it does need to be focused down into one story, or maybe an anthology movie, like Sin City or Love Actually. Although probably not too much like Love Actually...
Click to expand...

Love, Actually remade as a zombie movie ... hey, I think I'd pay to see that!

:D
 
darth_librarian said:
This sounds great. If (like me) you are currently too cheap to buy the book. Read the wikki article to catch up on this rather cool sounding project@

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z

There is a lot of movie potential in this book, but it does need to be focused down into one story, or maybe an anthology movie, like Sin City or Love Actually. Although probably not too much like Love Actually...
Click to expand...
I haven't read the book either (though I have been hearing good things about it for a while), but one of the primary appeals to it seems to me the scope of the book. I too doubt it will do the whole faux history book type format build up from various reports, what seems to be basically a short story collection. But that he actually mapped out this entire war and outbreak, and created this whole faux history for a worldwide event, I really hope that they manage to somehow capture that on the big screen. That just sounds like it could be really cool to me, and I'm really curious if they manage to do that.
 
40 characters is too many, it is only 2 minutes a character. Merge the stories together and JMS may be able to do it with ten characters.
 
40 characters is too many, it is only 2 minutes a character.
Click to expand...

Right, because you couldn't have two characers on screen at the same time. :)

And when is the last time you saw a theatrical drama that was 80 minutes long? That's actually a bit short for a comedy. The typical dramatic theatrical film is about 120 minutes, perhaps a little over. (Although theater owners tend to balk at really long films since they reduce the number of showings they have have in a day.) So you'd have a least 3 minutes per character even if each story were told separately. :D

Look, Cornelius Ryan's book, The Longest Day, told disparate stories of sailors, soldiers, marines, Frecnch civilians, resistance fighters and German soliders in Normandy and in Germany itself during the 24 hours of June 6, 1944. Yet Darryl Zanuck and his team managed to distill that massive story into a quite manageable film without slighting any of the famous characters or incidents that were most important to the book and to history. And there were plenty of them. Fictional history shouldn't be that much harder to distill down than real history. :)

Regards,

Joe
 
I did pretty well on the test:

Soldier
You scored 60 physical, and 50 mental
You're pretty good at killing zombies, but you really ought to find someone to take orders from.

I apparently got higher than the 99th percentile on both physical and mental scores based on my age and gender. Go, me! :D
 
The book is 352 pages. 352/40 = 8.8 pages per character.

I have not read the book but I suspect that each character is basically a scene.
Say 5 minutes per character. 5 * 40 = 200 minutes

Allow 20 minutes for the star to introduce him self and have a love affair.

(200 + 20) / 110 = 2

It could be written as a two parter, each 110 minutes long. :cool:
 
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