Re: They guessed the acronym.
Joe, wouldn't you rather have a miniseries of the Telepath War than a theatrical film?
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Theatrical film = approx. 2 hours
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Miniseries = 4 to 6 (or 8 or more) hours.
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Aisling
In addition to the cogent reasons given by GH, consider this: New Line's success with
LotR (distributed by Warner Bros.) and WB's own success with
Harry Potter should make them more open to the notion of a somewhat
longer theatrical film, as long as the theaters can still get in enough showings on Friday and Saturday nights. A running time of 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 hours, even closer to 3 hours, should not be out of the question if that's how much time it takes to tell the story.
A "4 hour" "mini-series" is about 2 1/2 hours of actual screen time. And longer "mini-series" are rare in television these days precisely because of the cost. You'll notice that most longer mini-series are either relatively contemporary stories or else they're set in the
past. Minis set in space are runinously expensive not only because of SFX but because even most of the clothing and many of the hand props have to be built from scratch. You can do a King Arthur story or WWI or Civil War epic and pull most of what you need out of the studio's own warehouses, or rent or buy it from a dozen places around Hollywood. Battle re-enacters and SCA members can be hired to show up in their
own costumes and carrying much more authentic-looking props than anything you could come up with. But you can't call Abby Rents and have then send over a dozen Narn Kha'ri chairs, or fifteen Minbari robes.
Even an 8 hour mini would only give us about 5 hours of story, and I'm not sure that the real dramatic meat of a Teep War story would
need 5 hours, or benefit from the extra time. A JMS always says, "You have to decide who the story is
about." If it is mostly about "our" characters, lots of stuff that takes place during the war is not going to be seen on-screen, just as lots of battles from the Shadow War weren't - because our characters weren't directly involved in them. So while "the war" might conceptually seem like a huge event and a huge story, it really depends on whose eyes it is told through, and what dramatic events JMS chooses to highlight. WWII is a huge event, and there have probably been thousands of dramatic movies, series and TV episodes or projects that have dealt with it, to say nothing of several thousand more documentaries, but very few of the dramas have tried to tackle the
whole story of the war. You couldn't possibly track that many characters through that many locations. Even a project as epic as
The Winds of War and
War & Remembrance only captured a fraction of the events of the war, and entire theaters of operation because there was no plausible way for Wouk to put a character into them. (Not that he didn't get pretty close to the edge on plausibility as it was.
)
I want a big screen film because the cast and crew deserve the big payday that JMS talked about and the exposure it would bring them in that part of the industry the still looks down on television. Because it would say the show had "arrived" in a way that few series ever do. Because it would do more than any cable network TV movie ever could to introduce new fans to the show, and sell even
more DVD sets, and because if successful it would do more than anything else to convince Warner Bros. that there is still life in the B5 universe. I'd like nothing more than for the original cast to do three or four theatrical films while another series (perhaps even a clean reboot of
Crusade) continued playing in that universe on TV,
a la TNG and the
TOS films.
Finally I'd like to see a Teep War film because when the project was declared DOA in 1999 I predicted that a really profitable DVD release could revive the project- and I like being proven right.
Especially since at the time I was told that:
1) TV shows would be too expensive to collect on DVD, and except for
Trek and a few shows that had already been successful on VHS, no studio would ever release TV product on the new medium.
2) Such shows as were released would be in the tried-and-true 2-episode, single disc release. No one would ever shell out $100 for a full season of a series.
3) Even in the unlikely event that Warner Bros. released
B5 on DVD they would not add any extras.
4) Even if WB released
B5 on DVD they would certainly never pay for widescreen transfers or 5.1 sound remixes.
5) Even if WB released
B5 on DVD they'd never sell enough to make a profit, and therefore would scrap the release part way through, just like they did with the video tapes.
6) Even if WB somehow
did make a profit on
B5 DVDs and release the whole series, there was no way a niche show with a fraction of
Trek's audience would sell enough to get WB interested in new
B5 projects, much less a theatrical film.
Regards,
Joe
