Ursula K Le Guin is just as pissed at Hollywood as I am
While poking around ursulakleguin.com, I found this letter to her fans entitiled “To the People Who Wrote Me about the Sci Fi Channel Miniseries“.
For those of you lucky enough to miss it, the Sci Fi Channel did a high profile mini-series based on the Earth Sea books that played in December, starring Danny Glover and Isabella Rossellini among others. I pondered for a while wether to watch it, and decided that given that I still haven’t seen the Lord of the Rings movies I should probably, for the sake of moderation and experimentation, have a look at the Earth Sea series. So I set a tape to record, sat down with some home made pizza and white wine (and a housemate who is coincedentally making her way the books) and prepared to enjoy it. I was feeling optomistic – I once read her musings on the process of having “the Lathe of Heaven” made into a made-for-TV-movie and she said she had a lot of fun and enjoyed the product.
I took my dinner to the dinner table. The movie opened with Ged on Gont, only a sort of leprachaun fairy version of Gont, and he was a teenage Ged flirting with his village love interest. Tolerable, of course there will be changes in tone, I hung in there. Cut to Kossil, grim and lonely Kathargian priestess in bed with a Havnorian lord, cut to akward semi-humorous torture-of-Roke-wizards scene. That was the limit of my open minded tolerance. Gonzo.
How purient a mind does it take to piss on such beautiful books? They aren’t very complicated plotwise, it would have been relativley easy to make a nice film adaptation that conveyed at least a lot of the character and charm of the novels. Was there anyone involved who actually thought they were doing a good thing by cranking out such tripe using the wisdom and care of Le Guin’s novels as their raw material? Or is the whole population of Hollywood really so desensitized to real human emotion that they do it without thinking? Did anybody working away week after week on the project, find themselves crying?
I didn’t think about it much after that, I just figured it was an unfortunate missed opportunity, maybe if it had been at least okay more people would have read the books. And hey, maybe it got suddenly better after I left. But if I am honest with myself, I have to admit, I was angry.
I was not alone. Not only were a lot of Le Guin fans some pissed, turns out Ursula herself was seething. The idea of Ursula Le Guin seething is a formidable thought.
“It’s time that the standard Hollywood contract is changed.
I’ve heard the usual advice to the book-writer, “Take the money and run,” all too often. I’m sorry I ever said it myself ? it’s sell-out talk. The statement “They didn’t wreck my book: there it is on the bookshelf!” ? even that, though proud, is defensive. How about this, right at the start: “Forget the money up front, forget the fancy promises, pay me a decent share of the profits from a decent effort to make my book into a movie, with my participation in essential decision-making and script approval written into the contract ? then maybe I’ll talk to you.”
Oh, I can hear the producers screaming like Fay Wray!”
In any case, I am somehow grounded by the idea that Ursula Le Guin reads (and responds) to all her fan mail, and that we her fans have in some way comforted her in a uncomfortable time, as she has provided comfort to us so many times.
“But I tell you, it was almost worth going through it all, to get such an outpouring of anger, grief, indignation, outrage, and sympathy from you ever since.”
Thank you everyone who wrote to her.