Yes, the word is:
…along with his brother and former co-director Paul, Chris Weitz is going to take on the biggest fantasty-literature property as yet untouched by movieland: Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga.
While I’d love to see Hollywood’s version of the Dreaming City, Arioch, and even of the Runeswords, I think making this as a special effects extravaganza will miss rather a lot of the point of the books–it’ll be tricky to capture the decadence of Melnibone, and Elric’s rather inhuman, complex, and let’s face it narcissistic nature.
I can’t wait to see how the Hollywood machine deals with the story. If you haven’t read the stories, let me present the first paragraph of Elric’s Wikipedia entry:
Elric presents an excellent example of a counterstereotype, because he was written specifically as the polar opposite of Robert E. Howard’s Conan and similar fantasy heroes. Instead of a mighty-thewed barbarian warrior who fights his way from obscurity to achieve fame and power, Elric is a frail, sickly albino, a highly-educated and cultured (often downright decadent) emperor who abandons his throne. Whereas the conventional fantasy hero rescues fair maidens from evil wizards and monsters and defends his country from invaders, Elric (inadvertently) slays his true love, is himself a powerful wizard in league with the Chaos lord Arioch, summons monsters to aid himself in battle, and leads a successful invasion against his homeland of Melniboné. Finally, while fantasy heroes often begin as novices and gradually become more skilled and powerful over time, Elric steadily loses his throne, his homeland, his family and friends, and his magical resources.
Read that, think of the typical “Hollywood effect” on novel adaptations, and you have to laugh.
It won’t matter, of course, the books will still be there for other just-got-into-their-teens, and maybe having a movie will make it that much more certain that the books will stay in print.
Anyway, I think I’m with Gibson on the whole books-into-movies thing:
I no longer get very wrought up over the liminals, myself, except to be annoyed by people who seem to assume that feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis.
