Abraham Sherman is one of those awesome contributors passionnate about Edgar Rice Burroughs who regularly writes posts on the Facebook pages dedicated to the writer. He recently wrote a contribution that I found very interesting, about the fact that the author made a Confederate soldier as his hero, which was quite surprising since his own father was an Union officer during the American Civil War. Did that mean that John Carter himself was favorable to slavery?
If the Andrew Stanton movie, God bless him, doesn't ignore this fact, and doesn't condemn his hero for it, the video game to come chooses to make John Carter a World War II soldier, a choice evidently more politically correct.
Regarding the American Civil War, we often tend to schematize the conflict, which had mostly political roots, to "those villain slavers from the South against those nice Northern progressists". Reality was without a doubt more nuanced than that.
With the autorization of Abraham Sherman, here his his post from the "John Carter of Mars & All ERB Gaming Group":
"There were also good men in the South, and the heroes in ERB's stories were the opposite of racist.
ERB Incorporated announced yesterday a new project about John Carter. For a few weeks, they tried to generate interest by teasing actors that would "play" Dejah Thoris, John Carter and Tars Tarkas. Eventually it's revealed that it will be a video game, well, if the Kickstarter campaign achieves its goal, from April the 19th on.
First, video games on Kickstarter are notoriously even more problematic than "physical" products. In the biography of the actress that plays Dejah, we find out she did voices for Star Citizen/Squadron 42, a video game also financed on Kickstarter... in 2012, and which is still unfinished, 341 millions dollars later...
Second, the animation shown is not very impressive.
Third, and in that instance it's the purist speaking, John Carter fights Nazis during World War Two, and once again, the physical appearance of Green Martians doesn't match Burroughs' description...
Fourth, and among the more worrying, among the companies mentioned, FNCPR Publishing seems to be a marketing company, and the studio seemingly in charge of developing the game, Tanglewood Games, shows on its website games they may have been part of, but which are not their own. Also on the website, many job ads are featured for the development of a "first-person shooter" based on a "high-profile IP".
Worrysome, to be continued when we will have more informations...
Here is the number of potential readers that have dowloaded or bought the "Who Is Sister Love?" ebook. No feedback at this time on the English version:
Mais Qui Est Donc Sister Love ? (French version) : 77 (68 free dowloads, 9 sales), 2 positives feedbacks (4.5 out of 5 on Amazon.fr)
Who Is Sister Love? : 94 (92 free dowloads, 2 sales)
Another good news is that I found a way to bring color to my black-and-white original drawing! The ebook will be updated soon!
Eight years ago on March 9th of 2012, John Carter was released in the US. Two days before, on March the 7th, I was at the first showing of the French release, my Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Cycle de Mars" omnibus in my bag. I hated the movie, for me it was such a wasted opportunity. Why invest 250 million dollars to not even respect the original novel, and adding clunkiness and plot holes that weren't even in it in the first place?
And then I began gradually to realise that the half-filled glass was ultimately more important to me than the half-empty glass. And probably for the first time in my life my opinion made a complete 180 degree, that reflected the emotional ride that represented the adaptation of my favorite novel on screen. Today, it's quite simply one of my favorite movies, in spite, or even because of its flaws.
Indeed, it wasn't perhaps the smartest move to cram all this exposition at the beginning of the movie, which even for me, an absolute fan of the novels, was a bit too much, neither was it appropriate to stop the action in the Thern temple to deliver explanations that probably would only have been useful in a sequel. Maybe Andrew Stanton and his pals, Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon, should have trusted more the storyteller talent of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and maybe they should have made John Carter less reluctant to engage in the plot of his own movie, maybe, maybe...
But ultimately their way of doing things, even if clumsy at times, was driven by the best of intentions. Even if the works of Burroughs have been pillaged over the years, there is something in this movie that sets it apart from its contemporaries, an earnestness that shines throughout. John Carter, not only can be watched, it can be rewatched with the same pleasure, as I have always the same pleasure to reread Burroughs. The movie doesn't seem formulaic. And everybody loves Woola.
It's no mistake if each time the movie is aired on French tv, my page view counter explodes, in my modest scale, because viewers want to know about the potential sequel. It's also no mistake if John Carter is regularly cited in pages like "those movies which deserve a sequel" or "those movies that didn't deserve their failure at the box-office". Taylor Kitsch recently thanked Netflix, which seemed very happy about the views John Carter gathered on their streaming service, before it returns to Disney+ in April. And maybe at that time Disney will realize the movie's popularity on their own platform.
So what are the odds of seeing a sequel one day? And do I still believe it could happen?
My answers would be, respectively, "slim" and "yes".
John Carter is used to shout at the face of adversity "I still live!". And I would bet my shirt that Andrew Stanton also says so.
Andrew Stanton is a storyteller before anything else. He's an artist, who wouldn't satisfy himself with a story he would have told only the first tier. You have to see him in the "TED" conference about this subject mattter. He's utterly passionate about "storytelling". At one point during an event he was supposed to have revealed what could have been the sequels to John Carter. It never happened, why? Does he still believe in another way to tell the rest of the story? Medias outlets revealed that in his "Finding Dory" contract there was a guarantee of another live-action movie, which didn't materialise since 2016. Since then, Andrew Stanton only directed tv show episodes. Of course, my foolish hope is that this movie could be "John Carter 2 : Gods of Mars"!
Could that be possible? In fact, yes, if Disney understands the potential, to me very real, of the movie, which shows every sign of becoming "cult", a somewhat overused term in these days and age, but which in this precise case does seem warranted. Bob Iger, who never was, to say the least, a stanch supporter of the movie, steps back (at last) from his CEO position at Disney. The rights for John Carter are seemingly still available since they returned to ERB Incorporated. More important, maybe, Disney perhaps wouldn't even need to purchase the rights anews, since Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels fall into public domain in January of 2021 worldwide! Burroughs died in 1950, and in most countries, including France, their work fall in public domain 50 years after their author's death. Granted, the trademarks don't have an expiration date, but it would surely be enough for Disney to name their movie simply "John Carter 2". And frankly I don't picture ERB Inc risking a trial with the all-powerful Disney. That would even be quite ironic, since Disney as a compny does everything in its powers for decades to avoid the works of Ol' Walt to fall into public domain!
Anyway, a lot of wishful thinking and a foolish hope is all I can offer! Happy birthday to the movie in any case.
We Still Live.
There's no such thing as "doing enough research"... The worst case scenario is when you DON'T KNOW you should have done research. I became a victim of that in the first ever version of "Who Is Sister Love?". One of my two known readers (in France, but not only, on a global scale also, not tomention the whole known universe), Vivien Prigent, had noticed such an impossibility: there has NEVER been a job of Governor of Washington, there's only a Mayor.
Before someone asks the question, let the answer be written here for posterity's sake: I was not thinking about Donald Trump while creating Steven Thorne. You would have to be prescient to have predicted his election in 2011...
Anyway, another singularity of Washington had visibly escaped me, the very nice skycraper of Thorne Industries had no chance to be located there, because as you probably know, skycrapers are all bot forbidden in Washington! And, not only had I placed there the building of Thorne Industries, but one of the final scenes takes place where there are, not one, but TWO skycrapers under construction. Moments like that leave you somewhat numb, I can tell you...
So I had to revise the first book. It turned out to be quite quick. On the other side of the Potomac is Rosslyn, in the Arlington County. It's a... town? (I put an interrogation mark because it has no ruling institution, it's what is called an unincorporated area); and that area does indeed have skycrapers. Problem résolved, at five minutes of driving from Washington, and that doesn't prevent Steven Thorne from living in Washington.
Another topic for the revision was to replace all "2014" mentions with "Nowadays". It doesn't make any sense to keep the story set in the year 2014, we're now in 2019, and all things considered, nothing I've written refers to that specific year. It dates the novel too much, and for no good reason.
I only heard about this project this morning, and it's already funded!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1387618382/the-babylon-5-preservation-project/description
Babylon 5 is quite imply my favorite tv show. in a Top 5 that would also contain series like the original Star Trek and its Next Generation, Columbo and Mission: Impossible, this is quite an accomplishment.
The common ground between all these series for me is their quality of writing. Those series are very demanding in terms of screenplays, and series that are difficult to write for. And in that bunch, Babylon 5 is the only one to have been written at some 80% by just one man: Joseph Michael Straczynski. How do you know that you're a fan of jms, as he likes to be called on social media? Answer: when you can write his family name without checking Google. "Who Is Sister Love?" is dedicated to jms, for better or worse. It was while reading his Babylon 5 screenplays that came the idea of writing the one featuring Sister Love, that I turned later into a novel.
It shows the importance of Babylon 5 in my creative life. Is it to say that jms is my hero and/or an untouchable icon? Of course not, and I don't think he would like that either. Few things he did after had for me the sheer impact of Babylon 5, beginning with the horrendous Crusade, its sequel. His comics work never really convinced me. He gave me hope for a few Spider-Man issues with John Romita Jr, but I always found him more at ease with his own creations, than with breaking other people's toys (Sins Past, really??). His original comics left me cold, like Rising Stars and Midnight Nation. i think his words need flesh-and-blood actors. He also made the baffling decision to stop producing the "Babylon 5 : Lost Tales" after the first DVD, in spite of the apparent good will of Warner to continue the adventure. In spite of his talent, he never really made an impression in the Motion Picture world. I haven't seen Sense8.
Babylon 5 is as of today a thing of the past, without any real legacy. Its "revolutionary methods of production", which allowed the series to be made while respecting its budget (a rarity in Hollywood!), don't seem to be applied nowadays. The series will probably never be remastered in High Definition, forbidding most reruns, because the special effects were produced in standard definition, and in a 4:3 ratio. What's left is its powerful narrative, which in my opinion is still unique in the tv landscape, but will it be enough to ensure its future?
That's why it's important to me to preserve this unque time bubble. So many people that worked on the show have already left us. I bought everything I could find about the show, be it novels, comic books, making-of books, and almost everything B5 Books released about Babylon 5 (and about Babylon 5 only, not Crusade). A synthesis gathering all those scattered informations was missing, and I hope the Making-Of book will do that. I have all faith in Jason Davies' abilities to fulfill this task, after all he supervised most of the B5 Books releases.
the option "just the book" costs 50$. For 10$ more, you will receive a weekly email with various informations, some of which may or may not appear in the book. For crazy people like me, you'll have to pay double that amount, 120$, just to have your name printed in the book. the Kickstarter goes on until June the 9th of 2019.
I don't have a screenshot of Sister Love where she was born, in City of Heroes, but here is instead a screenshot of Sister Love as created with the character creator of Lego Incredibles on Switch.
I made a really weird dream last night, I was about to direct the movie based on my novel "Who Is Sister Love?"! Good news? I’ll let you be the judge of that...
In fact I was entering a mini-van, in which there were a dozen people. Who was driving? Who knows, in any case the van starts to move. I have an hour (my lunch time from work) pour to get to know these people. Obviously I trusted one of these people, a woman, to organize a whole cast and crew from A to Z. Strangely, even if of course, I can’t see myself, I know I'm dressed in a rather "gothic" fashion, with a long black coat, and that I have long hair, kind of like Tommy Wiseau, the bad director of the film so awful that it became cult, "The Room", which I have never seen, but of which I saw parodies, as well as extracts of the movie made by and starring James Franco, devoted to this shooting: The Disaster Artist.
The casting director then introduces me to... the actress who will play Sister Love! This girl is small, plump whereas Sister Love is rather skinny, and her skin is whiter than mine, whereas Sister Love is a black-skinned African! She wears the colors of Sister Love, but inverted, a red jacket at the top and yellow pants at the bottom. Sister Love wears a yellow-dyed leather top, and crimson-red leggings! "Sister Love" asks me if I can shoot her tests the next day, and I am obliged to admit that I am an employee, and therefore not available the next day, and that I meet them today during my lunch break! So much for my professionalism as a director...
I know our destination is an hour away. How was I going to get out of this when I perfectly knew that my lunch break was an hour and no more? Only God knows. In any case, we are now in a warehouse, sitting on the ground. I then ask who does what on my production. My interlocutors are starting to moan for God knows whatever reason. One of them rants that this movie he heard about 10 years ago and nothing came out of it... We must be in the future, I wrote the first version of this story as a screenplay in 2011...
Flash-forward, this time on the set of the movie itself! I'm currently YELLING at the poor actress who plays Sister Love! "The others do things and you do nothing!" What an asshole I am... The scene seems simple. The superhero team is coming out of an elevator, in a building obviously under construction, as there is construction equipment everywhere, and the camera is zooming in on them. I think I recognized the clothes of another of my characters, Furnace, but what I see above all is the HUGE piece of yellow fabric with two holes for the eyes that is placed on the face of "Sister Love". During the 60s and 70s Sister Love wore a yellow mask, but she had given up on it in our era...
The scene seems simple, and yet nothing goes well. It's been at least three times that we redo the scene. This time, the camera zooms in, but on nothing, the "actors" are still in the elevator, and the dream stops there! Is it necessary to specify, but I will do it anyway, that the dream is 100% authentic? Otherwise what would be the interest? As it is, it’s embarrassing enough...
So, if this dream is premonitory, let’s take a rendez-vous in 2021 for one of the most amateurish and messy shooting of a movie possible!
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