Kung Fu Monkey shows us where Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler’s sausages come from:
Movie executives do not lead happy lives. If you are an executive, this is your day: a scruffy man in a Hawaiian shirt walks into your office and says, “I need you to be personally responsible for giving me one hundred million dollars so I can go to Ireland and have people who pretend for a living act like they’re fighting imaginary dragons.”
“Will I get to see the dragons first?” you ask hopefully.
“Oh, no the dragons won’t exist until after we’re done shooting. The professional pretending people will be yelling at sticks. Occasionally, they will flee from a mop.”
And your job, as the exec, is to write him the check. Any sane man would break.
Now days, of course, they don’t even do that — they just stand in front of a big blue or green wall, and the entire set and all the fantasy stuff is computer generated later. In some movies, the pretending people don’t even appear — the computer clothes them with their characters’ bodies. All that’s left is their movement and voice.
By the way, the author of this piece, John Rogers, would be the scruffy man in the Hawaiian shirt, if I’m not mistaken. Oh, wait, I am mistaken. That would be the director. Rogers is the script writer. His cut would be a little more than $100,000, which, as he explains, amounts to about $10,000 a year, after expenses.
It’s the first article in a series on adapting books to movies, and it’s a great read.
Tags: Hollywood, John Rogers, Kung Fu Monkey, show running