Why watchmen unfilmable

Yet in a world where the allegedly difficult work of Ian McEwan and Cormac McCarthy can be adapted into Oscar-winning cinema, and where "the Citizen Kane of comic books" seems poised to clear up at the box office, one has to hope that the persistent rumours linking Gwyneth Paltrow with an adaptation of Tartt's novel are true, and that she can divert herself away from her new website long enough to become involved with what could be another triumph for imagination and success against the odds.

Watchmen took 22 years to bring to the screen; let's hope that The Secret History may yet appear before Has Watchmen solved the case of the unfilmable novel?

If they can make a movie out of Alan Moore's famously complex graphic novel, surely Catcher in the Rye and The Secret History can't be far behind.

Manhattan project … the original Watchmen. Reuse this content. Nobody ever called me to give testimony, so I just sat at home waiting for them to figure it out. The case was settled in mid-January, just seven weeks before the opening. It is perhaps no surprise Watchmen ended in such a tangled web of studios, having been tossed around between so many of them since rights to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' DC Comics series were snapped up by Gordon and Joel Silver for Fox in Numerous executives and film-makers subsequently deemed it unfilmable.

Fox put it into turnaround in cementing that turnaround agreement three years later , before Gordon set it up at Warner Bros, Universal and Paramount respectively, all of which ultimately balked.

Finally in , Gordon and new producing partner Lloyd Levin returned to Warner, and Snyder - then still in production on - became involved. Once he was on board, Paramount came back in as a financial partner and international distributor. Warner is handling domestic and Fox receives a healthy gross participation position under the recent settlement. Whatever the legal wrangles, the key here is Snyder, an energetic year-old who has become one of Hollywood's biggest directing names with just three movies under his belt.

Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass, among others, had developed their own visions of Watchmen , but it was Snyder who was able to get his to the screen. I have great respect for them.

I even make reference to Gilliam's Brazil in the credit sequence. Which is one of the many, many reasons it was absolutely insane for Zack Snyder to try to make Watchmen into a movie. Terry Gilliam, who once gave it a try, famously said Alan Moore's legendary graphic novel was "unfilmable," and if Gilliam, who tried to make Don Quixote for roughly half his life, gives up on a project, you know it's impossible.

But forget how difficult it would be to make a movie adaptation that makes the fans happy. How do you deal with the actual logistics of the thing? You have to have the characters age decades. You have to introduce absurd concepts that were designed by Moore specifically to work only on the page. And what about Dr. Manhattan's nudity? And what about the squid? Snyder's approach, which was basically just to make an exact copy of the graphic novel with one notorious exception, ended up getting the movie made and released, on March 6, , 12 years ago this week.

But it also showed the perils of giving fans what they want — or maybe just what they think they want. Why was it a big deal at the time? Moore's and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen isn't just a graphic novel. It will happen. Thomas Pynchon's timeless tome Gravity's Rainbow of post-war paranoia and conspiracy won the National Book Award in Image courtesy Penguin Classics.

Lame excuse: Too inaccessible. Cinema in the 21st century has so far made its name adapting seminal comics, but the 20th century was spent on great novels. But what of this cryptic, challenging tome from literature's last superstar? Gravity's Rainbow is packed with paranoia, rocketry and post-World War II occultism, and barely clocks in under a thousand pages.

Plus, it is written by a reclusive genius with a gift for brain-teasing gab and a tendency to avoid the press like the plague. How does that translate into a popcorn blockbuster? It doesn't. Next to none. Lame excuse: Too legendary. If Gravity's Rainbow is the last literary titan standing, then William Gibson 's world-beating Neuromancer is the first sci-fi colossus to beat when it comes to the cinema crossover. A mash of punk, technology, noir and metaphysics, it one-upped Pynchon's challenging masterpiece by being both accessible and mind-blowing, ushering in the 21st century before its time.

With a hacker antihero in Case, and a supporting cast made up of unhinged cyborgs and desperate gangsters, Gibson's award-winning page-turner rebooted not just speculative fiction, but sci-fi cinema as we know it.

He's even rebooted himself: His not-great adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic , starring a clumsy Keanu Reeves, was upgraded into a mirrored money-machine called The Matrix. And yeah, that ended clumsily as well, but it all points out the obvious. William Gibson's seminal Neuromancer is in development again.

Image courtesy Seven Arts Pictures. We need to live in a century where William Gibson helps turn Neuromancer into a better film than the three made by two Wachowski brothers hypnotized by the meatspace merge.