Writers on the BIG SCREEN

For the past three years fans of HBO’s wildly popular series Game of Thrones has dominated television ratings and social media. It’s become one of the most popular shows on television with an average of 11.6 million people watching every show, even reruns!

The show is based off the series A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin who is also heavily involved in the process of creating the show itself. The series was published in 1996 and as of now contains five books. Because of the success of the HBO show the book series has become more and more popular in the past few years with old and new fans alike. In addition to the five book Martin has also published companion books such as a cookbook, a map for the extensive universe, and even a graphic novel.

Recently there has been an explosion of books and comics that have appeared on the big screen. Marvel Studios has raked in over 6 BILLION (yes with a B people) with just six films in nine years. They’ve also started a new show on ABC called Agents of Shield the show has drawn in fans from the films and comics and has done an excellent job of utilizing social media to spur on more interest. They are currently in talks with Netflix for shows as well. The best part about the Marvel franchise is that all the films and shows are interconnected. Nothing happens in one films that doesn’t happen in affect something else.

In the DC universe Batman and Wonder Woman are suspected to be joining the next film in the new Superman line up (possibly the start of a Justice League America franchise?). Spider-Man recently got a reboot, X-Men Days of Future Past comes out this summer, and Fox is considering a reboot of the Fantastic Four. Phew!

On top of that The Hunger Games, The Twilight Saga, and Harry Potter are other books that made an enormous splash in theaters and have rekindled interest in the YA genre across a huge amount of age groups.

Obviously there’s a trend here. Wondering what other writers have made it to the big screen?

Gillian Flynn published her book Gone Girl in January of 2012. The movie version will be released October 3rd of 2014. The film is being directed by David Fincher who has directed films like Fight Club, Se7en, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and many, many more. 

Flynn not only wrote the book though, she’s also writing the screenplay for the film which will star Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. There have been rumors that the ending of the story will be changed but Flynn assured her fans in an AMA on Reddit that the ending wouldn’t stray too far from the book. Here’s a TIME article if you don’t have time to scroll through the whole AMA.

I LOVED the book and I’m so pumped to see what Flynn can do on the big screen this October.

Flynn’s other book Dark Places is also being turned into a movie. Seriously, she’s amazing and I’m so excited to see a female author get so much attention and have so much control over her projects.

I haven’t read this one yet unfortunately but Flynn’s website tells us that the director taking over the project is Gilles Paquet-Brenner who has adapted another internationally acclaimed book Sarah’s Key.

Dark Places is to be released on September 1st of 2014.

Next up? Another HBO show.

True Detective premiered January 2014, ran for 8 episodes, and has been nominated for an Emmy. It traces the journey of two Louisiana detectives, played masterfully by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. These two mismatched men hunt a serial killer for over seventeen years.

While this show was not originally a book it was written by Nic Pizzolatto who is a novelist and a professor at several universities including DePauw University and the University of Chicago.

True Detective was HBO’s most watched ‘freshman’ series ever, meaning that it broke record for it’s viewership in it’s first season. The show averaged 11.9 million views per episode. The first season’s story has drawn to a close and there is much speculation about who will be cast for the next season and what topics it will cover. There is a lot of clamor for HBO to run a strong female detective or possible two after their success with two men.

Watch the trailer here and the amazing credit sequence here.

Writers aren’t just in the literary world. They’re spreading out into the worlds of television and film to amazing critical success. Personally I find films and television shows written by traditional novelists and authors to have more depth both in their premises and their characters. It’s a fresh trend that I’m very excited to see continue.

 

A few interesting thoughts

Well it’s the first time I’ve posted on here in quite some time. Not having a computer really slows me down. Typing on a keyboard feels crazy weird.

Tonight in my capstone Women’s Gender Studies class we watched Iron Jawed Angels, which is a move about the suffragette movement in America in the early part of the 20th century. One thing that they discussed in the movie that really caught my attention was when the lead character, Alice Paul, talked about supporting the right for women to vote. It wasn’t about what women would do once they got the vote. Instead, it was about their right to voice their opinion in their government. Plain and simple.

Today, there is a lot of discussion about women’s rights in the medical field. Do women have the right to have an abortion? Can they have access to birth control? And so on and so on.

But that isn’t the point.

The point is that all people, regardless of their sex, should be able to make informed decisions about their personal health. This means that all people should be able to access information most importantly and that no one should be able to deny that right.

There is no reason why the government, or anyone else for that matter, should need to stick their noses into anyone’s medical decisions. If we pay for it then we should be able to access it.

This country was built on the idea that a person should be free from persecution. Shouldn’t this include the freedom from being persecuted for seeking out certain medical procedures?

Another thought that has long been nagging at me is that the majority of these decisions about what people (mainly women) can and can’t do in regards to their medical decisions is based on Christian values. There is a huge argument that this country was founded on Christian values. I would like to point out that the founding father’s brand of Christianity would be unrecognizable today to any church-goer, but also that America was colonized in the hopes of escaping religious persecution. We have no national religion so why do our law makers insist on pressing Christian values in their laws? Especially those that should be private and are protected by doctor-patient confidentiality?

My personal beliefs and values are important to me. But more important to me is that each individual is afforded the freedoms that our country is supposedly so proud of.
 America is only proud of freedom when it falls in line with our preconceived values. We only support freedom of expression when we can agree with what is said. This is an undermining of the very principle of freedom.

This is not a radical notion. I do not support anarchy. But I also don’t support hypocrisy. If America is unwilling to embrace the ‘melting pot’ then where will it go? The world is changing all around us and it does no good to shut it out. Is it not better to hear all opinions, to learn all that we can about the world and the people in it and draw our own conclusions?

Consider being the minority. Consider your life if you were on the outskirts and your beliefs and/or values were insulted subtly every single day. Consider this and act accordingly to those around you. Learn all you can first, then begin to form your beliefs.