Although he is now better known for the fact that there is no way he will finish the sixth book of A Song of Ice and Fire (we have been waiting for Winds of Winter since 2011, and it doesn’t look like it will arrive anytime soon), the truth is that George RR Martin has been one of the most regular workers in show business since he sold his first story in 1971, The Hero. Since then, he became a regular in American science fiction, and even wrote scripts for movies and television series episodes… until he encountered a block. Not a creative one, precisely, but in terms of cash flow.
Game of Vengeance
In 1986, already with several awards and nominations under his belt for his novels, Martin wrote several scripts for one of the best series of the moment, the reboot of The Twilight Zone. In fact, one of them was directed by none other than Wes Craven (the one from Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street, in case you don’t know him). All of them are good, but The Toys of Caliban is simply one of the best in the entire series. In it, an adult with the brain of a child is able to make everything he imagines come true, and his parents keep him locked up to prevent him from doing any harm in the adult world.
At the same time, the screenwriter supervised Beauty and the Beast, a fantastic series that lasted from 1987 to 1990 starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman, and wrote 13 episodes. However, the experience ended up being negative for him. As he described in an interview with the New York Times, the producers would tell him “George, this is amazing. It’s fantastic, it’s a fabulous read, thank you. But it’s three times our budget. We can’t do it in any way, it’s too big and expensive”. It happened to him over and over again: they forced him to cut massive battles, special effects, to combine characters, to eliminate everything he liked from his scripts.
And so what did he decide? Of course, to return to prose, his first great love, where he could make everything as grand as he wanted: Who was going to stop him from having a battle in a book between armies of millions of people, orcs, or elves? How were they going to tell him to reduce the number of characters, if it was his work and only his work? Without a budget, the only limit was his imagination, and thus began his particular revenge against film and television producers. The irony is obvious, of course: in the end, the work that came from those pretensions, A Song of Ice and Fire, which he considered unadaptable, ended up becoming one of the most popular series of all time: Game of Thrones.
By the way: although studios were asking for more epic fantasy after the success of The Lord of the Rings, Martin was in no hurry to sell his novels to Hollywood, because he knew perfectly well that at least 20 parts would be needed to adapt them correctly. After all, the number of books kept increasing, and what was initially going to be just one volume turned into three, then four, six, and even seven: a series was the right choice… as long as they committed to correcting their past mistakes and allowed him to include as much blood, sex, battles, and expensive special effects as he wanted. What was the result? You already know it well: Hollywood, saved by a novelist bored of Hollywood. Ah, the sweet irony…
I always wanted to do something in epic fantasy. But not just to rehash Tolkien. I wanted to do something to make it my own. To some extent, the project was also a reaction to my own Hollywood career.
