There were people who said that The Lord of the Rings couldn’t be filmed. As it turned out, they were dead wrong. That seems to have encouraged other filmmakers to look at big, fat fantasy epics for inspiration, with the result that George R.R. Martin’s sprawling, twisty (and twisted) epic, A Song of Ice And Fire, has been optioned by HBO.
Now admittedly it won’t be a film but a drama series, with each season following the course of one of the four books published so far, starting with A Game Of Thrones. Martin is currently working on the fifth book (technically the second half of the fourth book, but we’ll let that slide) and assures us it will be finished soon.
The series is notable for its Tolkienesque sprawl, but also its healthy helpings of sex and violence, putting it on a par with Deadwood or Rome rather than Xena or Buffy. Book One, for example, sees a young boy being thrown out a tower window by an adulterous, incestuous noble couple, and things pretty much go downhill from there. With a host of characters and twisting allegiances (think you know who the bad guys are? Think again) and very little actual magic or dwarves / elves / hobbits, it’s fantasy series as MC Escher puzzle, and all the better for it. And then there’s Martin’s nasty habit of killing off major characters – and on at least one occasion, then bringing them back from the dead as vengeful zombies. The Chronicles of Narnia this ain’t.
So what’s to set this apart from the once-mooted but now dead quiet proposals to film Robert Jordan’s (even more sprawling) Wheel of Time? Well, this one has Troy screenwriter David Benioff and Halo writer D.B. Weiss attached to executive produce, and write every episode of the first series except for one, which Martin (a former TV writer) will handle himself. The plan is that, by the time the series of seven books is finished in 2011 (if we were you, we wouldn’t count on that date), one season a year will be translated to the small screen.
"They tried for 50 years to make 'Lord of the Rings' as one movie before Peter Jackson found success making three," Martin told Variety. "My books are bigger and more complicated, and would require 18 movies. Otherwise, you'd have to choose one or two characters." At least this way they don’t have to chose. We’re still not entirely sure that they can boil down the mammoth and many-stranded narrative to TV size, but if anyone can do it, HBO can. Keep your eyes on this space for further news, and your fingers crossed.