Foundation and Hollywood

Yesterday, the news broke that Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy will finally be adapted for television. I’ve learned to be skeptical of such announcements, but the package that they’ve assembled sounds undeniably exciting. As we learn from an article in The Wrap:

HBO and Warner Bros. TV are teaming to produce a series based on Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation trilogy that will be written and produced by Interstellar writer Jonathan Nolan…Nolan, who is already working with HBO on Westworld, has been quietly developing the project for the last several months. He recently tipped his hand to Indiewire, which asked him: “What’s the one piece of science fiction you truly love that people don’t know enough about?” [Nolan replied:] “Well, I fucking love the Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov…That’s a set of books I think everyone would benefit from reading.”

Whoops, my mistake—that’s a story from two years ago. The latest attempt will be developed by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman for Apple, which acquired it from Skydance Television in what Deadline describes as “a competitive situation.” And when you turn back the clock even further, you find that efforts to adapt the trilogy were made in the nineties by New Line Cinema, which went with The Lord of the Rings instead, and even by Roland Emmerich, who might be the last director whom you’d entrust with this material. There were probably other projects that have been long since forgotten. And it doesn’t take a psychohistorian to realize that the odds are stacked against this new version ever seeing the light of day.

Why has the Foundation series remained so alluring to Hollywood, yet so resistant to adaptation? For a clue, we can turn to Asimov himself. In the early eighties, he was approached by Doubleday to write his first new novel in years, and an editor laid out the situation in no uncertain terms: “Listen, Isaac, let me make it clear. When [editor Betty Prashker] said ‘a novel,’ she meant ‘a science fiction novel,’ and when we say ‘a science fiction novel,’ we mean ‘a Foundation novel.’ That’s what we want.” Asimov was daunted, but the offer was too generous to refuse, so he decided to give it a try. As he recounts in his memoir I. Asimov:

Before I got started, I would have to reread the Foundation trilogy. This I approached with a certain horror…I couldn’t help noticing, of course, that there was not very much action in it. The problems and resolutions thereof were expressed primarily in dialogue, in competing rational discussions from different points of view, with no clear indication to the reader which view was right and which was wrong.

This didn’t mean that the trilogy wasn’t engaging—Asimov thought that “it was a page-turner,” and when he was done, he was surprised by his personal reaction: “I experienced exactly what readers had been telling me for decades—a sense of fury that it was over and there was no more.” But if you’re looking to adapt it into another medium, you quickly find that there isn’t a lot there in terms of conventional drama or excitement. As Omar Sharif once said about Lawrence of Arabia: “If you are the man with the money and somebody comes to you and says he wants to make a film…with no stars, and no women, and no love story, and not much action either…what would you say?

In fact, it’s hard to pin down exactly what the Foundation series—or at least the first book—has to offer the movies or television. Speaking as a fan, I can safely state that it doesn’t have memorable characters, iconic scenes, or even much in the way of background. If I were hired to adapt it, I might react in much the same way that William Goldman did when he worked on the movie version of Maverick. Goldman confesses in Which Lie Did I Tell? that his reasons for taking the assignment were simple: “I knew it would be easy…The last thing in life I wanted was to try another original. This adaptation had to be a breeze—all I needed to do was pick out one of the old [episodes] that had too much plot, expand it, and there would be the movie.” He continues:

One of the shocks of my life happened in my living room, where I spent many hours looking at the old Maverick shows I’d been sent. Because, and this was the crusher, television storytelling has changed…Not only was the [James] Garner character generally passive, there was almost no plot at all. Nothing for me to steal. I essentially had to write, sob, another original.

Similarly, the Foundation series gives a writer almost nothing to steal. Once you get to “The Mule,” the action picks up considerably, but that’s obviously your second—or even your third—season, not your first. In the meantime, you’re left with the concept of psychohistory and nothing else. You have to write another original. Which is essentially what happened with I, Robot.

And even psychohistory can be more trouble that it might be worth. It works most convincingly over the course of years or decades, which isn’t a timeframe that lends itself to movies or television, and it naturally restricts the ability of the characters to take control of the story. Which isn’t to say that it’s impossible. (In fact, I have some decent ideas of my own, but I’ll keep them to myself, in case Goyer and Friedman ever want to take a meeting. My schedule is pretty packed at the moment, but it frees up considerably in a few months.) But it’s worth asking why the Foundation series has been such a tempting target for so long. It’s clearly a recognizable property, which is valuable in itself, and its highbrow reputation makes it seem like a promising candidate for a prestige adaptation, although even a glance at the originals shows how deeply they remain rooted in the pulp tradition from which they emerged. If I were a producer looking to move into science fiction with a big acquisition, this would be one of the first places that I’d look, even if these stories aren’t exactly what they seem to be—the Deadline article says that they “informed” the Star Wars movies, which is true only in the loosest possible sense. When you combine the apparent value of the material with the practical difficulty of adapting it, you end up with the cycle that we’ve seen for decades. Asimov was the most famous name in science fiction for thirty years, and his works were almost perpetually under option, but apart from a quickie adaptation of Nightfall, he died before seeing any of it on the screen. He was glad to take the money, but he knew that his particular brand of fiction wouldn’t translate well to other media, and he concluded with what he once called Asimov’s First Law of Hollywood: “Whatever happens, nothing happens.”

The Shakespeare Code

I don’t think I’ll ever be accused of not having enough strange books in my library, but over the weekend, I picked up a battered copy of one of the most curious of them all: the first and only edition of The Great Cryptogram by Ignatius L. Donnelly, which was initially published in 1888. Donnelly isn’t particularly well known these days, but he’s a fascinating—and peculiarly American—character, an ingenious crackpot who draws on European models while remaining indelibly of his own place and time. He came out of nowhere to become, among other things, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, a congressman, a state senator, and the founder of a failed utopian community, but he’s best remembered for a series of increasingly odd, and influential, literary productions. His book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World shaped much of the prevailing image of Atlantis as a lost empire that served as the basis of all subsequent civilization, and his Ragnarok anticipates Immanuel Velikovsky, among others, in arguing that a comet collided with the earth 12,000 years ago, altering the planet’s climate and leaving its traces in the myths and legends of a global cataclysm.

The Great Cryptogram was his most ambitious and personal project, a massive tome of over nine hundred pages that argues that Francis Bacon was the true author of the works of Shakespeare and left clues to his real identity—in the form of an elaborate code—in the published text of the plays themselves. I first encountered Donnelly’s theory in The Codebreakers by David Kahn, who rightly dismisses it as a pathological misreading, and even at the time, it was roundly mocked. But there’s something weirdly beautiful about it. Donnelly reproduces pages from the First Folio and his own notes in multiple colors, showing how he selected the words that spelled out Bacon’s secret message, and it would be hugely expensive to print it even today. (In the end, it was an enormous flop. According to Kahn, the book’s publisher had to bring in a special printer to make the plates, and later sued Donnelly for the recovery of advance royalties.) Yet the first half of the book, which lays out the biographical “evidence” for the Baconian hypothesis, could be published tomorrow to an enthusiastic reception. And while I don’t think I’ll ever make it through the whole thing, it’s worth asking why so many people are still so eager to believe that Shakespeare’s plays were written by somebody else.

Donnelly’s core argument is a familiar one. Given the linguistic invention, erudition, and worldly knowledge of the plays, it seems impossible that they could have been written by a rural glover’s son. Bacon, a universal scholar with a suitable pedigree, seems like a much better candidate, although conspiracy theorists from Sigmund Freud to Roland Emmerich on down have settled by consensus on the Earl of Oxford. Yet the anti-Stratfordians are obsessed with solving a problem that doesn’t really exist. Shakespeare’s genius, to the extent it can be broken down, rests on three qualities: an unparalleled way with character, a deep intuition and shrewdness about dramatic structure, and a staggering degree of verbal energy and expressiveness. The first two traits have little, if anything, to do with formal education, and the second, in particular, could have emerged only from the daily, unforgiving grind of performance and playmaking—from the experience of a man, in short, who solved narrative problems for a living. And his language required less in the way of rigorous schooling than access to the right books and the determination to use them as tools. Whether or not he actually owned and annotated a copy of John Baret’s Alvearie, it’s exactly the kind of book he could have used, and it would have gone a long way toward providing the raw material he needed.

As for Shakespeare’s intellectual or philosophical depth, it’s difficult to imagine a writer with this set of traits—that is, an inhuman facility with character, situation, and language—operating for any length of time without yielding ideas of commensurate complexity, even if we glimpse them darkly, or as flashes of lightning that illuminate the text on the way to the next confrontation. Shakespeare was a machine for generating the kinds of ideas that emerge precisely from language and dramatic incident, a verbal magician whose spells produce resonances that can take a lifetime to unpack, and he did it consistently for a quarter of a century. (He also grew up as a writer in public: when you read all the plays in order, as I did a decade ago, it becomes obvious how the richness of the late works comes out of the lessons he learned from his early, more conventional efforts.) To put it another way, a talent like Shakespeare’s is so exceptional, so statistically rare, that his eduction or lack thereof seems like a trivial consideration: the world’s universities offer up thousands of excellent scholars each year, and their achievements are commonplace, even boring, compared to what Shakespeare possessed that can’t be taught. Donnelly, the Oxfordians, and the rest spin incredible webs of tortured logic to justify what is really the least interesting, and the most explicable, aspect of the works they admire. There’s no need to look for a cryptogram here; Shakespeare is already our greatest maker of codes.

Show me the monster

Over the weekend, I finally caught up with the recent remake of Godzilla. I’d wanted to see this movie for a long time, and although I was aware that a lot of viewers had found it disappointing—especially with regard to Godzilla’s own limited screen time—I was looking forward to watching a big, effects-driven blockbuster that followed what I’ve called one of the cardinal rules of suspense. You don’t show the monster. You let the viewer’s imagination do the work. It’s what Spielberg did in Jaws and Ridley Scott did in Alien. I know all this, and I believe in it. Yet after Godzilla was over, my first reaction was, well, that I wished I’d seen more of the monster. Part of me feels a little guilty even for typing this. Director Gareth Edwards and his production team are obviously harking back to Spielberg, and there’s no question that this approach is preferable to the nonstop pummeling of the senses we get from the likes of Michael Bay. But if we look back at what what Roger Ebert wrote in his review of Roland Emmerich’s own Godzilla remake, we start to realize that the truth is a little more complicated: “Steven Spielberg opened Jurassic Park by giving us a good, long look at the dinosaurs in full sunlight, and our imaginations leapt up. Godzilla hops out of sight like a camera-shy kangaroo.”

So which is it? Would Spielberg want us to show the monster or not? Or to put to put it another way, why does an approach that works for Jaws leave us so dissatisfied with Godzilla? For one thing, there’s the fact that while Jaws leaves its shark offscreen for most of the movie, it spends the intervening time developing a trio of engaging protagonists we’d happily follow on an ordinary fishing trip, while Godzilla kills off its most interesting character before the halfway mark. A director like Spielberg also knows that every delay demands a corresponding payoff: most of the flying saucers in Close Encounters stay out of sight, but when we see the mothership at last, it still has the power to delight the imagination almost forty years later. Godzilla never affords us that kind of cathartic moment, which even a movie like Peter Jackson’s King King offers almost to a fault. More subtly, it’s worth pointing out that most of the films that first come to mind when we think of the power of suggestion, like Jaws or Alien, were forced in that direction out of technical limitations. Not showing the monster is only one of a series of ingenious decisions and workarounds imposed by real constraints, and it’s no surprise if the result is more compelling than a movie that doesn’t need to sweat as hard.

But I think the real explanation is even simpler. In Jaws, it makes sense to leave the shark off screen: for the most part, we’re seeing events from the perspective of men on shore or on the boat, fighting an unseen foe, and as long as we stick to their point of view—which makes for good dramatic logic—we won’t see more than a dorsal fin or underwater shadow. The same holds for Alien, which pits its crew against a single murderous creature in a labyrinth of darkness, and even Close Encounters, where the flying objects, by definition, are elusive enough to remain unidentified. But Godzilla is hard to miss. He’s 350 feet tall. This is a creature defined by its overwhelming physical presence, and to keep him out of sight, we need to artificially depart from the perspective of those on the ground. We cut away from the main action or cheat the lighting and the camera angles, so instead of seeing things through a character’s eyes, we enforce a kind of alienation from what the human beings in the story are experiencing. (Having already been entertained but underwhelmed by Pacific Rim, I’m starting to think that any story about two or more really big monsters might be inherently undramatic: there isn’t enough room for action on a human scale when the plot turns on a fistfight between creatures the size of skyscrapers.)

In other words, Godzilla understands the “rule” that it shouldn’t show the monster, but it forgets why that rule has meaning in the first place. Watching it, I felt much the same way I did when I saw Ti West’s The House of the Devil. In that movie, we’re repeatedly shown the heroine moving past dark doorways, and each time she does, our heart rate accelerates—but time and again, nothing happens. And after an hour of establishing the layout of its terrifying house, when the horror finally does come, the film commits the ultimate crime: it cuts away to a room we’ve never seen. Maybe it knows, rightly, that dread is more effective than terror, but it forgets an even more basic rule: if you’re going to tease us with all those shots of a doorway, sooner or later, something has to come out of that door. Godzilla makes much the same mistake, which is only a reminder of the difference between approaching a genre from the outside, even from the standpoint of a loving fan, and figuring out its logic from within, as Spielberg did. Rules, to the extent they exist, are there for a reason, and it can be dangerous, especially for smart storytellers, to honor those conventions with great technical skill while failing to articulate while they’re there in the first place. And as Godzilla proves, you can be a careful, perceptive, and talented director, but still miss the monster in the room.