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Is Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin throwing shade on book-to-screen adaptations?
Maybe.
The writer recently wrote on his personal blog to air out his issues with Hollywood and screenwriters' attempts at adaptations and trying to make the source material their own. He had spoken about this topic in 2022 with fellow writer Neil Gaiman. In that discussion, Martin complained about how most Hollywood writers think there's no need to be faithful to the works they're adapting either for film or television.
To adapt or not to adapt
In his most current blog entry, he wrote, “Very little has changed since then. If anything, things have gotten worse. Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.' It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone.”
He doubled down and added, “No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve' on it.”
“‘The book is the book, the film is the film,' they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse,” Martin continued.
He doesn't seem to hold the same opinion for House of the Dragon writers.
However, while the writer never named names, anyone who's ever seen the final season of HBO's Game of Thrones, could be forgiven to think that this may be his form of “throwing shade” at the writers.
Thrones throwback
Many fans took to social media to air their grievances when the finale was released. Some of them said that it was the worst episode of the entire series. Others expressed that the entire season was overall underwhelming and disappointing.
Even the show's cast had negative opinions, although they soften their stance a bit.
Kit Harington, who played Jon Snow, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019 that he was disappointed his character didn't get to kill the Night King.
Gwendolyn Christie, who played fan favorite Brienne of Tarth, said she was also disappointed with the ending “because I love this character and I read about this character [in George R.R. Martin's novels] before I saw the show. So we all have our own ideas about how we think the character is going to develop. Sometimes your ideas become set in your mind, and sometimes David and Dan write something you didn't expect and find difficult to comprehend,” she told Entertainment Weekly.
Even the actress who played Cersei Lannister, the character most fans love to hate, Lena Heady, had complaints.
She told The Guardian, “I will say I wanted a better death. Obviously you dream of your death. You could go in any way on that show. So I was kind of gutted.”
Series creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff responded five years after the finale.
Benioff told The Hollywood Reporter, “You always hope everyone's going to love anything you do and it would've been great if 100% of people loved it, but they didn't. You can get so bogged down in public opinion that you spend your whole life googling things and trying to find people who felt one way or the other way.”
George R.R. Martin's high praise for FX's Shogun
Let's say Martin wasn't throwing shade at all. And maybe he really wasn't because he thinks that “once in a while we do get a really good adaptation of a really good book, and when that happens, it deserves applause.”
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He singled out FX's Shogun, currently an Emmy frontrunner for drama series.
“I was dubious when I first heard they were making another version of the Clavell novel,” he wrote in his blog.
“It has been a long time, a long long LONG time, but I read the book when it first came out in the late 70s and was mightily impressed. And the 1980 miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain as the Anjin was a landmark of long form television, right up with with ‘Roots'; why do it over again, when that version was so good?” the author continued.
I very obviously agree. Just search my name in this website and you'll see what I mean.
Martin is glad the show's producers remade the show.
“The new ‘Shogun' is superb… I think the author would have been pleased. Both old and new screenwriters did honor to the source material, and gave us terrific adaptations, resisting the impulse ‘to make it their own,'” he added.
Make it your own or make something of your own?
Here's where I disagree with Martin. Not fundamentally, just the ‘make it their own' part because the new Shogun is the show's own. It's told from the perspective of the Japanese. The central character really isn't Anjin, the way Clavell wrote in his novel and in the 1980 series.
The new show is the writers' own. At the same time, the writers also respected the source material. Shogun really did show that they could create a perfect balance of that.
During Martin's 2022 conversation with Gaiman, he asked, “How faithful do you have to be? Some people don't feel that they have to be faithful at all. There's this phrase that goes around: ‘I'm going to make it my own.' I hate that phrase. And I think Neil probably hates that phrase, too.”
But things seem to be looking up for Gaiman when it comes to adaptations. Netflix's Sandman has gotten input from him, and so did Prime Video's Good Omens.
However, Gaiman agreed with his fellow and cited the example of how he's had to watch people make Sandman their own for 30 years. His biggest problem, though, is that these people who want to make an already existing work their own “hadn't even read ‘Sandman' to make it their own, they'd just flipped through a few comics or something.”
And that, I think, is the biggest mistake writers who adapt books to a different medium such as film or TV.
I'm not against adaptations. Next to books, I live for them. But it's illogical and downright contrary to adapt something you hardly know about. Love isn't a requirement for adaptations, at least in my opinion. Respect, though, should be a bare minimum.
If you're so dead set on making something your own, then maybe you should go make your own something.
