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Lighten Up About Game Movies
Topic Started: Feb 17 2006, 11:51 AM (211 Views)
Purple Ranger 14
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Hollywood Heavyweights Tell Gamers To Lighten Up About Film Adaptations
Speakers at gaming summit say hard-core fans get in the way of game-to-film projects.
by Stephen Totilo
"Doom 3" (Activision, Inc.)
LAS VEGAS — It's pretty clear what gamers think of Hollywood's treatment of video game movies, but last week it was Hollywood's turn to vent about games and gamers. The result was a bit of tough love from some players who make movies for a living.
At a panel discussing the crossover between movies and games held during the final day of the Design Innovative Communicate Entertain gaming summit, "Gladiator" writer David Franzoni issued a battery of constructive criticism about how games are written. Meanwhile "Doom" producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura called on hard-core gamers to lighten up about game-based movies.
Franzoni focused primarily on what games — rather than game movies — could do better. He made it clear that he's logged some serious time on an Xbox 360, setting himself apart from the typical graying Hollywood execs who still make games a tricky sell in Tinseltown.
The 360's World War II first-person-shooter "Call of Duty 2" seemed fresh on Franzoni's mind, serving to highlight his main problem with games. Impressive as it is, "Call of Duty" failed to compel him to fight.
"Where's the liberation of the concentration camp, guys?" he asked an audience of 300 top-level gaming professionals. "It's a fabulous game and it's fantastic to play, but I'm looking for that thing that's going to motivate me besides just shooting human targets."
For Franzoni, games are doing great with bombast but failing with character. "When I sit down to write, I'm looking for something that gives my character a reason to live," he said. "There are so many games that we play that halfway through you go, 'Why am I doing this?' They're great first-person shooters, but there's nothing at stake."
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Purple Ranger 14
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His solution is for game makers to hire more professional writers and to turn to the great stories in other media for inspiration. His improbable example? Ballet. "In the dance of the Joffrey Ballet called 'The Green Table,' there are visions of war and death that are far more scary than I've ever seen in any video game. I believe if video developers went back and visited that dance they would get it and translate that into a game," he said.
But if it's hard to imagine game makers taking their cues from tights and tutus, try to fancy gamers themselves following di Bonaventura's advice to lighten up about video game movies.
The "Doom" producer has strong Hollywood credentials. He's a former Warner Bros. studio chief who oversaw hits including "The Matrix," "Harry Potter" and "Training Day." And he's got enough love for games that he initially tried to get "The Matrix" made as a video game even before it became a movie.
So he wasn't speaking from ignorance when he said that, when making a movie based on a game, "the hardest juggle that you have is trying to balance what the creators of the game and the players feel about it with the demands of the corporate structure of the studio" (see "Rewind: What Happens When Movies Get Game?").
When Ted Price, president of "Ratchet and Clank" maker Insomniac Games asked di Bonaventura what the producer would have done differently with the underperforming "Doom" movie, the answer essentially boiled down to paying less attention to the game and its fans. "I'm going to get in trouble with a lot of people if I answer this question," he said. "I would stick with my instincts about what makes a great film. I would worry less about what the [game's] creators wanted and less about what the studio felt the gamers wanted." The movie should have been more of a sophisticated, character-focused sci-fi flick, he said.
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Purple Ranger 14
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But fans' demands that a movie stay as close to the game as possible compelled everyone involved to keep things too simplistic. "The core audience makes it so hard on filmmakers," he said. "Their absolutism can actually be very disruptive to what's going on in the filmmaking process." Fans should accept certain realities about storytelling and, he said pointedly, of business.
If fans don't back off, they might just scare the studios off. "It creates an atmosphere in the senior-executive ranks in the studio where it's just not worth it," he said. As he is the producer of upcoming "G.I. Joe" and "Transformers" movies and is in development with Nicolas Cage on a movie version of Namco's "Dead to Rights" game franchise, di Bonaventura will surely face these issues again.
For all their criticism, these were the voices of some of gaming's Hollywood advocates. So are they ready to back their opinions up and execute? Di Bonaventura said he'd like to turn an upcoming movie he's producing into a video game because it has the strong character focus and physical gimmick that he thinks would make for a rich game. The movie, "1408," is based on a Stephen King short story about a man who checks into a hotel room and can't escape. How well it might do as a game might be answered by players of 2004's "Silent Hill 4," which had a similar trapped-in-a-room plot.
Franzoni hinted that he has some game ideas in the works but seemed particularly eager to turn an existing game into a movie. In a seeming disavowal of di Bonaventura's key argument, Franzoni said that the PC first-person shooter "Half-Life" could make a great film and wouldn't even need a change. "You shoot the game," he said. "You don't mess around with that one. That is such a bitchin' game that it is the script."
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Purple Ranger 14
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He said he'd already pitched it to Hollywood heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer, whom Franzoni and di Bonaventura both praised as having a particularly young and game-savvy staff. Still, the "Pearl Harbor" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" producer wasn't too impressed. "He said it was too much like 'Alien,' " said Franzoni. "He's a very bright guy, but he doesn't play games."
Franzoni does. And when more people in Hollywood do, he figures the situation will get better, for game movies and maybe for games as well. So will gamers just lighten up?
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