A couple of issues only, rave. Still intending to pick up the trade.
If all the world's a stage and all the people merely players, who in bloody
hell hired the director? -- Charles L Grant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQUxw9aUVik
To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com
From: ravena...@yahoo.com
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:08:23 +
Subject: [scifinoir2] Comic book comes to big screen in Surrogates
Anybody read the Surrogates comic book series?
~rave!
http://hoonaem.notlong.com
Clerk hits gold with Surrogates
01:00 AM EDT on Friday, September 25, 2009
By Roger Moore
The Orlando Sentinel
Robert Venditti was working in a Borders bookstore when he wrote The
Surrogates, now a film starring Bruce Willis.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Like a lot of young men, Robert Venditti went to college with
big dreams.
I was going to be the next Hemingway, he says.
As he earned his bachelor of arts degree from the University of Florida and a
master's degree from the University of Central Florida, he figured out you
can't just graduate from college and apply for a job as a fiction writer.
Law school was out. He had a taste of that in a summer job and realized it
wasn't the life for me.
But there was that part-time job, the one that started in South Florida and
moved to Altamonte Springs and then Winter Park, Fla., as he attended grad
school. He worked at Borders Books, and that changed his life. That's when
Venditti first picked up a comic book.
I thought, like a lot of people, that comics were just a juvenile medium,
Venditti, 35, says from his home in Atlanta. But my buddy Marques Robinson got
me to read Astro City: The Confessor. The complexity of the ideas, the
characters, the way the visuals help tell the story, really appealed to me. I
started researching comics, trying to figure out how you got to write for them.
He figured it out, all right. In 2003, Venditti's comic-book series The
Surrogates hit stores. Entertainment Weekly called this tale of people who live
vicarious lives through their artificial (and artificially gorgeous)
surrogates a resplendently grimy commentary on our times.
Venditti's success could reach a whole new level on Friday as Surrogates, a
thriller starring Bruce Willis based on Venditti's book (with artist Brett
Weldele) hits theaters. It's a comic-book writer's — any writer's — version of
winning the Lotto.
The minute I heard Bruce Willis was cast was the first moment I allowed myself
to hope that this might actually get turned into a movie, Venditti says with a
laugh. A producer who had just hung out his shingle called me up [Max
Handelman]. He shopped it around, ran into a studio guy who had just seen Sin
City and wanted `something edgy, comic-booky' like that. So Mandeville Films
got involved, then Jonathan Mostow (director of U-571, Terminator 3), with
screenwriters from Terminator 3.
I've been involved, at least in the loop, he says. I looked at it from the
perspective that these other people were creative minds in their own right. If
they're inspired by something I did to bring their own creativity to it, I'm
taking that as a compliment and letting them do what they want. They were
staying true to the themes and adding their own ideas and plot lines and
characters. You know they're going to add explosions. That's Hollywood.
Venditti's Borders-to-Hollywood story should be an inspiration to anyone hoping
to break into comics. He worked his way in the door with a tape gun.
I'd moved to Atlanta, transferred to a Borders up here, and I'd heard of this
comic-book company, Top Shelf Productions, that was having a rough patch, he
says. He offered to come in and use his expertise packing books as a volunteer.
A few months of that and he showed the company his idea for a comic, one
inspired by Indra Sinha's book, The Cybergypsies, which he had read in grad
school at UCF.
Sinha studied people addicted to the Internet. Obsession with alternate
reality was causing divorces, people were losing their jobs. By 2002, all these
`extreme makeovers' were all over the media. What if there was a technology
that allowed people to fulfill that basic human need to be someone other than
yourself? What would that world look like?
With the huge fanbase for the online alternate-persona game Second Life and
James Cameron's film Avatar hotly anticipated this fall, Venditti seems ahead
of the curve.
That's just another happy accident, he says. That idea is just out there
now.
His Surrogates was such a success that he just released a prequel — Flesh
Bone. He has another comic, The Homeland Directive, in the works, and is
adapting the novels of Percy Jackson (The Lightning Thief) into a comic. If he
hasn't given up his Hemingway dreams, Venditti does sound very much like a man
who is sold on his new medium