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Post by andydecker on Mar 30, 2020 17:10:24 GMT
Whether this relates in any way to the prices for OOP paperbacks that he wrote, I also don't know. Maybe it is a conspiracy by Fox News.
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Post by kooshmeister on Mar 30, 2020 18:41:29 GMT
One seller in the UK is advertising Re-Animator on market-place. For a delusional 1570,00 Euro. I wonder if Rovin got that much for the manuscript in 1987. The guy on eBay I got mine from was advertising it for $99. I negotiated him down to $79, which still ended up being $90 with shipping. I guess the book was just under-printed. Another movie novelization that seems rare and frequently commands high prices is Michael McDowell's Clue. There's one copy on eBay for $247 (!).
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Post by kooshmeister on Apr 1, 2020 1:23:45 GMT
And managed to snag a copy of Blowfly from Brit Books USA on Amazon.
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Post by kooshmeister on Apr 2, 2020 7:26:40 GMT
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Post by andydecker on Apr 2, 2020 8:43:56 GMT
Can't say they spend much effort for this, no movie still is, but the translation looks somewhat more in tune with the topic of the novel.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Apr 2, 2020 8:58:08 GMT
My German is not the best, but it seems to me the blurb talks about "the novel that the film by John Carpenter was based upon." I am pretty sure that is not right.
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Post by andydecker on Apr 2, 2020 9:30:44 GMT
My German is not the best, but it seems to me the blurb talks about "the novel that the film by John Carpenter was based upon." I am pretty sure that is not right. Spot on, Jojo. I didn't even noticed this. The usual novelisation nonsense.
At the time Foster was one of the bestselling writers of Heyne Publishing, the largest SF and Fantasy publisher in Germany in these years. Five or six translated novels a month at the peak. Foster's novelisation of Alien got 18 printings, the last one 1994, 15 years after the original release, so they must have sold at least 20000 units of this or more. Not bad for a movie novelistation. Even his original fantasy novels like the Spellsinger cycle got 5 or more printings. So in the case of The Thing either Heyne got the facts wrong or thought a bit of hyperbole couldn't be wrong.
I checked and at least on the back cover the credit is right. A novel by Foster based upon a screenplay by Lancaster. Poor old John Campbell doesn't get mentioned.
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Post by kooshmeister on Apr 2, 2020 16:07:28 GMT
A novel by Foster based upon a screenplay by Lancaster. Poor old John Campbell doesn't get mentioned. He still has it better than anyone who isn't Merian C. Cooper in connection to King Kong's novelization. Poor Delos W. Lovelace is almost always credited after Cooper and Edgar Wallace (who by Cooper's own admission had nothing to do with anything beyond one half-finished treatment), if he's credited at all. And the people who actually wrote the script Lovelace based the novelization on? Never a mention. James Creelman and Ruth Rose? And this is a problem persisting to this day. Typically, it goes something like this: King Kong by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace, Novelization by Delos W. Lovelace. If there's a "based on" blurb, it's usually Cooper who gets sole credit. No mention of Creelman and Rose. And while I can understand using Wallace's name to promote the book way back when, these days Edgar Wallace is basically the gall bladder of the King Kong novel credits; he's there but doesn't do anything and isn't required anymore. Current publications should go something like " King King by Delos W. Lovelace, Based on a Script by James Creelman and Ruth Rose and an Idea by Merian C. Cooper."
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Post by pulphack on Apr 2, 2020 19:27:12 GMT
Christ I wish you'd stop Edgar Wallace bashing about Kong. I know you have a book that trashes him, and goes entirely with Merian Cooper's version of events, but it's not the whole truth and I do get fed up with you pushing that line.
Wallace wrote a first script that was rejected in need of wholesale rewriting as Cooper's ideas were off in another direction. In the Cooper version, this is where Wallace exits the story.
Not quite. Wallace died in Hollywood working on another version of the script. This included much that was used in the final version. Cooper denied this as it gave him a reason not to settle up on the lucrative contract he had with Wallace.
The final version of the script used a lot of the structure and ideas that went into the final shooting script. You can dismiss me on this, but Wallace had a copy of the script in his effects, and decades later his daughter Penny sold it at auction. This is documented. More, I can vouch for this as I knew Penny Wallace in the late 80's/early 90's.
So the truth is that Wallace was more than a 'gall bladder' (charming). He did contribute a script that constituted a large part of the film as we know it, though he did not produce the final draft and shooting script. However, Cooper was not honest with Wallace's family or with his own subsequent biographers.
You can call me a liar if you like, but I know Penny Wallace was not lying.
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Post by kooshmeister on Apr 2, 2020 20:36:00 GMT
My issue is less whether Wallace did or didn't contribute anything, but more that I'm tired of seeing Lovelace get third billing on a book he wrote. Yes, he wrote it using someone else's ideas (it's an adaptation, after all), but he did do the legwork of actually hammering out, therefore, I believe he ought to be credited first on the cover, not third behind Cooper and Wallace when he's credited at all. So I don't think Cooper and Wallace's names belong on current publications of the books. Wallace's certainly doesn't anyway, regardless of what he did or didn't contribute to the script. As I said, the proper credit should be "By Delos W. Lovelace, Based on the Script by James Creelman and Ruth Rose and a Story by Merian C. Cooper." If Wallace is to be credited on the novelization cover (and I'm sorry, but I don't think he ought to be), it ought to be as part of the "story by" with Cooper.
In any event, I didn't realize that in defending Lovelace I was dissing Wallace. Sorry if I touched a nerve. Knocking Wallace wasn't my intent. When I called him the gall bladder of Kong, I was going off the idea that his name was attached for marquee value (see below), which isn't needed anymore; as King Kong is famous on its own, reprints of Lovelace's novelization don't require Edgar Wallace's name on the cover to sell anymore, so I'm at a loss as to why he keeps being credited ahead of the book's actual author. I guess I just think the person who wrote the book deserves to be credited before anyone else, regardless of whether they wrote it using someone else's ideas or not; Lovelace did the work, not Cooper and Wallace, the end.
I was unaware of the Penny Wallace story until now, and almost every account I'd read of Wallace's involvement with the production was that he'd done one draft, then passed away and Cooper only credited him because he promised he would and because his name would lend marquee value to the film. This is the version of events told in the forward/introduction to the 2005 Modern Library Classics edition of the book (and despite what you might think, it doesn't "trash" him). Until today, all accounts I'd read were that Wallace's involvement was minimal, so forgive me for thinking his contribution(s) were blown out of proportion over the years.
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Post by kooshmeister on Apr 2, 2020 21:33:25 GMT
In any event, I didn't mean to start trouble. I apologize.
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Post by cromagnonman on Apr 3, 2020 9:47:34 GMT
If someone's association with a book is considered superfluous wouldn't it be more appropriate to describe them as an appendix rather than a gall bladder?
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Post by pulphack on Apr 3, 2020 11:52:06 GMT
Oh it's not trouble - I may have been a bit sharp, which was unnecessary, but I do hate when it turns out that the story you've been thinking true and repeating in good faith turns out to be a bit of a crock. Those Wallace fans who used to give him full credit and dismiss anyone else were equally as irritating in this respect.
Ultimately, Cooper was an old fashioned Huckster, not unlike the movie maker in the film...
I will argue your point about novelisers getting first credit, though - my reasoning is this: a noveliser doesn't really do the legwork as such; the scenario and structure, and much of the dialogue, is given to them by the script they are working from. As a writer it gives them a chance to get something on the CV, get paid, and have fun doing it. A good noveliser can make a shite script good. However, ultimately it is the property that most people are buying when they pick up the book. Very few of us will look for the writer (guilty, come on down John Burke!). In truth, in the case of Kong the credit order should really have had Cooper first, then Lovelace, then the scriptwriters, for as much as I think he's a shyster, Cooper was the man who owned and originated the project, and without him there is no film and no book. In the same way, with all those paperback franchises from the earliest days of Nick Carter and Sexton Blake onwards, there may have been fan favourite writers, but for most readers it was the character they looked for on the bookstalls.
I see why you think Lovelace deserves first billing, and on artistic merit I can agree with the reasoning, but he was ultimately a guy who took his job seriously in wanting to do it well who got handed a decent assignment.
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Post by kooshmeister on Apr 3, 2020 20:32:06 GMT
Oh it's not trouble - I may have been a bit sharp, which was unnecessary, but I do hate when it turns out that the story you've been thinking true and repeating in good faith turns out to be a bit of a crock. Those Wallace fans who used to give him full credit and dismiss anyone else were equally as irritating in this respect. I understand. And like I said, I'd never heard the thing about Penny Wallace until you mentioned it. Ultimately, Cooper was an old fashioned Huckster, not unlike the movie maker in the film... Even without knowing the truth about Edgar Wallace, I've always had kind of a love/hate relationship with Cooper, especially as concerns Willis O'Brien. I feel like he torpedoed Creation in order to get O'Brien for King Kong. If true, that was kind of a dick move on Cooper's part. I feel like, thanks to Cooper's interference, O'Brien never did get to do his own projects; after Kong, he seemed stuck in a rut of doing the effects for other people's movies and not his own, when he wasn't having his ideas outright stolen. Much as I love Kong, I really would've liked to have seen Creation. It makes me wish Peter Jackson had done that back in '05 instead of another Kong remake (which, though I loved it at the time, I seem to enjoy less with each passing year; not because it's a remake, but it's a big, bloated, gloriously self-indulgent mess that makes the '76 movie look positively restrained in comparison). But I digress...
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Post by kooshmeister on Apr 4, 2020 3:52:00 GMT
I had to...
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