Warner Bros, Joel Silver Revive Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer Novel Series With ‘The Galton Case’

COMMENTS (8)

• Never read the books, but have fallen asleep every time I’ve tried to watch the movies.

  Not sure how the movies differed from the books – hopefully Alot, or it’s nap time again for me.

  Comment by Tink — Monday October 31, 2011 @ 11:01am PDT  Reply to this post

• Yo Joel Silver, how’s about that Veronica Mars movie? Anytime you’re ready.

  Comment by PaulH — Monday October 31, 2011 @ 11:50am PDT  Reply to this post

• Your forgot that Brian Keith played the character in a short-lived TV series back in ’75.
  The books are brilliant…hard to get across in a movie. Would work best as period pieces.

  Comment by Jennifer — Monday October 31, 2011 @ 12:55pm PDT  Reply to this post

• How strange. Watching the British actor Iain Glenn recently in “Game of Thrones” and then “Strike Back,” I had a flash that he’d make a great Archer — a role that requires way more expressive listening than talking. Why not, when every other movie and TV show in Hollywood has a Brit playing a Yank?

  Comment by DavidC — Monday October 31, 2011 @ 1:57pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Mr. Stephen White, hold on to your hat because this producer will render your books and your character like nothing you’ve ever seen. He’ll reinvent him, make him hip, make him do things Ross MacDonald never dreamed of. In the end, he’ll ruin the books, the character and the franchise. Never has a producer been so destructive to the creative process.

  Comment by Addie DeWitt — Monday October 31, 2011 @ 2:00pm PDT  Reply to this post

• I hope that this year, both “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” wind up being both sincerely faithful to their source novels, and also successful at the Box Office. If there’s easy evidence that audiences will reward quality film adaptations of crime novels, hopefully producers will resist the urge to severely re-write or re-imagine the material in projects like this. (This goes for the “Thin Man” project, too.)

  Ross MacDonald’s novels are truely unique and exceptional, and I don’t see any reason why they can’t be successfully transferred to the screen as well as le Carre’s work. But I’m probably not as cynical as I should be.

  Comment by Belltown SMP — Monday October 31, 2011 @ 3:04pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Time to go to the library I guess !

  Comment by Tink — Monday October 31, 2011 @ 8:07pm PDT  Reply to this post

• The problem with bringing Ross MacDonald to the screen is that the great strength of the books is in the language. All of the beauty is in the narrative. Yes, the plots are wonderfully intricate and the dialog is superb, but that’s all you’ll get on the screen. It would take extensive narration to showcase hundreds of beautiful phrases and metaphors, and I’m afraid that would be awkward.

  I’d advise anyone to just read the books, and you can pick them in any order. For the record, my favorites are The Underground Man and The Chill. The Galton Case, of course, is excellent as well, but read it first, so that IF the screen version falls short, you’ll know exactly why.

  Comment by Don Morrison — Saturday November 5, 2011 @ 2:45am PDT  Reply to this post