With Kevin Brown and the Sci Fi Channel I developed a four hour mini-series based on the first two books in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series: "The Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Tombs of Atuan". [gallery link="file" ids="125,138,130,131,132,134,135,136,137"] Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHCGk5d3Gsw ...
Young Indiana Jones Chronicles In 1990, just weeks after leaving my career as a TV journalist, I was fortunate enough to be taken on by George Lucas as one of the writers for his series "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." This involved spending weeks at a time at Skywalker Ranch, where the picture below was taken,with writers like Jonathan Hensleigh, Rosemary Anne Sissons,Matthew Jacobs, Jules Selbo and Frank Darabont, creating, under George Lucas' guidance, the plots for each episode of the series, which we would then go home and write, reassembling...
After I had sold Small Soldiers to Spielberg I was asked by Working Title to write a movie based on the characters in Mary Norton's wonderful "Borrowers" books: possibly because I was regarded as the expert on little people! I created a modern story about a Borrowing family who had the save the house they lived in from the depredations of a lawyer who ended up being played by the inestimable John Goodman. Directed by Peter Hewitt, it looked gorgeous and is still popular with kids today. Hugh Laurie, now...
A picture essay In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the French town of Colmar in Alsace Lorraine, a highly respectable Protestant widow named Charlotte Bartholdi sat stone-faced in the parlor of her charming little house at 30, Rue de Marchands. Her eccentric, genealogy-loving elder son, Charles, had fallen in love with a beautiful young woman and wanted to marry her. The only problem, he explained, was that she was Jewish: but as he was convinced they would make each other happy and she would bring him the stability he...
Small Soldiers was the first film script I sold, and was written while I was still living in England - although by then I was commuting to arin County several times a year to work on The Young Indian Jones Chronicles. I had been working on the idea for years but was never able to find a story to fit the concept. But when I got an agent in LA and began pitching my ideas around the town, this one aroused enthusiasm. Nobody hired me to write the script, but...
I felt truly honoured when TNT asked me to adapt Marion Zimmer Bradley's extraordinary saga of the Arthurian saga as seen through the point of view of the women of the era. Women in particular award it the same enthusiasm that's usually reserved for The Lord of the Rings, and I was profoundly relieved that I didn't face a barrage of criticism for the fairly large structural changes I had to make. But I did them in the spirit of the book and everyone seemed to accept them in good...
Here are some of the colourful colours used to help make Verne's works bestsellers in 19th century France. His publisher Hetzel certainly had a flair for the eye-catching. I'm sure these jackets had the same sort of impact as the covers of Tintin comic books have in France today. ...
Article From Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune, New Zealand Scriptwriter Gavin Scott has always had a passion for history. Even as a kid growing up in Hawke's Bay he would "plunge into the history books at Havelock North Library". That interest has manifested itself in his work of the past decade, writing television and movie scripts for the likes of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Disney and HBO. Tonight Scott's television series The Secret Adventures of Jutes Verne starts on Prime Television. Scott had read a biography of Verne and discovered that his 20,000 Leagues Under...
Commentary By GAVIN SCOTT CREATOR, THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF JULES VERNE Welcome to the world of Jules Verne: or at least, our might-have-been version of it. The idea for this show came to me when I read that Jules Verne had written an original version of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that was significantly different from the one we know. It was about a Polish nobleman whose family had been massacred by the Russians during the suppression of an uprising, and who built a submarine to take revenge. Jules’ publisher, Hetzel, knew he had...
