George R.R. Martin has made his feelings known about many TV and film adaptations of novels, saying that “things have gotten worse” over the past few years.
In a blogpost, published last Friday (May 24), the Game of Thrones author reflected on a 2022 event he participated in with Neil Gaiman. He referred to a Variety report of the event, where he lamented over his experience writing scripts for episodes of The Twilight Zone.
He recalled feeling squeezed to make “illegitimate” changes while adapting a short story for the television series, due to budget constraints. “I was new to Hollywood,” Martin said. “I didn’t say, ‘You’re fucking morons.’” Martin now writes in his blogpost that, since 2022, “very little has changed since then.”
“If anything, things have gotten worse,” he continued. “No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve on it.”
“They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse,” he added. However, he spends the rest of the blogpost on highlighting a recent series that he feels “deserves applause” for the way it treats its source material: Shogun.
“I think the author would have been pleased,” he surmises. “Both old and new screenwriters did honor to the source material, and gave us terrific adaptations, resisting the impulse to ‘make it their own’. But don’t take my word for it. Watch it yourself.”
Earlier this year, Martin aired his grief over how social media discourse on books, films, and television series is dominated by “anti-fans” who “would rather talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love”.
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In Game of Thrones-related news, House of the Dragon’s forthcoming second season debuts on June 16. Martin has seen its first two episodes, which he calls “powerful, emotional, gut-wrenching, heart rending”.