More on "Good Omens" the Movie and Coraline

In a recent e-mail exchange I had with Neil Gaiman he confirmed that Terry Gilliam is the director for the adapation of Good Omens to the screen. On a side note, Gaiman has been working on Coraline and will be doing a signing of the book in the Barnes and Noble in Union Square, NYC on Thursday the 11th. That's today. Update: 07/11 13:15 GMT by CT : I just wanted to say 'Curse Your Terry Gilliam'! Ever since I read Good Omens, I wished I was a film director just so I could direct that book. I guess Terry will do a good job too ;)

New news?

[koshi]

Is this new news its been on imbd.com [imdb.com] for a while now.
I also heard that the two of them were thinking of working on Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" but someone else got the rights first.

Re:This sounds good, but

[Angry Toad]

Excuse me? Terry is primarily a director, responsible for cinematic masterpieces like Brazil, Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys, and the (underrated, IMHO) Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Perhaps you're thinking of Terry Pratchett, who co-wrote the book with Gaiman?

Good Omens link

[MartinB]

Perhaps you meant here [corona.bc.ca], or perhaps here [lspace.org].

Re:Good Omens link

[MartinB]

or indeed perhaps here [smart.co.uk], which will show that Gilliam screenwriting and directing Good Omens is old news indeed.

Re:HHG

[BabyDave]

Interesting - his usual story is that Mort would have been made years ago, but some Hollywood exec person said that

"the American public aren't ready for Death as a sympathetic character."

[This was said about 18 months before "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey" was released. Now, who was the best character in that ...?]

Old News

[h4mmer5tein]

Dont mean to put a damper on things but this is old news. Good Omens has been in pre-production for 3 years now and Terry Gilliam was always going to direct it. The Hold ups have been with money and financing, not the production team or cast list. Last I saw Terry was waiting to see if the finance would be tied up in time to shoot Good Omens or wether it would get moved down the list a way while he shot Tideland.

Re:Old News

[filth grinder]

You are right, this is old news. In fact, here is an excerpt from a Neil Gaim interview a couple of months ago where he talks about the hold up:

Dan Epstein: Good Omens will never happen right?
Neil Gaiman: Oh, Good Omens may happen. The whole thing about movies is that you never say it might or might not happen until the first day of shooting, and then it's happening. And even then you've got your fingers crossed. There is a great script by him and Tony Grisoni. They got the budget down to $65 million and they raised about 50 million dollars from abroad. All the investors wanted was for an American entity to go in on the final $15 million and guarantee an American distribution deal. There is the problem?they can't find one. There's no American with the balls enough to agree to fund it and have a Terry Gilliam movie. They are scared of him but he's funny, wise and brilliant. Not only that, but he made Twelve Monkeys and The Fisher King which demonstrated that he could easily bring in a movie on time and under budget. Currently the last e-mail that I heard from Gilliam is that Tony Grisoni is doing a rewrite to try and get the budget down to $45 million.

Dan Epstein: I wish I had $15 million to give to Terry Gilliam to make the movie.

Neil Gaiman: You know what? So do I. That's the single most frustrating thing. You want to walk around Hollywood asking everyone where are their balls. So it's not dead until the option is not renewed and the option just came up and it was renewed again. I got the check. You never know what happens with a picture until you're sitting there eating popcorn at the premiere.

The rest of the interview can be seen here [slushfactory.com]

To answer something else, Gilliam is a writer, he wrote Brazil and his other movies (except 12 Monkeys, he co-wrote the script for Fear and Loathing). He was also a writer for Month Python. So, he does know how to adapt novels to film.

Re:Terry Gilliam

[pbrice68]

Much to most everyone's surprise, it seems, is that Brazil is not a sci-fi movie, at all. It doesn't even take place in the future.

It is/was a satire of our *current* bureacratic times. That's why there were so many "old" things.

It is strange that everyone thinks of Brazil as sci-fi when there is nothing sci-fi about it. It's just a *very* cheeky fantasy/satire.

Brazil

[fishlet]

I hope this isn't too far off topic... but if you want to see Terry Giliams flair for darkness & humor combined... go out and rent 'Brazil'. I think he's the man do to this movie right.

Good Omens

[StrutterX]

To get a lot of the jokes in Good Omens it helps if you have read any of Richmal Compton's Just William books.

Read them to your kids; but do read a little bit. Your appreciation of the satire in Good Omens will increase.

StrutterX

Re:The right director confirmed!

[c.derby]

"...Terry Gilliam is American..."

He was born in Minneapolis but is now a British citizen.

http://us.imdb.com/Name?Gilliam,+Terry

Re:Novel and Parrot by Terry Gilliam

[macaddict]

Terry is also a writer (Starship Titanic novelisation),

That's the other Terry, Terry Jones. He also did the voice of the Parrot.

Sara

Why Slashdotters Should Care About "Good Omens"

[AAAWalrus]

Due to a lack of any posts on this article, and a few ignorant posts that are here, it would seem that Slashdotters don't really know or care about "Good Omens" or what it is. Here's a post to clue you all in. (If you've actually read the book, stop reading. No really! Go read something about Donald Knuth or some rant about Microsoft. Shoo!)

Good Omens is a book co-written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in (I believe) the early 90's. Neil Gaiman is most famous for writing the Sandman comics (graphic novellas?). Terry Pratchett is most famous for writing the many books in the Discworld series. Basically, Gaiman writes dark and brooding stories, Pratchett writes intensely clever and funny stories. "Good Omens" is the brilliant collaboration of these two minds, producing a hilarious account of Armageddon. The book has been most compared to "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and while they do share many common qualities, "Good Omens" is more readable and enjoyable to me.

Why should you care? Because the book is THAT good, and Terry Gilliam is THAT good of a director, and the combination of the two could produce a movie that is THAT good. What's the last movie that came out in the theaters that is a genuine cult classic and will be for years to come? It's been a while. Several years. It's hard to come up with one, isn't it? Well, a movie based on "Good Omens" directed by Terry Gilliam has a lot of potential to be just that: a genuine quotable flick that we can watch dozens of times over and enjoy it each and every time.

Again, what I'm saying is important here is that the *potential* is there for a really great movie that we could all love and enjoy, and we should all be pushing for it's release. Wouldn't it be much cooler if we built up hype about this potentially great movie rather than lamenting about how much George Lucas sucks and how he flushed Star Wars down the toilet?

Re:Stupid story write-up

[Anonymous Coward]

What i wish is that slashdot would go back to doing the little [?] links to everything2 [everything2.com]. That way they could just use terms without caring who read it, because everyone could click the little question marks and find out what those things are.

Since they seemed to have abandoned that practice, though, here's a suggestion: when they reference something you don't recognize, look it up on everything2 yourself. It's a good reference. Here are the entries for:
Good Omens [everything2.com]
Terry Gilliam [everything2.com]
Neil Gaiman [everything2.com]
Terry Pratchett [everything2.com]

Those links should cover just about anything you could concievably want to know about the backstory of this /. article.

Re:Terry & the Holy Grail?

[the_psilo]

(VG) at the end of an IMDB entry means it is a Video Game. I don't quite get why the "International Movie Database" [imdb.org] lists video games as well, but I guess a number of actors have had voice roles in them, and there does seem to be some bleedover from Hollywood into games, as you noted.

aloha
psilo

Re:Stupid comment filters

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, crud. I just noticed that slashdot edited out the spaces in those links, meaning none of them work. Let's try that again with %20s this time.

Good Omens [everything2.com]
Terry Gilliam [everything2.com]
Neil Gaiman [everything2.com]
Terry Pratchett [everything2.com]

THOSE links will work.. I'm really sorry about that. Figures, the one time i forget to hit "preview", this happens.. blah.

If an echo filter adds echo, then what does a lameness filter do?

-- super ugly ultraman

for the most current information on Neil Gaiman...

[Bogatyr]

I suggest consulting Gaiman's weblog [neilgaiman.com] which he tends to update at least daily. That way you get his writing without having to wait for the next book, comments, opinions, essays, little short stori es he throws in just because, cool things he's found, etc. a

Agnes Nutter, Witch.

[Anonymous Coward]

The full title of this book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch [barnesandnoble.com]

There are quite a few jokes related to occultism or magic(k), like the literal demonization of (Aleister) Crowley.

Linklater directing Scanner, Soderbergh producing

[chascarrillo]

According to Ain't It Cool News [aintitcool.com], Richard Linklater is set to direct A Scanner Darkly. Disappointing, since Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney had optioned it and I was assuming that Soderbergh would be directing (instead, he and Clooney are producing). But hey, they're doing Solaris, so all is forgiven...

I'd doubt that a studio would spend the money to option all of Dick's works considering that they're going for truly astounding amounts of money. A Scanner Darkly cost $2,000,000. Remember Impostor? That went for about $1,000,000.