Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)

[The Invunche]

That'll be $137 in Denmark.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

At the risk of steering this a bit OT, my nice shiny new Bud Plant catalog arrived today, and I see that the nice folks at Graphitti are producing a 20th anniversary deluxe edition.

WATCHMEN: The Absolute Edition
By Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

Celebrate the 20th anniversary of Watchmen, the classic 12-issue miniseries. Each page of art has been restored and recolored by WildStorm FX and approved by Gibbons to appear as originally intended. A beautifully designed slipcase has been created to hold this oversized hardcover collection.

Additionally, this grand tome includes 48 pages of supplemental material produced exclusively for the Graphitti Designs Watchmen hardcover edition, not seen since the original publication. Included is a cornucopia of rare and historically valuable treasures, samples of Moore's Watchmen scripts, the original Watchmen proposal, Gibbons conceptual art, cover roughs, and more. [Expected: Oct]
DC, 2005

HC, 8x13, 464pg, FC


Boo yah

Lists for $75.00

I think us enterprising souls can probably find it for @ $60.00

Hmm... this sounds very similar (content-wise) to the now OOP print hardcover that came out many years ago.

I'm surprised to hear that this is happening considering Moore nixed this a little while ago because of a long-standing dispute with DC. I guess they must have finally come to some sort of agreement.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Hmm... this sounds very similar (content-wise) to the now OOP print hardcover that came out many years ago.

From the description:

Additionally, this grand tome includes 48 pages of supplemental material produced exclusively for the Graphitti Designs Watchmen hardcover edition, not seen since the original publication.

So if you have the Graphitti Designs edition, you probably won't need this, unless you really want that recolored artwork. Or you could buy the "Absolute Edition" and sell off your Graphitti copy for a tidy profit.

I'm surprised to hear that this is happening considering Moore nixed this a little while ago because of a long-standing dispute with DC. I guess they must have finally come to some sort of agreement.

It wasn't really a "long-standing dispute" -- DC censored an issue of Tomorrow's Stories by removing an eight-page story satirizing L. Ron Hubbard, so Moore retaliated by withdrawing his approval for the 15th Anniversary hardcover and a line of Watchmen action figures. That was five years ago and the issue is pretty much resolved (the story ran in a different comic). I doubt Moore cares what DC does with Watchmen at this point anyway.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Entertainment Weekly is running a piece on the Watchmen -- the book and the film, here's an excerpt about the checkered history of the movie attempts:

IV. ''Arnie!''
Watchmen has had no shortage of Hollywood admirers. In the late '80s, producer Joel Silver (The Matrix) tried to make a film adaptation with director Terry Gilliam. Robin Williams and Richard Gere were rumored to be interested. But the project imploded primarily over budget, and the end of the Cold War deprived Watchmen of its political relevance. But in 2001, the comic found new life thanks to a zeitgeist-mining script by David Hayter (X-Men). Paramount was set to roll earlier this year with The Bourne Supremacy's Paul Greengrass at the helm — until a regime change at the studio sent it into turnaround. Still, says producer Larry Gordon, ''We have every reason to believe we will eventually make the movie.'' By the way, Moore doesn't mind: He's adamantly opposed to Watchmen's adaptation for artistic, business, and personal reasons — a position that hardened after Fox's limp 2003 version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — and plans to give any film royalties to Gibbons.

DAVE GIBBONS
I remember meeting with Joel Silver, who wanted to cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Manhattan: ''He's gonna be Arnie!'' We said, ''Well, he's got the physique, but the German accent...'' He said, ''Doesn't matter!'' It didn't come to anything with Joel.

SAM HAMM (first Watchmen screenwriter)
I was coming off writing Batman when I was asked to take a whack at it. I thought it too unwieldy to compress into two hours. The comic really is a spectacular piece of architecture. Trying to replicate it [was]just impossible.

DAVID HAYTER
What I pitched to Larry was actually a miniseries for HBO. But it would have cost $100 million. When I mapped it out as a two-hour movie, I looked at how Peter Jackson broke down The Lord of the Rings. My first draft was 178 pages, which was encouraging; it told me a screenplay was actually possible. One thing that has tripped up Hollywood is the Cold War setting, when there was a sense of impending doom. With 9/11, unfortunately, we got it right back again. So we did update it.

ALAN MOORE
David Hayter's screenplay was as close as I could imagine anyone getting to Watchmen. That said, I shan't be going to see it. My book is a comic book. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book. It's been made in a certain way, and designed to be read a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cozy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee. Personally, I think that would make for a lovely Saturday night.

[Andre Jurieu]

Time Magazine included The Watchmen among their 100 Best Modern English-Language Novels (from 1923-Present). They also have a list of their picks for All-Time Top 10 Graphic Novels. I'm apologizing in advance for including that last link.

[Jun-Dai]

. . .zeitgeist-mining script. . .

That's going in my quotefile.

[Polybius]

Joel Silver, Robin Williams, Richard Gere and Schwarezenegger.



Jesus eating pudding, I hope none of them get within a mile of the finished product.

[The Invunche]

Oh I agree, but if Gere gained some pounds he would look a lot like Daniel Dreiberg/Nightowl. Too bad he can't act.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

One thing that has tripped up Hollywood is the Cold War setting, when there was a sense of impending doom. With 9/11, unfortunately, we got it right back again. So we did update it.

How exactly do you fit the prospect of nuclear annihilation of the entire planet within a war on terror framework? And wouldn't moving the story into present day require moving the entire timeline up twenty years, which would be pretty fatal seeing how the timeline of the comic was intended to parallel the development of real-life comic books? The only way around that would be to age all the characters by twenty years, which would put Veidt, Rorschach, Dreiberg and Laurie somewhere in their sixties during the present-day scenes. I can't see a Hollywood studio going for that.

[zedz]

And wouldn't moving the story into present day require moving the entire timeline up twenty years, which would be pretty fatal seeing how the timeline of the comic was intended to parallel the development of real-life comic books? The only way around that would be to age all the characters by twenty years, which would put Veidt, Rorschach, Dreiberg and Laurie somewhere in their sixties during the present-day scenes. I can't see a Hollywood studio going for that.

Presumably that kind of subtext would be the first thing to go in any adaptation to another medium, whenever it was undertaken. How many members of the audience would be expected to be au fait with the historical development of comic books?

[Fletch F. Fletch]

How exactly do you fit the prospect of nuclear annihilation of the entire planet within a war on terror framework? And wouldn't moving the story into present day require moving the entire timeline up twenty years, which would be pretty fatal seeing how the timeline of the comic was intended to parallel the development of real-life comic books? The only way around that would be to age all the characters by twenty years, which would put Veidt, Rorschach, Dreiberg and Laurie somewhere in their sixties during the present-day scenes. I can't see a Hollywood studio going for that.

Which is one of the many reasons why a major studio adaptation just won't fly. I still think they should be going for an HBO or Showtime mini-series format that way you could to the book justice and take the time to flesh out all the characters and the world they inhabit. Restricting it to a two hour or even a three hour film would totally ruin it.

I think that the major sticking point with a faithful adaptation is that Hayter didn't think any major studio would go for the book's original ending, feeling that it would be too shocking for audiences after 9/11.

[thewind]

Time Magazine included The Watchmen among their 100 Best Modern English-Language Novels (from 1923-Present). They also have a list of their picks for All-Time Top 10 Graphic Novels. I'm apologizing in advance for including that last link.

Why apologize for that last link? Other than Bone and Blankets, I can see a clear rationale for everything on that list. Palomar, Berlin, and Corrigan are easily among the best dozen or two works in the medium.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

The latest developments: http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/676/676592p1.html

The good news: it has finally been confirmed that Warner Brothers is going to back it. The bad news: they've dumped Hayter's script and are starting from scratch. #-o

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Oh dear, this does not bode well...

From LatinoReview.com:

Snyder To Direct Watchmen!
Date: June 23, 2006

By: Kellvin Chavez
Source: The Hollywood Reporter

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Zach Snyder has come aboard to develop and direct "Watchmen," the seminal DC Comics limited series created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, for Warner Bros. Pictures.

Alex Tse is writing the script of the long-gestating project, which is being produced by Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin.

"Watchmen" has a development history almost as epic as the story the comic tells. The project has seen such studios as Fox, Universal and Paramount come and go and has seduced and vexed such filmmakers as Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Greengrass and screenwriter David Hayter.

Sources say Snyder has impressed Warners with "300," an adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel that he directed and co-wrote. Snyder shot the movie -- a Greek epic about the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. -- on soundstages in Montreal using partial sets and greenscreens, similar in technique to Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City."

[The Invunche]

I don't know. I liked Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and I never have high hopes for any Moore adaptation anyway.

[Cold Bishop]

One thing that has tripped up Hollywood is the Cold War setting, when there was a sense of impending doom. With 9/11, unfortunately, we got it right back again. So we did update it.

How exactly do you fit the prospect of nuclear annihilation of the entire planet within a war on terror framework? And wouldn't moving the story into present day require moving the entire timeline up twenty years, which would be pretty fatal seeing how the timeline of the comic was intended to parallel the development of real-life comic books? The only way around that would be to age all the characters by twenty years, which would put Veidt, Rorschach, Dreiberg and Laurie somewhere in their sixties during the present-day scenes. I can't see a Hollywood studio going for that.

I always imagined that Hayter was keeping it in the 80's, like the comic, but drawing clear parallels to keep it politically relevent. That's what it sounded he was doing to me.

As for Zach Snyder. I'd give him credit for demonstrating a stylistic flair with Dawn, but to me Watchmen is very much a character film, so I'm a little dissapointed at this choice. Couldn't they get Aronofsky now that Fountain is (almost) finished?

Who knows? maybe 300 will impress me enough.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Yeah, 'tis true. Altho, I am really disappointed they aren't using Hayter's screenplay. I read it and felt that he really nailed it and condensed it as well as you could for a 2 hr. movie while keeping it pretty damn faithful to the book.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

This sounds vaguely encouraging...

Zack Snyder plans ahead for Watchmen Extended Edition

Posted Tuesday, November 14 2006 @ 05:02 AM PST by Peter Sciretta
Filed under: Geek Report

While the director of the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead has said some questionable things in the past about his adaptation of the Alan Moore classic Watchmen, things are now shaping up.

"It's a labor of love, and I've wanted to try to get back to the source material as much as I could without it being, of course, a six-hour long movie. And I would say the fans are probably going, 'What do you mean? You say that like it's a bad thing!'" Zack Snyder told IGN. "I will tell you that the draft of the script is long. It's so long in fact that when we turned it in, we turned 'The Black Freighter' stuff in as a separate script so as not to scare them too much. We were like, 'Here's your script. Oh, here's your other script!' They were like, 'Oh, great!'

And Snyder promises that every last cut will be released someday: "That's the one cool thing we have is DVD, and in my opinion it's not exploited nearly enough. [We could use that] to create the three-hour version of Watchmen. And [as a director] I'm totally fine with that, but I feel like that's a battle I haven't lost yet, so I'm not going to concede to it yet."

The director will immediately begin on Watchman after the completion of Frank Miller's 300.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Looks like Snyder almost had Tom Cruise cast as Ozymandias. From CHUD:

[quote]TOM CRUISE'S STARRING ROLE IN WATCHMEN NARROWLY AVERTED
03.01.07
By Devin Faraci

For the last couple of months I have been hearing rumors coming from the Watchmen camp. Most of them were about casting – a very reliable source told me that some of the biggest names in Hollywood were in talks to star in the film. So when another source told me that Tom Cruise was in talks, I knew that it was quite likely true.

My source was right. While on the phone with Watchmen director-to-be Zack Snyder yesterday, talking about the pending release of 300, I asked him point blank about Cruise, and he confirmed that he and Tom had been talking about it. A lot. But that now it looked like Cruise would not be appearing in the film.

“He was interested,â€

[The Invunche]

Thank God.

[Joe Buck]

Its going to be hard to live up to the comic.....we'll see.

[jcelwin]

Cruise would have been perfect for that part!

[The Invunche]

Cruise can only play Cruise and Cruise wasn't in the comic.

[Handsome Dan]

I alwayd thought that Owen Wilson would make a great Oz. Given the changes that the character goes through, it would be a nice bit of...misdirection.

[Antoine Doinel]

Here's a nice post from Nerve's film blog about the various development incarnations of Watchmen:

A Personal History of the Watchmen Movie
3/5/2007 2:15:00 PM

I've seen the Watchmen movie.

It was in 1987, I was fifteen, and, alas, it was just a dream, a last-gasp diversion before waking up and trudging off to Thomas Downey High.? (Not that much trudging was necessary; I lived across the street from my high school.)? The details faded the moment I woke up, leaving only a few scattered fragments that I did my best to describe to my bemused friends during the lunch hour. Twenty years have condensed those fragments into a single image: An empty city street, lit orange and purple, Dave Gibbons' smooth, architectural lines and John Higgins' moody coloring miraculously translated into live-action Technicolor. And then the title, in that famous thick font, scrolling sideways as we pan up from the street and settle on the skyline. And of course, the sound of a clock ticking inexorably towards midnight.

Why do I want a Watchmen movie, anyway? What good would it serve other than to be the latest in a line of mediocre adaptations of brilliant Alan Moore comics? Terry Gilliam gave up, called it "unfilmable". Scratch a movie forum and underneath you'll find many fans who think the same. You can reduce the comments to a litany. "Make it a mini-series or not at all." "Don't ruin the book." "Can't be done in two hours." "Just don't bother." I'm more sympathetic than I want to believe. This book is such an accomplishment, I'm not sure any take on it could be satisfactory, that any director or writer, regardless of pedigree, could do it justice.

Still. The yearning to see these characters, this story, translated into photographed reality is too strong. Maybe it's just my ego -- seeing the film would be an act of wish fulfillment, my dream made reality, and I could either cry tears of recognition or smugly dismiss it, knowing I could do better.? No book survives the adaptation process unscathed, of course, but perhaps -- perhaps some scars are more pleasing than others. It just has to get in the right hands...

It wasn't a good start. Watchmen's movie rights were snapped up almost immediately by Joel Silver, who famously wanted to cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Manhattan and paint him blue. It seems silly now -- hell, it seemed silly then -- but what else were they going to do? Ask William Hurt to inject steroids? (We were still more than a decade out from Gollum, the first remotely plausible CGI character.) The perpetually cursed Gilliam was signed to direct, and Sam Hamm, hot off his Batman script, was hired to write. I'd heard bad things about the script through the years, but it wasn't until I moved to Seattle in 1997 that I found Hamm's script, for sale in a comic book and memorabilia store. I was so excited that I bought it immediately, sight unseen, sleeved in plastic. I took it home to read, and was so distraught, angry at Hamm's betrayal of the book in the name of "audience expectations", I started my writing own Watchmen rip-off that night.

Gilliam's Watchmen was never to be -- the money wasn't there for a dark superhero movie. The one thing that Watchmen needs and Gilliam was qualified to provide -- an epic-sized world, used to examine the psychologies of the people within it -- was the very thing that stopped him. But I don't think it's too hard to imagine what could have been, since we got 12 Monkeys instead: the animals wandering through the snow, the doomsday clock, the sense that these characters held their destinies in their hands, even as Time demands they march lockstep towards their fates. With the right script, I think Gilliam could've done it.

The movie goes comatose for nearly fifteen years. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, David Hayter emerges with a draft. They say he's done the impossible: a two-hourish screenplay that gets the story with a minimum of changes. Except for one big one: It would now take place in 2006, not an alternate 1985. No more Tricky Dick in perpetuity; we'd have W. No more Vietnam; that would be the Gulf War, no doubt. Now it would have "relevance", the same way, presumably, Children of Men has "relevance".

But Watchmen was never about relevance -- it's about superheroes. Well, to be sure, it's about personal responsibility, but it gets there via the superhero genre. Adding real-life details, as counter-intuitive as it seems, doesn't make it any more accessible -- it just confuses the issue. Part of what makes Watchmen Watchmen is its hermeticism -- this is another world, with its own look, its own history, its own referents. (The ideal Watchmen director might actually be Wes Anderson.) It achieves this through the layering and layering of symbols, motifs, repeating images. "Who Watches The Watchmen?" The Hiroshima shadows. The pyramids that appear in the background, so unassuming at first, long before we realize their terrible significance. Yet, I can only think of one example where this kind of obsessive layering was brought off successfully in a filmed medium: Arrested Development. That this was a half-hour comedic television show, 53 episodes long, and never a commercial hit doesn't bode well.

Two more directors get a chance to make the movie, and still, nothing. I have a sense of what Darren Aronofsky's Watchmen would have been like. It's dark -- darker than Fincher. It gets the black ink of the comics down on celluloid. It gets the paranoia. It's the movie Rorschach himself would have made. It's also humorless. Watchmen isn't exactly filled with jokes -- the only punchline that comes to mind is "Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft," which paints the book's mood pretty accurately. But a film version of Watchmen can't be humorless. It requires a sense of irony about itself, since all the main characters dress up in costumes to fight crime. Good actors could alleviate that, but I've never trusted Aronofsky with actors. I don't feel he's really interested in them, as if he'd be better off turning his films into coffee table books.

Paul Greengrass, on the other hand, means immediacy. Bloody Sunday, United 93, The Bourne Supremacy -- all of these rely on a you-are-there aesthetic, or at least Greengrass's definition of same: handheld cameras, whiplash editing, "documentary" realism. He got further than anyone before him -- costume designs, completed sets, a three-minute animatic. If not for Paramount's cold feet, the movie would be on DVD by now. And yet, I can't imagine a Paul Greengrass Watchmen.

And now, Zack Snyder. It feels like a compromise, doesn't it? I don't think Snyder's a hack -- his Dawn of the Dead remake was underrated -- but there's something of a shoulder shrug about the choice. His only qualification appears to be that he's made a Frank Miller adaptation. (Is 300 an actual movie or just tableaux? It looks like Michael Bay doing Sergei Paradjanov.) ? Incredibly, though, Snyder plans to not only return the film to the eighties, but also shoot the "Black Freighter" comic-within-a-comic. This is folly. This is beautiful. I honestly don't know what Snyder's Watchmen will look like, other than to flip through the pages of the book.

And maybe that's how it should be. — Kent M. Beeson