Pern Heads To Big Screen

Post by **Alatar** » Wed May 31, 2006 12:14 pm

From SciFi.com

Pern Heads To Big Screen

Anne McCaffrey's best-selling and long-running SF book series The Dragonriders of Pern will be adapted for the big screen by Canadian production company Copperheart Entertainment, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Copperheart, which was behind the 2005 Oscar-winning animated short Ryan, has optioned the 19-book series, which began with Dragonflight in 1968. The books are best known for having humans ride dragons with which they telepathically bond. With Dragonflight, McCaffrey became the first woman ever to win a Hugo Award for fiction, and she is one of the 2006 inductees into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Copperheart, run by Steve Hoban, also has produced the Imax 3-D movie Cyberworld.

Pern nearly came to TV in a 2001 series for The WB from Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore, but the network pulled the plug on the pilot after Moore refused to make changes to the Pern mythos that he thought would harm its integrity.

Post by **Primula Baggins** » Wed May 31, 2006 3:29 pm

Wow! This could be fun. The earlier books are really entertaining. I lost interest about halfway through, when one of my favorite characters (and easily the most well-rounded, being based on a real person) was killed off. But I must have read the first several books half a dozen times as a teenager. The Harper Hall books for kids are also good.

Do you know anything about what changes they wanted Moore to make? (I have no doubt that one of them was dropping the gay elements of the dragon culture, which in the earlier books are simply there by implication—in fact I half-think McCaffrey herself didn't realize the inevitable result of her ideas for a while.)

Post by **vison** » Wed May 31, 2006 3:46 pm

I liked the first books very much. Let's hope they can pull this off.

Post by **Maria** » Wed May 31, 2006 4:47 pm

Prim wrote:The Harper Hall books for kids are also good.

For Kids?????

I'm re-reading them right now!

I hope they do a good job. I've loved this series for a long time... excepting the last few books, of course.

Post by **Lidless** » Wed May 31, 2006 4:50 pm

The only Pern book I thoroughly enjoyed was pretty much the last one with AIVIS - the standard 'life is not as you know it, there is much more, and I am your mentor' story.

Post by **Primula Baggins** » Wed May 31, 2006 5:04 pm

Maria wrote:
Prim wrote:The Harper Hall books for kids are also good.
For Kids?????

I'm re-reading them right now!

I hope they do a good job. I've loved this series for a long time... excepting the last few books, of course.

Note how I phrased that: "the books for kids are also good."

Not "the books are also good for kids."

I read and enjoy many, many books written ostensibly for kids!

I stopped reading Pern quite a while ago—though I think I did read the one Lidless mentions. The magic was just gone; the ideas weren't enough any more to carry me through McCaffrey's writing and characterization, which in my judgment are not the most skillful.

But the earlier books, where there's still mystery and the Thread is a horrible, unexplained menace—those are cool.

I hope the film is thoroughly in that place.

Post by **Lidless** » Wed May 31, 2006 5:11 pm

Primula Baggins wrote:...where...the Thread is a horrible, unexplained menace

Perhaps we should rebrand B77 as a McCaffrey fansite.

Post by **Alys** » Wed May 31, 2006 6:58 pm

It has been a long time since I read any Pern books but I thoroughly enjoyed them as a teenager, maybe I should give them another shot.

I'd love to have seen a Ron Moore adaptation, and I'm glad he stuck to his guns re the changes, but given the amount of special effects needed I can't help but feel that TV wouldn't have been the best medium.

Post by **Alatar** » Wed May 31, 2006 8:20 pm

I think that version was to be completely CG, a la Roughnecks: Starship Troopers (The TV Series), but then this one could also be animated based on the article above.

Post by **eborr** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 9:11 am

Animation huh, you think the least they could do is get some live dragons -

Like others I enjoyed these books years ago, having not re-read them for some time, I don't really remember the detail in the stories.

I think if they were going to make films they would need in some way to retain the overall story through to the discovery of the initial settlement, which would take a number of films.

Of course one of the challenges would be how they would include the sexuality of the stories and still come up with films that are suitable for a pre-teen audience, which economically is something that they must be considering. If you take the nobbing out - then a a lot of the bonding between dragon and rider will be lost,

Post by **ToshoftheWuffingas** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:11 am

So the choice is soft-core or hard-core Pern?

Post by **eborr** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 1:32 pm

Depends on whether they elect for a brown nosed dragon or just the blue one

Post by **Maria** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 3:09 pm

I just never realized they were written for kids, Prim.

I'm not into the technicalities of writing, if I like it, I like it and don't even think about what catagory the story might be in as long as it's sci fi or fantasy.

Post by **Primula Baggins** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 5:52 pm

Well, they're often sold in the Young Adults section. And the Ugly Duckling plot, with young teens finding their gifts and their way in the world, is pretty classic. But I agree that if the book is good enough (such as these, or a better example, Le Guin's Earthsea books, which at least started out as young adult novels), it really doesn't matter.

Post by **Maria** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 7:28 pm

I would never have known that, as we got all our books from a used book store when I was a teen, when I first read this series. Interesting. No wonder my youngest daughter liked the Harper Hall series but lost interest in the Dragonflight series and didn't finish it....