George R.R. Martin is calling out film and TV adaptations of books that don’t live up to their source material.
In a new blog post, the author recalls a panel with Neil Gaiman, the creator of the comic book series Sandman, which Netflix adapted into a series. Gaiman was involved in developing the Netflix series, and although Martin didn’t comment on the adaptation, he said that “very little has changed since” 2022.
“If anything, things have gotten worse,” Martin wrote. “Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by.”
Martin went on to cite famous authors like Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, and Jane Austen.
“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,” he continued. “‘The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own.”
“They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse,” he said.
Martin notated that “once in a while we do get a really good adaptation of a really good book” and mentioned he had come across the FX series Shogun.
The creator of the House of the Dragon said he had read the 1975 book by James Clavell when it was originally released. Martin also cited the 1980 miniseries adaptation in the 1980s starring Richard Chamberlain “was a landmark” and didn’t feel the need to have a new adaptation.
“I am glad they did, though. The new Shogun is superb,” he said. “Better than Chamberlain’s version, you ask? Hmmm, I don’t know. I have not watched the 1980 miniseries since, well, 1980. That one was great too.”
He continued, “The fascinating thing is that while the old and new versions have some significant differences — the subtitles that make the Japanese dialogue intelligible to English-speaking viewers being the biggest — they are both faithful to the Clavell novel in their own way. I think the author would have been pleased. Both old and new screenwriters did honor to the source material, and gave us terrific adaptations, resisting the impulse to ‘make it their own.’”