And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come

So says Alan Moore when asked the inevitable questions about the Watchmen movie by the LA Times. At some point interviewers are going to stop asking him about movies. I don’t think he’s going to change his mind at this point.

I’m assuming we all know the reasons why Alan Moore’s name is not on the movie posters of his work?

Short version: Moore disliked the movie business and kept himself away from it, essentially selling rights and washing his hands of it, preferring to consider the movies of his work as something completely separate. But first there was the court case over League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where a movie writer accused Warners of stealing his movie idea and getting Moore to write the comic as a cover. Then the V For Vendetta farce with Moore being quoted in support of a film he wanted nothing to do with.

And now we have Watchmen. Personally I’m surprised to see him even comment, but I suppose people keep asking him the questions so comment he has. The latest is in the LA Times:

“Will the film even be coming out? There are these legal problems now, which I find wonderfully ironic,” Moore said. “Perhaps it’s been cursed from afar, from England. And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come.”

The interviewer does point out that this is said more mischievously than maliciously and later on Moore comes out with the following quote, a great example of the real reasons he wants nothing to do with the movies:

“I got into comics because I thought it was a good and useful medium that had not been explored to it fullest potential,”

“If you approach comics as a poor relation to film, you are left with a movie that does not move, has no soundtrack and lacks the benefit of having a recognizable movie star in the lead role.”

Watchmen – I’ve seen those before I think?

The teaser posters from the Watchmen movie have been released, and you’ll possibly recognise them. Especially if you were around in 86/87 when the original comics were released. (& as a quick aside, if you do have those individual issues, now may be a good time to get them onto ebay!).

Part of me is impressed by Snyder’s adherence to the look of the original iconic ads. But part of me just feels slightly guilty because the visual impact of the ads is only so impressive because of the creative collaboration between Moore & Gibbons. But only one name will be on the billboard.

Newsarama has a detailed breakdown, image by image of them, whilst Comicmix has lovely full images of the lot should you want to look. So I’ll just reproduce what was always one of my favourite images from the whole series: Ozymandias contemplating the world:

Send Alan Moore A Fiver ….

Matthew Badham, having sworn off blogs a while ago, now has another one on the go:
The Send Alan Moore A Fiver blog.
To quote Matthew:

I am not going to go and see the new Watchmen film.
However, should I, for some reason, change my mind, I pledge that I will send Alan Moore a fiver in recognition of the fact that he wrote the comic the film is adapted from, but will, albeit by choice, receive no money from the film’s profits.
I would like other people to make the same pledge.

It’s silly, but fun. Pledge away folks.

But Dad does Rorshach’s voice waaay better

The best Watchmen quote so far: Leah Moore on Twitter:

I saw the watchmen trailer last night. It resembles Dave’s art very closely, but dad does Rorschach’s voice waaay better. 🙂

(via Rich Johnston)

Watchmen movie trailer and Alan Moore interview

Well, no doubt you’ll have seen, read, heard about this already, but the Watchmen movie trailer is playing right now pretty much everywhere.

And having seen it, I have to go along with the note of very cautious optimism. It’s looking visually very impressive indeed and certainly plays out many scenes we all know and love from the graphic novel. But I couldn’t help thinking it all looked too clean and crisp to be the Watchmen. It’s a dirty, grimy, society gone wrong graphic novel with even the most beautiful of superheroes looking tarnished, but in all of the scenes in the trailer I just felt this was missing and it looked too artificial.

For more Watchmen movie goodness, courtesy Heidi, there’s a feature article on the movie in the latest Entertainment Weekly that features this cover:

Time will tell. Specifically 2009, when we all pop along to our local movie palace and watch the Watchmen for ourselves. But there’s still part of me that feels guilty for even partly looking forward to it. It seems like I’m somehow being unfaithful to Alan Moore. Bad me.

And speaking of Alan Moore and Watchmen, Entertainment Weekly also has an interview with the great man. Well worth reading as always. Take this; asked if he’s even interested in the movie and having been told that director Zack Snyder is meant to be a really nice guy:

He may very well be, but the thing is that he’s also the person who made 300. I’ve not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn’t particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that’s not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but…I wasn’t impressed with that…. I talked to [director] Terry Gilliam in the ’80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ”Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.”’ And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t.

Good Grief, it’s the Watchmen……

(via) If Schulz had drawn Watchmen…..