TV Getting Even Better? A PYNCHON Favorite to Watch Out for this Spring!

[Robert Z]

> On Dec 23, 2018, at 12:31 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I submit Lynch for GR.

I dunno… Pynchon’s Big Ones (GR, ATD, MD, V) are all so polyphonic, and they each straddle so many different genres, that I think it’s the wrong call to bring in a film director to make a TV adaptation of any of them.

In fact, the way I see it — since we’re talking about TV — the director is at best the *fourth-most* important person. *Most* important is the executive producer, or showrunner, orchestrating the overall production, the continuity, tone, etc. Second is whoever adapts the book as a screenplay. Third is the editor, or editors. And *only then* the director.

So if I were the GR miniseries showrunner, here’s how I’d do it. 

I’d start with a room of TV writers. Folks who have written for as many different kinds of shows as possible, like Jane Espenson; TV writers who are also novelists, like Dennis Lehane, or well-known Pynchon fanboy Ian Rankin; and especially anyone who’s adapted books to TV before. And I’d want as much comedy experience in the room as possible. 

I’d have them break the story as a season-long piece, at least eighteen but ideally twenty-four episodes of 60-minutes each. Rather than writing the script strictly episode by episode, each writer or writing team would take different major threads (Pointsman and the “White Vis”; Slothrop; Blicero/Gottfried; the 1930s parts; the Mauritius section; Pokler; usw). The showrunner would oversee the scripts for continuity, pacing, etc, but would otherwise let the various threads be what they need to be.

And of course, casting could totally make or break the GR adaptation, too. I’d go with as many unknowns as possible, maybe two or three celebrities for buzz, but only in peripheral roles.

Then there’s that “mad explicator” narrator. A voice-over is probably necessary, but it would be a huge effort, considering how horribly sideways voice-overs can go. A single voice? Or… three women’s voices trading off, like it’s the Norns telling us the story? Each with a different accent, Dutch, American, English. A ten-year old girl, a mature woman, and a very old woman (like Judy Dench or someone). Can you imagine, for example, the ten-year old girl doing the voice-over during the Anubis scenes?

Oh shit, and all the songs. You know? I think I’d basically just hand it over to Hal Willner and let him sort it all out.

Now, the director. The more powerful the director’s “vision” is, the less interested I am. Lynch, for example, would make it too Lynchian. Fuck that. So again, instead of one mighty auteur smearing his megalomaniacal shit all over everything, I’d rather enlist about fifteen or twenty TV directors who know how to get out of the way of the work. Felix Alcala, Stephen Surjik, Christopher Misiano, folks like that. Directors who have worked on shows like The Wire, Flashpoint, Rebus, Wallander. Directors who can do noir. And directors who have multi-cam sitcom experience.

Okay, so then I’d hand out all the various script threads to everybody, and send them out into the world to do their thing. Some of the sections should probably be animated — e.g. the Floundering Four, done like Saturday morning cartoons. Imagine Aardman Animations doing the Mauritius/van der Groov flashback section! Some threads would be black & white, some in color, some as screwball comedy, some as horror. With overlapping shooting schedules, we could get all the principal photography done in the time it takes to make maybe two movies. 

So as the footage comes in, we’d give it to the editorial team, who’d weave all the threads back together into the actual episodes. Each resulting episode would be a patchwork in several different styles. The three narrating Fates would stitch it together.

Off the top of my head, that’s basically how I’d do it. That’s kinda how GR already plays in my head when I read it, and I honestly don’t know how else it could be done.

~r