Posted by: "jacquesdebierue" jacquesdebierue@yahoo.com jacquesdebierue
Fri Dec 12, 2008 1:59 pm (PST)
I got curious and looked at IMDB. I found no movies based on the work
of Thomas. This strikes me as very strange, since he had a long career
with many filmable stories and characters. Am I missing or is IMDB
missing some movies? And I confess: I opened a box and got trapped in
Chinaman's Chance. Damn, this guy was good. That one would make a
great movie, for example.
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Thomas wrote an original script for the interesting, very noir crime movie
Bad Company. Lawrence Fishburn is narrator and anti-hero.
As for why Chinaman's Chance never became a movie, I can offer some
information. A few years after the novel was published, I met with the
executive of a production company that will remain nameless, about adapting
what I consider to be Thomas' best novel. Also at the meeting were the two
people who had optioned the film rights and would be the co-executive
producers of the movie. (They'd also optioned the rights to The Mordida
Man.) There were introductions all around. Then I was asked my plans for
turning the fairly complex Chinaman's Chance into a somewhat simpler
two-hour movie. By then I'd done enough of those painful pitches to know you
had to feel out the crowd a little to avoid making a serious mistake.
Richard Matheson once told me he met with Alfred Hitchcock to discuss
adapting Daphne du Maurier's short story The Birds. The first thing Matheson
said to the director was that it would be a terrible mistake to show the
birds, that it would be more frightening if you never saw them. End of
interview. So I asked the two exec producers what they liked about the
novel. One went on and on about the characters, how great they were, their
relationships, their backstories. During all this, the other co-producer
began shifting on the chair, showing signs of impatience and finally
blurting out that no, the only way the movie would work is if we did it
James Bond style. Let the actors supply the character depth, forget back
story, streamline the plot, have lots of action and snappy dialogue, and on
and on. I tried to interrupt to suggest that we could combine the best of
both concepts, but the two people who owned the rights had apparently never
discussed their concepts of the film before and really went after each
other. Shouting, some verbal abuse. Finally, the production company
executive turned to me and suggested that perhaps I should give them time to
resolve their "little" disagreement. He would call me to re-convene the
meeting when they did. I never heard from him again. The movie was never
made.
Dick Lochte
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