On Sep 16, 5:11=A0am, Professor <David.Butler.N...@gmail.com> wrote:
> =A0 =A0 [ The following text is in the "windows-1252" character set. ]
> =A0 =A0 [ Your display is set for the "ISO-8859-1" character set. =A0]
> =A0 =A0 [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]
>
> When the rumors started about JMS doing a movie on something called
> Lensmen, I ran out and bought the book series and read them back-to-
> back. Now that I have a few months of the stories behind me, I am
> attempting to understand how a writer would put such a vast story and
> myriad of characters into a movie. One particular issue is that of
> character development. Each Lensman Chronicle has unique characters
> within it and each book is separated by at least on generation, often
> times many more. If you were to write a movie script that ran the full
> timeline of Lensman, how do you keep the audience interested in the
> story if the characters keep changing? I was trying to find an film
> example from memory, but could not. Star Wars, main characters
> throughout, Matrix Trilogy, main characters throughout all three,
> Alien(s), there is the Sigourney Weaver character in each of them.
>
> Do American and Western European audiences need to have the same
> characters repeat in each movie of a trilogy to enable the connection
> with the character and to make it successful? Or has a writer never
> tried to do it differently (that I know of) and thus we don?t know if
> it will work or not? If the Lensman books can hold an audience with
> different characters between chronicles, why can?t a movie, or is that
> a false analogy?
> David

In brief, and withoiut getting into details that are still in the
process of being worked out, I've chosen to focus on the story of
Kimball Kinnison, using his story as the fulcrum by which I can get
into the whole history of the Lens and outward from there.

jms