Underwire: Watching Watchmen

[I posted this nugget on the quest to turn Alan Moore's seminal comic Watchmen into a feature film on Wired's new culture blog Underwire this morning. I'm snipping some here and sending you there for the rest. Let me know if you likey -- ST]

Watching Watchmen
"Although it is just about to hit the screens (and torrent nodes) near you, I've already had enough of director Zack Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, and not just because I'm tired of transcribing my early 2007 interview with him for Wired mag either. That's already done, after all, and the fruits of our hours-long discussion have landed at both Wired and my own online mag Morphizm. Meanwhile, Wired.com's Jason Silverman also has a lengthy discussion with the ebullient Pasadena-based director about the recreation of the infamous Spartan battle of Thermopylae, which itself has sparked political gossip in a recent New York Times think-lite piece wondering if President Bush is the Spartan king Leonidas defending his doomed land from the invading hordes of Persian god-king Xerxes or vice-versa. (Take a wild guess which one Bush thinks he is.)

All of this discussion is great and all, but 300 is just an appetizer. After all, the graphic novel itself is barely 35 pages long, and might as well be a storyboard for a soap commercial compared to the labyrinthine metafictions that make up Alan Moore's canonical Watchmen, which Snyder is reportedly tackling next. I say reportedly because everyone from Terry Gilliam to Paul Greengrass has tried to film Watchmen and failed, mostly because Moore's legendary source text is simply too big, too smart and too seminal to tackle without screwing something up and pissing off not just its diehard fan base, which is immense and powerful, but also moveigoers who are sick of bad films built out of the ashes of better comics. We're talking Lord of the Rings-type pressure here, and while Snyder is a sweet dude, he's still a new jack in Hollywood. Should anyone be handing him the keys to graphic novel canon so soon? We'll find out soon enough, if this mammoth project gets off the ground...." READ THE REST AT WIRED.COM

This is going to be huge.