Thursday, January 08, 2009

A Producer of "Watchmen" Tells His Side of the Fox/Warner Bros. Story; And the Reasons for an Impending Lull

The other day, I posted Daniel O'Brien's nutritional advice to Fox studio executives, as well as my own reaction to the legal decision handed down on Christmas Eve regarding the inter-studio fight over the rights to "Watchmen."

Today, Lloyd Levin, one of the producers of "Watchmen", weighed in with an open letter. You can read it here. There's not a lot of vitriol in this letter (and certainly none of the hilarious variety as in Daniel O'Brien's), but there's a lot of new information, and some real, heartfelt disappointment. It's a persuasive letter. I'd be interested to hear some pro-Fox positions from knowledgeable fans or studio people in the know, but my hunch is we won't ever read anything like that because Fox only had one reason to sue: money. And no one gets passionate about defending greed.

Also, the frequency of my posts in the next few months may be even more anemic than they have been, as I'm devoting my free time to an art project. Here's a sample:

A friend of friend and blog reader Shawn H. is compiling a book project that would collect an assortment of short stories illustrated in comic form. I'm illustrating Shawn's short story, entitled "Finders Keepers," a "weird tale" about a young man's discovery of a glass eye imbued with strange powers. We hope it will eventually be part of the collection. I've got my fingers crossed.

Right now I've got two pages finished, and for the next few months, I'll be working on the other 7 that will comprise the first half of the story. Because my drawing style for this is so detail-intensive, I think this will grab up a lot of time I might otherwise spend posting up my inane blog entries. But on the plus side, it's a lot of fun to draw, Shawn's fantastic story is eerie and perfectly suited to comic book treatment, and when we're finished, we'll both have some interesting work in a different medium we can point to with pride.

Provided I don't f**k up that is.

So bear with me during this new lull in fresh inanities.