Caffeinated Clint
Might another small-screening offering be ported over to theatres?
“Babylon 5” creator J. Michael Straczynski tells Gareth over at Skiewed and Reviewed that whilst we won’t be seeing any more small-screen adventures from the spacely gang – Warner Bros may be considering doing a feature film version.
Straczynski says, ”When I set out to write and create Babylon 5, it was with the intention of doing a five-year story and then you get out clean. We did that. Everything we set out to do, we did. My error was in falling so much in love with that universe, and the cast and crew, that I was tempted — and succumbed to that temptation — to keep it going. Some of the first TV movies were worth doing, such as In the Beginning. Others less so. Some of it added to the B5 legacy, some of did not, mainly because we were always fighting budgetary concerns that substantially limited where the story could go. But when you’re in love, you don’t see those things until later, in retrospect.
“The first rule of subsequent storytelling is Do no harm to the original. So in terms of the future, the only thing that would compel me to return to the B5 universe would be if WB came around and said “Here’s enough money to make a Really Big Movie, go and write whatever you want.†I don’t think the fans are owed more B5 sui generis, but I do think the fans might be owed more good B5. Ironically, WB never seemed interested in doing a big B5 movie just on its own terms, in recognition for what it is and was. But now that I’m suddenly doing all this movie work, they’ve started calling and saying, “So, how big a movie would it have to be for you to come back and make a B5 movie for us?†So we’ll see.”
Straczynski’s quite a big name in movies now – what, after having written Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” – so he’s probably in a position to at least get someone over at the WB to consider a reasonably-priced film version of his series.
