Neil Gaiman now HATES altered source material???

'George R.R. Martin And Neil Gaiman Claim They “Hate” Hollywood’s Tendency To Alter Source Material' by Spencer Baculi

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From Bounding into comics: https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/11/01/george-r-r-martin-and-neil-gaiman-claim-they-hate-hollywoods-tendency-to-alter-source-material/

Despite the numerous such changes seen in the recent live-action adaptations of their respective works, Game of Thrones scribe George R.R. Martin and The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman have claimed they despise Hollywood’s tendency to unnecessarily alter a given piece of source material when adapting it to the small or silver screens.

As reported by Variety, the event was hosted by Gaiman and held as part of Martin’s promotional tour for his upcoming The Rise of the Dragon: An Illustrated History of the Targaryen Dynasty, Volume One reference book.

Noting that this concept of being ‘faithful’ to source materials was “controversial” among the industry, Martin explained, “How faithful do you have to be? Some people don’t feel that they have to be faithful at all.” “There’s this phrase that goes around: ‘I’m going to make it my own,’” the writer continued. “I hate that phrase. And I think Neil probably hates that phrase, too.”

To this, Gaiman explicitly confirmed, “I do.”

“I spent 30 years watching people make Sandman their own,” he recalled. “And some of those people hadn’t even read Sandman to make it their own, they’d just flipped through a few comics or something.”

However, recognizing that certain changes are sometimes necessary to help translate a story to a completely different medium, Martin then proceeded to clarify his opinion, asserting “there are changes that you have to make — or that you’re called upon to make — that I think are legitimate. And there are other ones that are not legitimate.”

Eventually, after consulting with Zelazny himself, he chose to cut the warriors’ steeds – a decision, which Martin argued, was “to my mind, the kind of stuff you are called upon to do in Hollywood that is legitimate.”

Conversely, the author offered up the studio’s demand that the episode add an “ordinary person” – the bandit Tom, as portrayed by John Cameron Mitchell – to both serve as an audience surrogate and elevate the story to their vision of “high concept” as an example of an illegitimate change.

“I was new to Hollywood,” Martin lamented. “I didn’t say, ‘You’re f–king morons.’”

As noted above, this rhetoric is particularly coming from Gaiman and Martin considering the various creative liberties they not only allowed, but outright endorsed in Hollywood’s take on their seminal stories.

When The Sandman made the leap to Netflix, the iconic characters of Death and John Constantine were race- and gender-swapped, respectively, out of Gaiman’s desire (as described by producer Allan Heinberg) to make the series as “inclusive as possible“.

Gaiman even seems to have outright approached his original work with the intent to alter it.

In an August interview with UK news outlet Express, the author touted how “It was incredibly liberating to be able to look at everything in Sandman from a perspective of now. And getting to ask, ‘Well, if I was beginning writing this story now, would I still do that?’”

This is to say nothing of the changes HBO has made to Martin’s work under his watch.

Aside from Game of Thrones’ absolute butchering – which Martin has admitted was the regrettable result of him allowing himself to be pushed out of the series’ creative process – the characters and events of its sequel/prequel series, House of the Dragon, have also seen their fair share of changes in the transition to television.

These include House Valeryon being race-swapped, Laenor surviving his duel with Ser Qarl Correy, and perhaps most notably, Alicent and Rhaenyra developing the close childhood friendship upon which much of the adaptations’ narrative is built.

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