David Goyer, a Hollywood vet perhaps best known for co-writing Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, is going to direct a a new version of The Count of Monte Cristo which is billed as having “a graphic novel approach” in Michael Robert Johnson’s script.
Now what does this mean?
This experience [producing the Man of Steel Superman movie] helped Goyer land the new gig because Constantin’s approach for Monte Cristo will be akin to the refurbished take Warner Bros. did on its Sherlock Holmes movies as well as its DC heroes. In fact, one source tells The Hollywood Reporter that a buzz phrase for Monte Cristo is “19th century Dark Knight.” Constantin put an ultra-modern spin on a literary classic with Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers, which didn’t catch on domestically but performed solidly internationally.
You may recall that Alexander Dumas’s original tale 19th century tale featured a man named Edmond Dantes who is wrongly jailed and then emerges from prison with a new swagga persona and a plot to find a treasure he heard tell of while in the pen to help exact his revenge on those who sent him to jail. So far, so good, as far as this “graphic novel” thing goes.
The surprising twist is that Dantes (played by Ryan Gosling) has a secret lab where he builds a giant robot with the aid of a wise tinkerer played by Morgan Freeman, and is able to transfer his persona into the robot. This comes in handy when aliens attack the Earth with the goal of stopping the French Revolution. While attempting to stop the aliens, Dantes teams up with another guy named Jean Valjean (Channing Tatum) who also has a giant robot. Together the two start a team called “Le Revengeaux,” gathering an unusual gang of misfits—a reformed thief named Oliver Twist who can turn into a puddle of water (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and a feisty prostitute named Hester Prynn (Jessica Chastain) who is trained in the ancient art of Qigong.
It will be an exciting film.
PS: When I was a kid I always thought this story was called The Count of Monte Crisco and wondered what it had to do with rendered vegetable oil. Later I discovered that there was a delicious sandwich called the “Monte Cristo” consisting of a deep fried ham and cheese sandwich. Life is beautiful.
PPS: because I just can’t let this go, over the weekend I was chatting with some comical folks about the co-opting of the term “graphic novel.” One had seen a magazine feature billed as a “two page graphic novel!” I guess there are worse things to have than frivolous co-opting of the name of your literary form.
By Anatoly Liberman
Long ago I wrote a column with the title “Tit for Tat.” Engl. tip for tap also existed at one time. Words like tip, tap, top, tick, tack, tock, tit, tat, tot, as well as those with voiced endings like tid- (compare tidbit), tad, and tod (“bush; fox”), are ideal candidates for sound imitative coinages. One of the Swedish calls to hens is tup-tup-tuppa (tup “rooster”). The Russian for “knock-knock” is took-took-took, whereas top-top means “thump-thump.” The symbolic value of such words is equally obvious. Tip and tit designate small objects, while the things called tap and tat must be big. All this is perfectly clear. But an etymologist is expected to provide more than a bird’s eye of the origin of every word, and this is where the Devil, whose favorite abode is the details, shows his ugly head, horns and all. For example, tup is “rooster” in Swedish but “uncastrated ram” in English (whence the verb tup “to copulate,” memorable from Othello). Are we dealing with an ancient, undifferentiated name for a male animal that acquired one meaning in Swedish and another in English or with a sound complex applied to the rooster and the ram by chance? Was the idea of copulation foremost in the minds of those animal breeders who dealt with mammals and fowl (after all, tup is as expressive and energetic as our beloved F-word, and rooster is merely a polite substitute for cock). These and many similar questions are hard to answer, mainly because the list of the nouns and verbs to be explored has vague contours. Tit ~ tat ~ tot remind us of tut-tut, which in turn resembles dud. The so-called nasalized variants also suggest themselves: dimp(le), dump, thump, tumble, and a host of others. They multiply like maggots, have partly overlapping meanings, pretend to be related, but refuse to divulge their pedigree.
Another aggravating factor is the rampant homonymy among such words. First comes tip “a pointed end” (alongside the verb to tip, as in Chaucer’s tipped with horn). It is supposed to have reached England from Scandinavia, for its ancestor did not turn up in Old English. The Old Icelandic form was typpi, evidently from tuppi “top.” It is nice to know that when you look at tip long enough, you discover top. Northern (or Low) German also had tip, but this form, like its English equivalent, was recorded late, so that we cannot judge to what extent (if at all) it enjoyed popularity in England and interacted with the Scandinavian form. Thus, tip is top. Next we notice the verb tip, whose original meaning was “to pat,” and realize that tip is also tap (anyway, tap is simply pat read from right to left). This verb had a strange history. It surfaced in a most respectable 13th century book, then disappeared for 400 years, reemerged in thieves’ cant, and stayed in honest people’s usage with the sense “to strike lightly,” as in the following sentence from Swift (cited in The Century Dictionary; Swift detested the newfangled monosyllabic slang of his time): “A third rogue tips me by the elbow.” Perhaps it is the same verb as in tipped with horn (tap “touch with a point”?), but there is no knowing.
Tip also means “overturn” (a tip-cart in British English corresponds to the American dump truck), and it too may be of Scandinavian descent. But it emerged in texts so late (in the 17th century) that its “prehistory” is beyond reconstruction. In close proximity to tip we find tipple and tipsy. Tippler seems to have preceded tipple. If such is the order of these words’ appearance in language and not only in our texts, then the verb is a back formation from the noun (like beg from beggar and sculpt from sculptor). Presumably, a tipsy person is unsteady on his legs (in this delicate situation, we will not say his or her and avoid using their). The suffix -sy is not productive, even though it occurs in a few adjectives, such as topsy-turvy, and deceptively in clumsy, flimsy, and so forth. The circumstances in which tipsy sprang up remain unclear, especially because a tipsy person, unlike somebody who is three sheets in the wind, cannot serve as the embodiment of unsteadiness. Regional Norwegian has tippa “drink in small quantities” and tipla “drink slowly.” Verbs with the suffix -le (they tend to refer to recurring action) are called frequentative. In English, babble, cackle, and the like are usually of northern German or Dutch origin. In the Scandinavian languages, such formations exist too; however, some frequentative verbs are probably native English (thus, gobble seems to be from gob). Be that as it may be, tipla is a frequentative extension of tippa. A tippler sips liquor, that is, indulges in what is called tippa. (I wish we had the noun sippler.) The idea of smallness is unmistakable in tippa, but the connection with tipping and tapping is not. Tap “faucet” provides no help, for its basic meaning is “plug.”
The most interesting part of the story is the origin of tip “to give advice” and tip “gratuity.” In principle, it is not too difficult to derive tip “advise in a small way” from tip “touch,” and tip “gratuity” from “thing ‘tipped’ into a hand.” For Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary appeared in 1755, tip “give” was “a low word.” Colloquial and slangy phrases with the verb tip were frequent, and some of them are still around: “tip me your daddle or flipper” (hand), “tip me a hog” (shilling), “tip him a wink” (advice), “tip the traveler” (humbug a guest at an inn with travelers’ yarns), “tip the double” (decamp),“tip the grampus” (an old seafaring phrase: “duck a skulker for being asleep on his watch”), “tip a stave” (sing), “tip one’s rags a gallop” (run away; thieves’ slang), to mention a few. It is the predominantly “low” sphere in which this meaning of the verb tip flourished and a sudden explosion of its use in the second half of the 16th century that make the idea of a straight line from tip “touch, tap; turn over” to tip “give” suspect. One wonders whether we have to look for a missing link in northern German slang. German etymological dictionaries are cautious. In the entries on the cognates of tip, tap, and top, we read that the origin of those words is unknown or known insufficiently.
Given the verb tip “provide” (almost anything from money to information), tip “gratuity” constitutes no problem. More often verbs are formed from nouns, but occasionally the process goes in the opposite direction. Two other etymologies of the noun sound improbable. One connects tip with stipend, that is, stip or stips, minus initial s. The other goes back to the following story (I quote from Leo Pap’s 1982 article): “One day at the Cheshire Cheese tavern in London’s Fleet Street—that famous hangout of Dr. Samuel Johnson, of Boswell, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and some other men of letters who had constituted themselves into a Literary Club—a waiter hung a small wooden money box onto the wall near the dining room entrance. On this box, which evidently was in imitation of the receptacles customarily displayed in private houses at Christmas and on visiting days during the year, for donations which the servant staff expected from guests or from the master’s own family—on the box the waiter painted the words TO INSURE PROMPTNESS. The idea, of course, was that entering guests who wanted to be assured of speedy service might do well to drop a tinkling little penny or halfpenny in the box, so as to shoot some joyful energy into the servitor’s tired legs. Similar collection boxes went up in other coffeehouses and hostelries in town; and soon the motto on the box could safely be reduced to the mere initials, T.I.P. Before long, the T.I.P box was commonly referred to as the tip box, whence tip.” Although Pap doubts that the story was “fabricated out of whole cloth,” he does not believe that this is how the word tip came into being. It is indeed a cock and bull story, good enough only to “tip a traveler.” In my experience, all etymologies that refer to common words as acronyms (F.U.C.K. and its ilk) are wrong. Apparently, tip as everybody understood in the days of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Reynolds, was “decoded” into T.I.P. and “glossed” as to insure promptness.
There is one more hitch in the etymology of tip. In several European languages, a gratuity of this sort goes under the name of drink money (German Trinkgeld, French pourboire, etc.), with the intimation that the servitor will drink it up. Engl. tip “a draught of liquor” has been recorded (and let us not forget tippler and tipsy). It is possible but not very probable that two factors contributed to the rise of tip “gratuity”: the money could have been “tipped” into the waiter’s hand, and he could have used it to drink the giver’s health. Ever since the word struck root in the language, waiters have been tapping their patrons’ pockets, and patrons have been tipping waiters. We have perfected the system: add 10%, add 15%, or eat free but give (tip) a “donation.”
Anatoly Liberman is the author of
Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as
An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins,
The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to
[email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
I love Julia Cameron's writing. Back a few years ago, I was lucky enough to hear her talk in person in Sedona, and she is quite funny as well as, comforting to my artistic soul. She has a great term "spiritual midget" that I am relating to right now. I know I preach we should create for ourselves and our own joy, but does it make me a spiritual midget if I really thrive on the compliments I receive for my work? Let's face it, if you create a piece of art you are so jived about, and you post it to your blog, don't you feel a little crushed if no one else is jived too? (Or put a pieces in a gallery where they use one of your paintings to hold over a light fixture...yes, that was happening). And when they are jived, it's like icing on the cake, isn't it? I mean the good, vanilla sugary kind? This week I had several artists who I admire tell ME they like my work. That was very vanilla sugary. May even have made up for the light fixture fiasco. It's very validating and maybe, secretly, we DO need some of that, spiritual midgets or not.
Writer’s block.
Do the words make you wince?
If you belong to that blessed, miraculous group of people who can write anywhere, anytime, who are able to switch themselves on into a writing mood like a light-switch, then your answer will be No. But if you’re like me, and belong to that cursed, demonic group who kill themselves writing that first sentence, these words will make you grimace with a heartache that plunges deeper than the Cayman Trough.
But what is writer’s block, and why do many writers--damn good ones—suffer from it? Some think the reason is old plain laziness or lack of discipline, but I disagree. The reason is more complex. I can’t help remembering my creative writing professor back in college—a published author of many mystery novels who suddenly stopped writing for eight long years simply because he “froze at the computer and couldn’t put a word down.”
Only God knows the dark mechanics that kept my professor from writing for such a long time, so I can only speak for myself.
So here it goes. What is writer’s block? Following the famous editorial advice, instead of “telling” you, I will “show” you.
Picture in your mind a beautiful winter morning, snow falling from the window, the office toasty warm, the house empty and quite. It’s just me and writer’s block:
9:30 I sit at the computer, ready to write that piece of literature that will bring me fame and riches (okay, no need to be greedy, I’ll settle for riches).
9:31 I decide I better answer my emails first, get them out of my mind (yeah, right).
10:00 I’m thirsty. I better make myself some tea. Writers drink hot beverages, don’t they?
10:05 I’m back at the computer. I take a sip of my tea and suddenly remember all the things I should be doing instead of writing: wash the rabbit hutches, purchase moist wipes for my husband’s glasses, do the laundry, vacuum the bedrooms, feed the fish… somehow there’s no end to this list.
10:25 I stare at the blank monitor. I loathe myself.
10:30 I’m hungry. I’ll have an early lunch (someone should conduct a study about frustrated writers and overeating).
10:50 I glare at the sign on my desk “A Writer Is Someone Who Writes Everyday,” and try to set it to flames with my mind power.
11:00 I put Vivaldi on the stereo (studies have shown baroque music “expands” the mind).
You get the picture. This is writer’s block. This is what happens when I break the habit of writing everyday and disconnect myself from my current project. I don’t know about you, but when I don’t write, the consequences are catastrophic. I hate the world. I snap at people (my husband is my favourite victim). I feel trapped in a box, unable to breathe. If I were the sort of person who went to pubs, I would surely start a brawl.
But what causes writer’s block?
Almost always, it is fear. Plain and simple. F-E-A-R.
Fear of not being good enough.
Fear of not being able to write that perfect sentence that will impress the reader. No wonder it blocks! How can you write freely and impress people at the same time?
So in order to lift the block, you need to get rid of that fear. It is easier said than done, I know, but I will give you a few practical tips that will help you overcome it, based on probably the best book on writing in the market today, Julia Cameron’s The Right To Write. If these tips have worked for me, they can work for you, too.
1. Keep a journal and write 3 pages of anything that comes to your mind each morning. Strictly stream-of-consciousness stuff. Don’t worry, no one will read this (if you’re paranoid like me, hide the journal). The idea is to drain your brain of all the clutter so that when you sit at the computer to do the actual writing, you’ll be able to do it with a clear head. You don’t feel like writing this morning? Your writing sucks? You feel fat? You hate your neighbour? Write it down. By the way, if you feel like clobbering someone to death with a medieval flail, add that too. Write down your dreams, your plans, your fears. The idea is to keep writing non-stop until you have fill those 3 pages. I write in my journal almost everyday. I’m addicted to it, almost to the point of being superstitious. Remember to do it in the morning. If you write in your journal at night you’ll probably go over what you did during the day and this will defeat the purpose. The idea is to positively affect your day by writing those pages in the morning. By training your mind to do this each morning, you will not only make writing more approachable, but also more disciplined.
2. Don’t edit as you write. If you can’t keep your neurotic, perfectionist urges under control, then at least keep them to an absolute minimum. Editing as you write is like editing a movie and filming it at the same time. It can become pathological. Editing, re-editing, searching for that flawless sentence that will create that immaculate paragraph. Well, do you want to know something? It won’t happen. No matter how many times you try to improve it, there will be always room for improvement. Ultimately, if you want to finish that first draft, you’ll have to trust yourself and simply let it go. Remember that a first draft is just that, a first draft. Once you’ve finished that first draft then you can polish and change and edit all you want.
3. Set yourself a small quota everyday. You don’t have to finish a whole chapter in one sitting. Just write 2 pages, or 1, or even just a paragraph. The important thing here is to meet that daily quota. It’s amazing how thinking like this can affect your brain. It’s like with exercise. If you tell yourself, “Oh no, I have to exercise for one whole hour,” this will block you. But if you think, “I’ll only exercise 20 or 30 minutes,” the work becomes more approachable and you’ll stick with it. The key here is to create the habit a little step at a time. The best thing about meeting this daily quota is that it allows you to feel “guilt-free” for the rest of the day, making it possible for you to spend happier times with your family and do other things. In other words, if you stick to your writing schedule, you’ll be able to enjoy life.
4. Have the right sense of direction. This is probably one of Cameron’s most powerful advice. Don’t think that you have to think something up, that you have to create something. Instead, think that the words, plots, characters are already there suspended in some other dimension, and all you have to do is listen intently and write the words down as if taking dictation. Thinking like this will immediately lift a heavy load off your shoulders. It will make you feel free of responsibility and allow your writing to flow easier.
5. Find a support group. Artistic souls need artistic soul mates. If there isn’t any support group you like, start your own, like I did. As I write this article, I’m sitting at a café with 3 writer friends. We meet every Friday morning from 10 to 12. These meetings are incredibly productive, maybe for the simple reason that I HAVE to write. I mean, face it, not writing alone at home is bad, but not writing in front of your writer friends would be a disgrace. Who wants to be a loser? Also, sometimes writers need to get out of their homes and experience a change of scene. Writing at a café makes writing fun. There’s a baby howling a table away, and at the same time I can clearly hear the loud voice of a Spanish lady several feet from me, telling her friend that she wished her husband would hide his briefcase in the cellar… Hide his briefcase in the cellar? Strange… But I reel myself back in. I don’t want to become like one of my writing partners, who periodically listens to people’s conversations to get ideas for her stories. I’m not that desperate yet.
6. Give your brain high quality foods: Read great books about all types of subjects, both in fiction and nonfiction. I read astronomy, cosmology, history, comparative religion, physics, metaphysics. Listen to music. Music can trigger powerful inspiration. But please, not heavy metal! Put your favourite composer on the stereo, close your eyes, and just let your mind drift. Doing this alone is a form of meditation. I can assure you scenes of future books will appear in your mind, characters will talk, ideas for your present project will present themselves. Visit museums, flower shops, go to the theatre, take walks and observe nature. All these things will enrich your life and your mind, automatically giving your writing more energy and depth.
The following tip is not from Julia Cameron, but from me. It works wonders for motivation but is not for everybody, only for those of you who have generous and supportive husbands: Make a signed agreement with your husband in which he’ll have to pay you $10 for every full page you write. So if you write 15 pages a week, he’ll have to pay you $150… I said this is not for everybody. (By the way, my husband hasn’t agreed so far, but I’m still hopeful.)
Don’t be afraid. Just write. Just WRITE. Just describe the movie in your head and put the words down. In the meantime I’ll try to apply these wise words to myself, and not give the evil eye to the “A Writer Is Someone Who Writes Everyday” sign on my desk.
***
This article is based on ideas described in The Right To Write, by Julia Cameron.
Other great, inspiring books about unleashing the power of your creativity:
The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron
Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande
Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
Write From the Heart, by Hal Zina Bennett
Copyright ©2006 by Mayra Calvani / All Rights Reserved
Only in Hollywood can you take a piece of classic literature and spin it into realms unrecognizable.
I would rather watch the Gosling/Tatum Revengeaux film than a modernized Count of Monte Cristo.
Actually, forget Monte Cristo. I just want to watch the robot film. How does this not exist?
…and then, to follow up the two-page graphic novel, I’ll write a three-bar opera!
Actually, an opera played in three different bars would be pretty unique.
This is a joke, right? This isn’t seriously happening…
Also, I’ll be running a half-block marathon and then circumnavigating the globe as far as my neighbor’s house.
I’ve seen this happen daily since 1994, when PULP FICTION was released in movie theaters. Now everything, it seems, is labeled “pulp fiction” just because … well, ya know … it’s pulp!
No doubt everyone here will be fascinated to learn how Alexander Dumas anticipated the Marvel Method.
http://arche-arc.blogspot.com/2013/02/an-ancestor-to-marvel-method.html
…Did I miss something? Because I don’t see an explanation of what this “graphic novel approach” is supposed to be (let alone what it has to do with graphic novels).
So this is LXG trying to be Pacifc Rim?! What the hell? It’s not April 1st yet. Was this a prank that leaked early?! Was that paragraph written as a joke? I’m at a loss here.
If anything I’d say this is Count of Monte Cristo sounds more like an anime… but there was an anime Count of Monte Cristo and even thought it too involved aliens and space travel, it adhered to the book.
Also.. yeah. I’m also calling bullshit on the whole ‘graphic novel approach’. That makes as much sense as saying you want to make a movie like a record album or make a comic book that’s like a video game. Maybe someone can claim they want to make a video game like a ham sandwich next. The term graphic novel is a printing format. It does not describe genre or plot or characters. I somewhat informs story telling as it’s a single story within a novel told with words and illustrations.