That's the buzz.
I'll be speaking with the fine folks at Digital Production Buzz next week on our favorite topic - pulp screenwriting. The show broadcasts live over the internet every Thursday at 6pm PST and is available for download after that.
The other buzz you should be hearing (and seeing) is the small button in the sidebar. It will take you into a very cool, pulpy land of green and black. On police records he's a wanted criminal, but only the District Attorney knows that Daily Sentinel publisher Britt Reid fights crime as...
The Green Hornet.
6 comments:
Okay, that Green Hornet short was pretty darn good, especially for an amateur production. The only thing missing was a period setting -- Green Hornet really belongs in the 30s-40s. All they needed was period costumes for the bad guys, and they'd have had it.
Been wanting to see a big screen Green Hornet for some time, and am still disappointed that the Miramax production has fallen through more than once. Still, there's a big part of me that's convinced that any studio production would just screw it up. Golden Age Pulp takes a sure hand, and the studios rarely get it right.
I remember reading some comments by Kevin Smith on the subject to the effect of needing to invent some villains for the Hornet, since all he did on the Radio show was fight racketters and protection rackets, and that was really boring. Made me wonder why he wanted to make a Green Hornet film at all...
...still wonderin'
This should probably be its own post, but what the hell right?
The Green Hornet as a character succeeds because of several things:
1. Everyone considers him a villain. Police chase him, and other gangsters wonder, "What's his angle?" He's an anomaly.
2. People are instantly afraid of a man in a mask who has been called a 'villain' in the press.
3. The idea is that all of the villains that GH went up against were "untouchable" by the ordinary methods of law. That makes them pretty powerful doesn't it? Ruthless businessmen who have armies of lawyers to protect them. Faceless ones who pull the strings and have the gangs on the street do the dirty work. They are revered by society because society doesn't know how evil they are. They look at them as benefactors cleaning up drug-infested neighborhoods, and not realizing the 'benefactor' sold the drugs (or the guns) there in the first place.
The GH villains should be the brainy ones, the ones who know all the loopholes in the law, and only get caught when they deal with an even bigger criminal - The Green Hornet.
No need for super powers or crap like that... think of the GH stories as crime stories and a writer would have a much better handle on how to craft a great GH adventure.
Anyone writing a Green Hornet screenplay should start by going through the old radio shows. There's perhaps a few select episodes with plots that could be expanded for a feature film. Great stuff there. Bill hit the nail on the head (as usual) in his assment of "the Harnet" (as Mike Axeford would say).
This is a good opportunity to plug my just-published rant on recreating golden age pulps on the big screen, such as The Shadow, Dick Tracy, and The Phantom:
http://www.theforbidden-zone.com/scrolls/golden_age.shtml
Bill gets special thanks at the bottom for supplying the images.
Hmmm... yeah, I should read that all right... that's prime territory for a good rant!
And I want to see Bill's Green Hornet movie, dammit! That's the one I want.
BTW, speaking of making a complete hash of Pulp heroes, am two chapters froom the end of the Columbia Spider's Web serial, and God help me but I'm loving it. It is in absolutely no way a good Spider adaptation... but there's a delight to it tht's all it's own...
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