Pieces of Flair

TANSTAAFL

A while back I posted a rumor about Tim Minear adapting Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for the big screen. Looks like the project is still in limbo, but that Minear is taking is seriously.

There’s a lot of talking in the book – theoretical talking about Libertarian ideals and political structure and that sort of thing – how do you take that and make it immediate and dramatic and emotional? How do you say that stuff through scenes and action, as opposed to characters sitting around and having a conversation? That’s difficult. The other thing that is difficult is that there is also a certain amount of psychological pressure that I am trying to remove from myself when you’re adapting something like Heinlein. This book is so important to so many people and you don’t want to f*ck it up. So there’s that. You want to keep true to spirit of it, and you want to take this enormously long book, that takes place over a long period of time and try to do a version of it that will play for two hours on a movie screen. The other thing is to make sure the powers that be in Hollywood don’t force you to turn it into some Marxist screed on socialism, when Heinlein was a Libertarian and it’s about free-market capitalism. You want to try and not make it about an evil corporation. That’s the trick.