Spielberg's New Fantasy Movie

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Spielberg Looking at Making a Fantasy Movie

It is interesting how movies are like buses. You can wait hours for one, then along come four at once.

This phenomena - recently seen in science fiction with the spate of upcoming First Man on Mars-style movies - is now being repeated in the fantasy genre.

First a new Lord of the Rings goes into production, then a Dungeons and Dragons movie is greenlighted with indecent speed. Preceding that, the World of Pern was launched towards the direction of the TV (along with 10th Kingdom, Xena, Hercules, The Roar etc etc).

And now rumours reach us that Steven Spielberg is thinking of making a splash into the sword and sorcery arena, with an adaptation of the award-winning fantasy novel For The Crown and The Dragon.

Is this a shameless attempt to cash in on the coming fantasy movie craze by the big man?

Apparently not. Spielberg is meant to have spotted the book on the shelf of his friend George Lucas's office, and having borrowed it for a holiday read, decided it might be just the tome to bring his FX skills to bear on.

He'll certainly have a chance. The novel - originally directly published by WH Smith in 1994 as part of their encouraging new talent initiative - may be considered fairly standard S&S quest fare, but it was set apart from a copious list of competitors by being set in an alternative reality 18th century heavy on Welsh mythology.

As well as elves and other creatures of the fey, there's lots of steampunk touches in the book - steam driven war wagons and the like. It must certainly rank as the first S&S book with a walk-on part for Napoleon!

For The Crown and The Dragon sparked off the flintlock fantasy sub-genre - as evidenced by RPG games such as the titles knocked out by Alternative Armies, not to mention some 'flintlock fantasy influenced' novels published by a rather big publisher (that should have known better, but we better not name for the obvious legal reasons).

Spielberg is currently casting about for suitably talented scriptwriters to pen the adaptation, and interestingly enough, his minions have been spotted in New Zealand last week ... scouting out locations possibly?

NZ seems to be a favourite for the sword and sorcery crowd, with Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings already having landed there hot on the heels of Xena Warrior Princess. Ho hum. Everyone will be competing for the same hobbits it seems. Or in For The Crown and The Dragon's case, the same 'hobs' (the original small folk of the forest, according to Celtic legend).

As further evidence of the level of incest between all these TV series, Sarah Michelle Gellar - Miss Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself - is said to have been approached for the role of the book's heroine.

No doubt the film will be a number of years in the making, so if you want to get a feel for the movie early, you can find the first half of the novel available free from Nuvomedia's Rocket Library as a 'sampler' for download over the the net.

You'll first need to download their free e-book reader software, though, to read this digital book format.

If this all sounds like too much work, then you can always pop over to Amazon to buy a hard copy.

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