Chronicals of Amber is a go

K

koralis

Well-known member
Finally.... Skybound has had the rights and teasing it for years, and now it looks like Stephen Cobert's production company is going to make it happen.


I've reread that series 3-4 times... I think the only story I've done more than once. It just captures the imagination. Hell, a few months ago I even downloaded and read the Betacourt "prequel" series. It wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. :)


https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv...er-1235302213/

Colbert’s production company Spartina has joined Skybound Entertainment and Vincent Newman Entertainment’s existing partnership to develop Roger Zelazny’s beloved The Chronicles of Amber into a drama series.

Martin — who was a close friend of Zelazny, who died in 1995 — has many times noted in interviews stated the novels deserve to be adapted, most recently in October, writing on his blog, “I am a fantasy fan, and I want more fantasy on television… Most of all, I want Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber. I will never understand why Corwin and his siblings are not starring in their own show. And hey, if epic fantasy continues to do well, maybe we will finally get that. A boy can dream.”
​

While Martin is not involved in the project, Colbert responded to his enthusiasm nonetheless: “George R.R. Martin and I have similar dreams. I’ve carried the story of Corwin in my head for over 40 years, and I’m thrilled to partner with Skybound and Vincent Newman to bring these worlds to life. All roads lead to Amber, and I’m happy to be walking them.”
...
“Adapting one of my favorite book series of all time is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream,” added David Alpert, CEO, Skybound Entertainment. “Producing it alongside someone like Stephen Colbert, who is a true-blue super fan, is a thrill for me, and will be for anyone who’s ever listened to Stephen talk about fantasy. We can’t wait to share this amazing story both with the legion of current fans like ourselves and a new generation of fans that will undoubtedly fall for Amber.”
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A wired editorial from last year. Neal Gaiman was another fan (and friend) of Roger Zelazny's. I had read a bit where neal walks about growing up in the library and it was one of the gateway books for him.


https://www.wired.com/2021/05/geeks-...roger-zelazny/

“It’s kind of hard to overstate the impact that his work has on the people who really love it,” Cox says in Episode 467 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “In my own fiction, I’ve arguably spent my entire career just trying to write something that would affect anybody as strongly as the last sentence of ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes’ affected me the first time I read it.”​

...

And while Zelazny’s critical reputation may have declined over the years, his brisk, playful storytelling style has had an outsized influence on several generations of fantasy writers. “I quoted from a few younger writers at the end of the book about how Zelazny had influenced their work,” Cox says, “and I know full well that with at least one of them, and maybe all of them, that Amber was the gateway—the Amber books are what brought them in.”​

Zelazny remains mostly unknown outside of science fiction, but Cox is hopeful that a film or TV adaptation could make him a household name, as happened with Zelazny’s close friend George R. R. Martin.
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“The issue of literary reputation is endlessly complicated and endlessly fascinating. … Certainly Bradbury is still the science fiction writer people know even if they don’t read science fiction, and Philip K. Dick has joined that company as well. But also if you look at [Zelazny’s] contemporaries, people like Delany, like Ursula Le Guin, like Joanna Russ, preeminently like J.G. Ballard, [they all] gained reputations outside of science fiction—Michael Moorcock is very well known within contemporary British literature—and Zelazny just really didn’t. And I don’t have a set answer for that.”
​
...

her assertion is that Zelazny wrote some of these seemingly more conventional sword and sorcery tales because he liked that stuff. He grew up reading it, he genuinely loved that particular branch of genre fiction, and he wrote it because he wanted to.”
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while it was/is a great novel series, i'm still very sceptical about a (tv) adaption, maybe i've been burned too often in the past, i dunno. We'll have to wait and see, i guess.
 
Could go either way. Wheel of Time series was disappointing. Sandman was very good. Good Omens was very good.

It helps to have creative people involved that actually believe in the product rather than wanting to essentially write things from scratch to a broad approximation of the source material. GRR Martin's involvement with Game of Thrones, certainly benefitted the show.

Zelazny probably isn't providing a lot of guidance, but if Colbert and Kirkman are fans, hopefully they'll make sure it's done well and could always get GRR Martin to give some feedback as a first-look since he's too busy to be an executive producer.
 
koralis said:
Could go either way. Wheel of Time series was disappointing. Sandman was very good. Good Omens was very good.

It helps to have creative people involved that actually believe in the product rather than wanting to essentially write things from scratch to a broad approximation of the source material. GRR Martin's involvement with Game of Thrones, certainly benefitted the show.

Zelazny probably isn't providing a lot of guidance, but if Colbert and Kirkman are fans, hopefully they'll make sure it's done well and could always get GRR Martin to give some feedback as a first-look since he's too busy to be an executive producer.
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Yeah, its hard for me to put my finger on what went wrong with Wheel of Time. They clearly put a ton of $$ into that, and the show often had solid production values. But somebody made big mistakes in the writing, casting, acting, editing, etc. Not sure whether that's a failure in the show-runner, or too much intervention from the studio execs, but somebody messed up. Massively disappointing.

Luckily Rings of Power turned out much better.
 
Yeah, I watched it. But it didn't really feel like the books. Too damned serious, not enough wonder. You don't get the sense of it being a bunch of kids unprepared for life being thrust into something they couldn't comprehend.

Rings of Power I liked. The dwarf-king bits I think were my favorites. The show made some pretty stale source material feel alive. Good job.



If you're a reader, you could do worse than picking up the Great Book of Amber omnibus. 1st and 2nd series bundled into one mega-paperback (10 short novels?) I bought one years ago as I saw Zelazny vanishing from bookstore shelves, and later library shelves. I figured I'd want to read it again eventually.

I love zelazny's stuff. Amber is just the most mainstream.
 
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