TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Working on a "Gateway" film script (Frederick Pohl novel)

Go To

fulltimeD Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114 from Purgatory Since: Jan, 2010
Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114
#1: Nov 12th 2013 at 11:54:27 AM

Frederick Pohl's 1970's New Wave Science Fiction novel, "Gateway," Part 1 of the Heechee Saga. I've wanted to write a screenplay based on it since the Sixth Grade. Well, now I am.

Plot Skinny: In the future, people play the odds by embarking on hazardous but possibly very financially rewarding, if not suicidal journeys aboard a host of alien spaceships whose internal workings are totally incomprehensible, and explode if you try to take apart the Drive to study it. Most of them don't come back, and of the ones that do, maybe half of them return with the crews alive. But the financial rewards are too great to ignore, and life is so shitty most other places in the solar system, that Gateway's not a bad option by comparison. If you don't die, you stand to make a lot of money and be set for life. But like poker, one bad trip, one bad hand, could kill the game. So Gateway, an asteroid once inhabited by the mysterious aliens that built the ships, has become a hub for human exploration.

Bob Broadhead went to Gateway with nothing but a lottery ticket, and came back a multibillionaire. But somewhere, out in space, lies the past, and all his sorrows. Years later, he struggles to uncover a long-buried guilt of black-hole depths.

Is anyone else familiar with this novel? Does anyone have any ideas about how YOU would do it as a film? I'd like to hear from fans. I intend to be pretty faithful to the book but not narrowly so.

To be clear I have NOT read the entirety of the saga and intend this script to be a single, whole film, not part of a series.

edited 12th Nov '13 12:04:29 PM by fulltimeD

edgewalker22 Lawful neutral Since: Mar, 2013 Relationship Status: Gay for Big Boss
Lawful neutral
#2: Nov 15th 2013 at 4:13:54 AM

Hmm... updating the technology is the obvious one, but I'm not sure how to manage the framing device of Siegfried. Use him if you want to go for a more psychological angle (money being unable to buy a good night's sleep) or not if you want to go the more high adventure route. Letting the audience in on Robinette's survival in the first scene deflates a lot the threats he'd subsequently face. More to the point, you can handle a lot of the exposition the framing device allows by starting farther forward in dramatic time- say, him winning the ticket to Gateway.

Unsorted thoughts:

  • Fix or justify the currency values. If a serving of fresh fruit costs a hundred bucks, a million isn't going to set you up for life. Tinkering with the zeroes should be enough, unless you want to do something crazy with interest rates or some other justification.
  • Decide what you're doing with the Dane sub- (sub-?) plot. It's a nice bit of characterization in the book, especially the Did They or Didn't They? (my opinion: they did) but it's yet another romantic (well, sexual) cul-de-sac in a book already full of them, and the Gangst involved hasn't aged terribly well, especially since trimming down the scenes with Siegfried leaves it without a vehicle.
  • Keep "Everything We Know about the Heechee." Someway, somehow, get that blank book in there.

fulltimeD Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114 from Purgatory Since: Jan, 2010
Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114
#3: Nov 15th 2013 at 11:00:11 AM

^ Good thoughts. Updating the currency figures was one of the first things I did. I'm setting it ambiguously sometime in the 22nd century, no exact year, so there's been quite a bit of inflation. The "Everything We Know About the Heechee" book is DEFINITELY in there, it will show up on Rob's nightstand. I should make it the Gateway version of a Gideon's Bible; one in every room. I'm keeping both the emotional dynamic three-way between Bob, Klara and Dane, but probably erring on the "They didn't" side of that debate because I'm toning down the fuss that Bob and the others make about being gay, or about NOT being gay themselves (like Bob's defensiveness).

I have it start with narration by Bob, that transitions to a first arrival on Gateway, where he learns a lot of the rules, and the narration later is revealed to be Bob's end of the conversations with Siggy, and probably three quarters of Siggy's psychoanalysis is going to get cut. Ther opening narration shows the Big Bubble over Manhattan and all the strip-mined land around it, establishing that Earth is the Crapsack World from the book, but the sequence doesn't visually establish Bob Broadhead as being alive and on Earth- we see him first at Gateway, and during any interludes with Siggy I might decide to make it seem like those sessions take place on Gateway, but they're actually on Earth, after the Gateway experience. That could be a cool twist. And it's consistent since Siegfried was the same AI counselor people (like Klara) used on Gateway.

I'm keeping the piezoelectrics and the issues with weightlessness and body odor, and dumping the seventies cassette tape technology.

The Heechee Ships are described as an elaboration of the description in the book- mushroom shaped, with the stem and the cap being different modules, the orbiter and the lander. I also keep the Heechee metal and the ship classification system.

One thing I'm adding that's not part of the book are Corporation telepaths who "debrief" prospectors when the prospectors' accounts conflict.

edited 15th Nov '13 11:15:30 AM by fulltimeD

edgewalker22 Lawful neutral Since: Mar, 2013 Relationship Status: Gay for Big Boss
Lawful neutral
#4: Nov 15th 2013 at 2:27:42 PM

Hmm. I was thinking about this at work, and you could really play it as character growth in any direction- They Did, because Rob finally came to terms with his feelings for Dane and decided to act on them, OR They Didn't because Rob had cheated on Klara before and refused to make the same mistake again. Or, alternatively, they They Did, because Rob hasn't changed from who he was before and is too opportunistic and unassertive not to avail himself of what's being offered, so to speak. Or if you're aiming for trolling creator status, you could play it like in the book but with a bit less context- Rob and Dane have a Moment, Dane puts his arm around Rob and- smash cut to the next scene and listen to the yaoi fangirls' blood pressure spike. I think erring on the side of They Didn't is the best bet, just to give Rob and Klara's relationship a much clearer arc, but there's enough flexibility to do otherwise should you want.

The fake out with Siegfied is a really good idea. You might want to update the contents of their little chats, though- All Psychology Is Freudian is heavily enforced in the original book, and that's aged pretty badly. (It will also let you cut back on the gay/not gay thing because frankly the therapy won't be so stupidly sex-focused.)

Honestly, though, I think telepaths are a terrible idea. They raise a ton of questions (can a telepath hitch a ride inside the consciousness of someone on a ship? How discrete is the human consciousness in this setting? How does one become a telepath?) and don't add enough to the setting to justify it. Given that the Gateway corporation can and will space people for not paying rent, the scenarios where the stories don't match and they give a shit should be vanishingly small- they don't care what happens to their prospectors as long as the bottom line balances.

Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#5: Nov 15th 2013 at 4:30:54 PM

This seems interesting.

I do have to agree about the telepaths though. The setting has to include them from the start or they kind of become a story-breaker power. Someone adding them in later to a pre-existing story won't work very well.

fulltimeD Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114 from Purgatory Since: Jan, 2010
Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114
#6: Nov 16th 2013 at 9:52:44 AM

I'll drop the Telepaths then. I was also definitely planning on deconstructing Freud as opposed to in the book where All Psychology Is Freudian gets played really straight.

Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#7: Nov 16th 2013 at 9:55:34 AM

So, like Rob brings up the Freudian stuff and Sigfrid immediately debunks it and follows it up with accepted theories?

Actually, that would get old really fast.

edited 16th Nov '13 9:55:52 AM by Zendervai

fulltimeD Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114 from Purgatory Since: Jan, 2010
Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114
#8: Nov 16th 2013 at 10:01:26 AM

Regarding the money I could always just change it from dollars to some kind of Gateway credit chip that has exchange rates on Venus, or in America, or Russia, etc. That would sidestep the future inflation issue somewhat.

May or may not keep the telepaths in. They were meant as a gag... something to put in the future to create a sense of mis-en-scene, not necessarily anything relevant to the plot. I'm allowing myself to be inspired a bit by The Fifth Element here.

fulltimeD Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114 from Purgatory Since: Jan, 2010
Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114
#9: Nov 16th 2013 at 10:02:38 AM

^^ No, just that Siggy would have a more balanced perspective repertoire than the strict Freudianism he has in the book. I see it as a way of updating the dialog so that the emotional crux of the story is stiil relevant in more modern psychological terms, since that strict Freudianism doesn't age well, but the idea of survivor's guilt is still very much alive

As for Dane... I need him and Bob to be primarily antagonistic, and though I think the sexual ambiguity/innuendo between them works well on paper, the focus of Bob's romantic arc is and needs to be Klara, and I don't want to clutter that.

There will probably be a lot of throwaway and background references to new religions and other cultural phenomenon... I could see using the fake commercial framing device similar to Robo Cop and Starship Troopers to represent the inserts in the book that are like snippets of Life on Gateway (personals, mission reports, anecdotes, etc).

edited 16th Nov '13 10:14:23 AM by fulltimeD

tricksterson Never Trust from Behind you with an icepick Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
Never Trust
#10: Nov 16th 2013 at 10:21:25 AM

You might use "Everything We Know About The Heechee" as a kind of framing device ala Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Trump delenda est
fulltimeD Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114 from Purgatory Since: Jan, 2010
Deputy Director, Space-Time Gradient LV-114
#11: Nov 16th 2013 at 11:05:16 AM

^ Nah, "Everything We Know" is a gag book. Some hundred-odd number of pages, all blank. Everything we really know about the Heechee can be summed up in 3 or 4 sentences: They used the solar system as a base a really long time ago. They disappeared and left prayer-fans everywhere. And we can barely make sense of their spaceship technology without getting ourselves killed.

I think the gag book works better as a "Gideon's Bible" of Gateway, where every Prospector finds a copy in a drawer in their room. That way it works as satire and sets the scene.

Besides, I've already got a more nuanced framing device set up.

edited 16th Nov '13 11:05:46 AM by fulltimeD

Add Post

Total posts: 11
Top