This piece of awesomeness comes from Contamination aka Alien Contamination, the masterpiece by Luigi Cozzi, who previously directed the amazing Star Wars ripoff Star Crash — the one featuring a mascara-wearing David Hasselhoff fighting androids in a stop-motion sword duel. Having so perfectly captured the spirit of Star Wars, Cozzi moved on to Alien, with... uh, mixed results.

The LA Times has the scoop on the Monopoly movie thanks to Frank Beddor, the man who is helping develop the concept behind Scott's latest project.

So here's the set up. The story stars a loser type fella in Manhattan who sucks at selling real estate, but he's great at Monopoly. Irony! When he tries to beat the world Monopoly playing record, 70 days straight, his friends tell him he's an idiot and tease him. Words are exchanged and he throws down a chance card and goes to bed. The next day he wakes up and . . . he's in Monopoly City, where everyone pays for things in Monopoly money, and there are buckets and sports cars and everyone stands around waiting for this tiresome game of life to end but it never will, it never will. Because like the game Monopoly, Monopoly City is a tedious city where you're forced to watch one idiot spend all their colorful money buying up Park Place and Boardwalk which never works. Meanwhile the rest of the town just prays for it to be over. But forget it Jake, it's Monopoly City.

Alright I made that last part up, but the main character does wake up in Monopoly City and is forced to fight the EVIL Parker Brothers because if he beats them he wins. We don't know why and we don't really know how, but there you have it. Let's just accept that they are evil and invented a neverending game where you're forced to use a small amount of math.

Here's what Beddor says to the doubters:

Look, so much of it is about the execution. You know the visual component is going to be beautiful with Ridley. And you have all of the world editions to deal with — there are different editions of the game so the city won't be limited to the Atlantic City edition that we know in America. Ridley grew up with the British version ...

So half of us won't even get the references! I do agree to some extent, Ridley Scott is pretty amazing at what he does, and there have been other film premises we thought were ridiculous that turned out to be entertaining blockbusters. Beddor points to Pirates of the Caribbean as an example.

But on the plus side, Uncle Pennybags will be in the feature Hitchcock style, "appearing in the background as a maître d' at the restaurant and he's the buggy driver and the local eccentric and the doorman at the opera." Which is excellent. But who should play him?

[Image via Comedy Central]

Empire Online caught up with Alien progenitor Ridley Scott, and got the details on when this futuristic movie is going to start, since it's a prequel for a future film.

"The prequel will be a while ago," he explained. "It's very difficult to put a year on 'Alien,' but [for example] if 'Alien' was towards the end of this century, then the prequel story will take place thirty years prior."

I wonder if this prequel will recreate the super old technology and green screen computers that ran everything on the futuristic space ships, if so the crew if going to have to buy up a load of old school computer screens.

Script review site Scriptshadow got a hold of the Shadow 19 script, which was purchased by Warner Bros. with Keanu Reeves set to star. (A grain of salt is indicated, of course: We're assuming Scriptshadow read the real script, and this isn't a hoax.) The project eventually fell apart, and Spahits ended up successfully pitching his idea for the Alien prequel to Fox and Ridley Scott. Spoilers for Shadow 19 below.

Shadow 19 may have fallen by the wayside, but its blood-pumping, hard sci-fi, action flick plotline promises great things for the Alien prequel. The script introduces us to space marine Conrad Vance, already outfitted in his mecha suit and about to be launched into an off-world battle. Vance is a warrior, but also a survivor, the brilliant strategist who always comes back from battle. It's just our introduction to Vance and the sorts of military technology that exist in this future, but Scriptshadow assures us it's perfectly thrilling in its own right:

And in a battle that made me cum in my pants, Vance takes the offensive. He rips a turret off the thing, enters the Colossus, and starts to kill every living thing inside like a goddamn bull in a China shop. Of course, the look on all of the officer's faces is pretty fucking priceless when Vance uses his jump-jets to blast through a ladder-well, collide into the ceiling of the bridge, fall, land, and proceed to slaughter the Hegemony scum ED-209 style. Kudos to you, Mr. Spaihts. I never had multiple orgasms while reading the first ten pages of a screenplay until Shadow 19 (and I've read a lot of scripts).

After this successful battle, Vance is quickly whisked off to a top secret mission that brings him to the State Science Agency, an organization of cyberpunk Scientists who are completely loyal to the Agency, not just by contract, but by design. The most advanced Scientists are fitted with a cybernetic crown, one that enhances their cognitive abilities and renders them capable of operating the Agency's technology with their minds, but also plugs them into the Agency permanently and irreparably, so that treason means death.

The Agency has created a secret sentient terraforming ship called Prometheus, and Prometheus has been sent to transform the planet Erix into a habitable world. One of Prometheus' submachines, known as a Crawler, has broken down, and Vance has to brave the hostile planet in order to repair it. The Agency also has a device that sends a projection of Vance to Erix rather than Vance himself, so that when he dies (something that happens repeatedly), he has an endless videogame supply of "extra lives." So, Vance is sent to Erix over and over again until he can figure out how to survive long enough to repair the Crawler. Meanwhile, he develops a relationship with a mid-level Scientist, forcing them both to question their loyalties to their respective organizations. And there may be evidence of intelligent life on Erix, but the Agency is determined no Scientist will live long enough to discover it. Eventually, the movie culminates in an enormous battle for which Vance has requisitioned Earth's most powerful weapons, a scene designed to please lovers of first-person shooter games.

Although Scriptshadow's review indicates some flaws in the script (Vance's repeated attempts to survive Erix are, apparently, at points repetitive), they claim it's an impressive piece of work, even just on paper:

Shadow 19 is a gunmetal paean to id Software and cyberpunk. A hymn to boys (and girls, are you out there?) who spent many a night playing Doom, or any videogame, really, and you were so engrossed in the virtual world the next time you looked out the window it was already dawn. It is a love letter to fans of smart and ambitious science fiction.

It's a movie we might never see, but at least we might get shades of Shadow 19 in the Alien prequel.

Shadow 19 [Scriptshadow]

Some people interpreted last week's top 10 list of silly alien prosthetics as hating on low-budget science fiction, or dissing the hard work of makeup artists — and that was definitely not the intention. But when you've seen the same few ideas crop up again and again, you tend to get a bit jaded.

For me, personally, Star Trek in the 1990s and early 2000s ruined me for boring humanoid aliens. After the endless parade of people in vinyl pajamas, with different smushy bits of latex on their faces every week, I got rubber-nose fatigue. There's a lot to love about 1990s Trek — Deep Space Nine was frequently brilliant and prescient, and Voyager had some standout episodes — but the infinite assembly of silly faces was not one of the things I loved.

Oh, and the picture above is from Davosmith's amazing Flickr set of Manchester's Fab Cafe. Here's another image from the same set, featuring another one of the creatures on this list:

So here are ten aliens that were obviously done on a shoestring budget, but which absolutely knock your space boots off:

10. The Daleks, on Doctor Who.

The evil genetically engineered cyborgs on Doctor Who are like mini-tanks with buzzing bee voices, and they scared the pants off generations of British (and some American) kids. They've had their ups and downs — if the first Dalek story you saw was "Day Of The Daleks," "Destiny Of The Daleks," "Remembrance Of The Daleks" or the recent one where they turn people into pigs and then dress in zoot suits, you won't understand what the fuss is about. Watch "Genesis Of The Daleks" or "Dalek." (Before you jump on me in comments, I do like "Remembrance," except the Daleks wobble horribly and look just decrepit.) In their prime, though, the Daleks glide along, rasping with anger and pointing their terrible egg-whisk guns. They're utterly cheap — and horrifying. And you only occasinally Runners up: debatable whether the Cybermen are aliens, but they do often look cool. Also, the Draconians and Zygons make the rubber-mask thing look brilliant, and the Forest of Cheem also doesn't look bad at all. I also like the Slitheen, but only design-wise.

9. The Aliens from The Arrival.

Directed by David "Pitch Black" Twohy, this 1996 alien invasion film was probably made for three Snickers wrappers and a handful of arcade tokens — but I really love the look of these aliens, and they way they move on their weird satyr-ish horse legs. Here's a slinky alien transforming itself into a hawt babe, probably because it just watched Species. Also, I love the flaps that cover up its brain, and how they undulate. Nice stuff!

8. The Visitors from V.

They look human most of the time, but when we get the occasional glimpse of their real lizard faces under their human masks, it's super-effective — as long as we don't linger. Here are a couple of choice moments. I love Diana picking at the shreds of her human disguise, like they're a scab (at about 4:00 in the first video). And the speech in the second video is the greatest thing ever:

7. Greedo and the other cantina aliens, in Star Wars.

Weirdly, later live-action Star Wars movies have never featured aliens that felt as interesting and lively as the first glimpse we got in that cantina scene. Of course, we've already exposited about our love for Greedo, but all of the quick glimpses of aliens in this scene have a liveliness that makes you feel like they're each the star of a cool story. Not bad for an underdog film with a tiny $8.5 million budget (not much even in 1977) whose crew was busy trashing the set and making fun of the Wookiee costume.

6. The Jem'Hadar in Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

They actually jumped out at me when I was compiling pics for the post about silly-looking facial prosthetics last week — there was a picture of a Vorta surrounded by Jem'Hadar troopers, and I had to crop the Jem'Hadar out of the image, because they actually looked kind of cool. Something about the way their prostheses work with their faces really feels realistic, and all of those scenes of them struggling with their addiction to ketracel white feel engaging rather than run-of-the-mill. Runner up: Species 8472 in Voyager had some moments of genuine creepitude as well.

5. Black Oil in The X-Files.

A sentient alien virus that can live in hibernation for thousands of years, it appears as a liquid, not unlike crude oil. But it can move on its own, and it's sentient, and it can take people over. There's nothing cheaper than just having some black goo oozing around, and yet it's completely convincing and compelling, and doesn't feel like any life form you've encountered on Earth.

4. The Aliens in District 9.

Obviously, this movie's still fresh in our minds, but the downtrodden aliens in the film look different than anything we'd already seen. Their twitching face-tentacles can't help grossing you out a bit, even as their big pleading eyes lay claim to your sympathy. With a budget of around $30 million, this film is the equivalent of Star Wars or Alien back in the day — a low-budget film that succeeds thanks to a lot of inventiveness born of desperation. And great storytelling, of course. I almost left this film off the list, because we've covered it so much lately, but it clearly belongs.

3. The Vorlon from Babylon 5.

These energy-based life forms are among the First Ones, and inspire a quasi-religious awe among people who see them. So its fitting that their headgear and robes look so alien and unfamiliar. As Sheridan tells Kosh at one point, he can't even tell if it's the same Vorlon under all that covering, or different Vorlons in the same guise.

2. The 456, on Torchwood.

To me, this is the absolute best way to do an alien species on a budget. Shroud it in toxic smoke — and mystery — and just show little glimpses of evil tentacles. The way these creatures shriek and spatter the walls of their enclosure with alien puke will stick in your mind long after you're done watching the miniseries "Children Of Earth." This official still is actually a better look at the 456 than we ever get in the actual television show — and even in this image, they're somewhat indistinct and obscene looking. They're the perfect mixture of mysterious and disgusting, just right for aliens who want to molest your children.

1. The Xenomorph, from Alien.

The studio originally only wanted to give director Ridley Scott a $4.2 million budget, until he showed them storyboards and Mobius illustrations. But, says Scott in a recent interview, "The [revised] budget started out at $.8.2-million and ended up at 8.6, which I think in those days was still relatively cheap. We didn't have the money to do pretty well anything... But in a funny kind of way, you get very clever when there is very little money, because it makes you think." Scott had a stroke of luck when writer Dan O'Bannon took him aside and showed him H.R. Giger's art "like he was showing me a dirty book," and they brought in Giger to design — and sculpt — the alien costume and other alien artifacts. But the other key, says Scott, was disguising the fact that this was still a man in a suit:

We started with a stunt man who was quite thin, but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man. So my casting director said, ‘I've seen a guy in a pub in Soho who is about seven feet tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body.' So he brought Bolaji Bodejo to the office, and he was actually from Somalia, funnily enough," Scott remarks, having much later directed BLACK HAWK DOWN, which was set in Somalia. "I said, ‘Do you want to be in movies,' and he said sure. And he became the alien. I had him for two months. In the cockpit, there's a pack of cigarettes that says ‘Bolaji.'

Thanks to Alan Bostick, Alasdair Stuart, Madeline Ashby, @Nightwyrm on Twitter, Marlin May, Andrea Zanin, Melinda Adams, Rina Weisman, Micky Shirley, Susie Kameny, Greta Christina, Serene Vannoy, Rus McLaughlin, Minal Hajratwala, Annelise Ophelian, Seth Kaufman, David Fraser, and James Limbach for suggestions!

We spoke to Scott last year, and he confirmed that he was planning to film Brave New World, but with a screenwriter in place and more meetings happening, it sounds as though the project is being moved onto the fast track.

The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business blog says Scott and DiCaprio will produce the film through Universal Studios, and "Scott will produce with an eye to direct." And DiCaprio is still on board to star in the project, since he doesn't have anything lined up after he finishes filming Christopher Nolan's Inception. And a writer has been announced: Farhad Safinia, writer of Apocalypto.

THR thinks DiCaprio would play Bernard, who starts to question the decadent, destructive values of the false utopia he lives in. And the Guardian's Ben Child is already raising some worries that this choice will water down the film's dynamic:

I'm aware that this is going to solicit a torrent of posts berating me for suggesting that the film has to be exactly like the book, but in Huxley's tale, Bernard faces the scorn of society because, despite being a member of the elite Alpha Plus class, he is short, like the mindless Epsilons (and also because he adopts an individualist attitude and spurns Soma). The tall, handsome DiCaprio seems uniquely unsuited to play him - an actor such as Philip Seymour Hoffman or Paul Giamatti springs to mind - though it should be remembered that the actor has done a fine job playing troubled outsiders before, notably in Martin Scorsese's The Departed (not so much in The Beach, where his golden boy good looks completely destroyed the book's dynamic).

Since DiCaprio's production company, Appian Way, owns the movie rights to the novel, there's probably no way to keep him out of it in any case.

But it's still tremendous cause for excitement that Scott — a mere couple years after suggesting that science fiction was dead — is now being linked to three projects: the Alien prequel, Brave New World, and The Forever War. Let's hope we see one of those in the next few years. [THR]

MTV News tracked down Weaver at Comic Con, and asked her whether she would be involved in the upcoming Alien film, to which Weaver replied that she couldn't imagine an appearance by Ripley:

Just this winter, Weaver was talking about the possibility of a Ripley-centric movie with no Aliens, so it's a relief to hear once and for all that we'll be getting back to the Xenomorphs. And, as awesome a character as Ripley (at least the original Ripley) was, it's probably time for her to step aside and let other characters show off their Alien-killing chops. Hopefully, this is just one of many signs that Scott is genuinely looking to tell an interesting story set in this universe, rather than simply milking the franchise.

[MTV Movies Blog]

Ever since Scott announced his intentions to make an Alien prequel, speculation has abounded as to whether Scott himself would return to the director's chair. Word was the commercial director (and Scott's daughter's current beau) Carl Erik Rinsch might take the reigns, but that Fox refused to greenlight the project without Scott as director. Variety now reports that Scott has agreed to direct his first Alien movie in 30 years, with Jon Spaiht attached to write the script.

Spaiht isn't a household name yet, but his philosophical science fiction romance Passengers made the 2007 Black List of best unproduced scripts. He's also scripting The Darkest Hour, a film described as "Independence Day in Moscow," for 9 producer and Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov, as well as a feature for Disney titled Children of Mars. Reportedly, Spaiht delivered a prequel pitch that wowed Scott and the studio.

So, what is this brilliant idea? The new film will allegedly be a direct prequel to the original Alien, which means we may get to see what occurred on the derelict ship that Ripley and her crew discover in the first film. Or perhaps we'll see shades of William Gibson's idea for Alien 3, and trace the xenomorphs to their origin.

[Variety]

Oh, and this scene is probably work-safe... we think. If only we'd known about this scene when we put together our video compilation of shower scenes.

In Alien From The Deep, aka Alien degli Abissi, a plucky activist and her cameraman infiltrate an evil corporation that is dumping nuclear waste and radioactive materials into an active volcano. What could possibly go wrong, right? Sadly, they wake up some kind of extraterrestrial monster that's been sleeping under the volcano all this time, and it's immune to almost every kind of weapon.

Luckily, it turns out the creature isn't immune to being rammed with a construction truck, which the woman does in an obvious shout-out to the "Get away from her, you bitch" scene in Aliens. (Her post-decontamination underwear are even intended to make us think of Ripley, supposedly.) In any case, the movie's not content with having the female hero defeat the monster in a Ripley pastiche — the two guys have to step in and help out, with a specially designed monster-killing flamethrower. This clip also showcases how ridiculous-looking the monster actually is. It may be bigger than the Ridley Scott Alien, but that's about all it's got going for it:

As reported a couple weeks ago (including here at io9), Tony Scott has confirmed that he and his brother/producing partner Ridley are going ahead with an Alien prequel. Scott said Carl Erik Rinsch, the commercial director who made the robot-filled Saturn ad below, would make his feature debut as the movie's director.

Entertainment Weekly, however, reports that 20th Century Fox isn't interested in the project unless Ridley, who directed the original Alien 30 years ago, helms the new one as well. Complicating matters is the notion that Rinsch is (according to EW) dating Ridley's daughter, Jordan. (Like everyone else in the Scott family, she's also a director of TV ads.) Is that what Tony Scott meant when he said handing the movie to Rinsch was giving it over to "one of the family"?

Show of hands: Who wants to see Scott return to direct the franchise he created? Who has watched Rinsch's work and thinks he's just the fresh blood needed to revitalize the series, after the ignominy of the later sequels and the Alien vs. Predator titles? Who's afraid that a power struggle between Fox and the Scotts is going to scuttle the project altogeher? And who wishes they'd just leave well enough alone and not try to fix what ain't broke?

Scott, along with his brother Tony and son Luke, are teaming up with the independent studio Ag8 to produce Purefold. Ag8 previously produced the British web series Where Are The Joneses?, which asked viewers to write and submit the further adventures of the title characters. Purefold will use a similarly interactive format, as it unfolds in five to ten minute shorts driven by reader input culled from the social aggregator site FriendFeed. Although the series will debut on the web, there is some hope it will ultimately make its way to television.

Purefold will take place in the time before Blade Runner's 2019 setting. The producers apparently aren't too concerned about the short span of time between now and the highly advanced future depicted in the film, what with its replicants, flying cars, monolithic architecture, and implied interstellar colonization. In fact,according to Ag8 founding partner David Bausola, the first episodes of Purefold will likely take place in 2011. Of course, setting the action only a couple years from now is one way to avoid having to show those flying cars and crazy buildings on a web series's budget.

The producers of Purefold don't have the rights to Philip K. Dick's original novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, which provided the basis for Ridley Scott's film. As such, the series definitely won't be featuring any of Blade Runner's characters or specific situations, although I'm still holding out hope we'll finally get to see what's so damn unbelievable about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Or C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate, for that matter.

What Purefold definitely will have, however, is product placement, as RSA Films is bringing in a number of advertising and marketing agencies to help secure funding for the project. Considering what happened to companies that had their logos prominently featured in the original film, such as Bell, Pan Am, and Atari - they all went bust - I'm not sure if that's really a good idea.

As much as this all sounds a bit bizarre, there is one aspect of Purefold to be unreservedly excited about. Ridley Scott has said he will be releasing the series under the Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can repurpose, remix, and even rerelease the episodes as they see fit. Scott is the first major Hollywood director to embrace Creative Commons in this way. So, even if Purefold is ultimately just a forgettable oddity, it might be the start of something much bigger.

[The New York Times]

Bloody Disgusting is reporting that Carl Erik Rinsch is poised to take over directing the Alien origins feature that Ridley Scott, Michael Costigan and Tony Scott are all involved in. No idea who he is really, and if you can judge a man based on his short commercial work, but what he has directed is pretty stunning. Check out the clips.

Here are a few of our favorite commercials from the director (thanks for pointing out the evolution of technology, Slashfilm).

There's been talk of bringing back the character of Ripley before, sans alien. But the news from IESB is that this new movie will be an Alien prequel. Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman explained the idea...

There's been some talk. Ridley Scott, Ridley is right now working on Robin Hood, but I think he's toying with the idea and that would be great for us. I mean, it's always been a matter of, really, if you can get the originator to do it that would be the greatest thing, so I've got my fingers crossed, all of them.

I'm not sure how realistic this actually is as, Ridley is supposedly already working on Forever War and Brave New World. But who knows what will come first, after he's finished with his merry men?

Addressing a BFI forum as part of Blade Runner Day, Ridley Scott reminisced about how film-making has changed since his earliest works in the 1970s. Before digital cameras and CG effects, it was a lot more down and dirty. Especially when he was filming the iconic monster moments of 1979's Alien:

Ridley said: "From all those years of commercials, I knew I was going to use blood, KY Jelly and back light and all the segments were going to work out.

"I kept the monster away from all the actors. There was so much blood on the set that you had to do a take, wrap and come back in a week when it had all been cleaned up with alcohol.

"Roger [Christian - production designer] came in with the little demon in a shopping bag. We had an artificial chest screwed to the table. John [Hurt] was underneath, so it was an illusion that his neck was attached to that body.

"I had to cut through the chest with a razor blade as it wouldn't burst. And when it happened there was total silence. I think Yaphet [Kotto, who played Parker] started to shriek with laughter. We never went back. It was one take.

"People were saying the footage was gross and I didn't know whether that was a compliment or not. One of the studio guys had his daughter in watching the rushes and she was nine. He said it was over the top, and I said, 'You pay me for this. We're doing a film that's completely over the top'."

Scott's still getting his hands dirty, mucking around in the desert making his epic Robin Hood. But it sounds like he's going ultra-high-tech for Forever War, and he's largely influenced by James Cameron's motion-capture extravaganza Avatar, even though we still haven't seen any of it:

He said: "I'm filming a book by Joe Haldeman called Forever War. I've got a good writer doing it. I've seen some of James Cameron's work, and I've got to go 3D. It's going to be phenomenal."

Scott is one of the few classic directors who's still blowing me away - American Gangster, though flawed, was still one of the most memorable films I saw in 2007. So let's hope his desire to imitate Cameron doesn't get in the way of his drive to get down and dirty. [Wharf via Slashfilm]

The film appears as part of the Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival, appearing Saturday at the Cinerama Theater in downtown Seattle. It's set 30 years in the future, and follows a girl named Abigail (Juliet Bradford) and her friend Sam, who go to a party where reality mixes with the virtual world and you can't tell which is which. And then Abigail vanishes and Sam is left searching for her. It's a future where "the culture has become so saturated with communication that people start to lose their actual physical presence," says Yoshida.

Commenter ZaharDavidson points out the trailer is on YouTube:

Blade Runner is Yoshida's favorite movie, and she paid homage to it with Abigail, her thesis project at UCLA. She tried to channel a noir-ish Ridley Scott futurism in her film, she tells the News Tribune, including filming one scene in the second-street tunnel where Scott filmed some of his movie. She's working on a feature-length script now — let's hope we're hearing about her again soon. [News Tribune]

Weaver told MTV's Movie Blog that she and Scott have discussed returning to the character of Ripley in a new movie:

Both of us feel a kind of commitment to that woman. He’s as much responsible for who she is as I am... We’d have to go back to the drawing board on [the alien]... Ridley said that right away when we first talked about [a fifth film]. What we’re interested in is taking the character of Ripley and seeing what other science fiction story we can tell about someone who has lived several lives.

"Other science fiction story"? As in, one that isn't the latest iteration of "Bad Ass Woman Fights Aliens, Rinse And Repeat"? If so, color me interested; the Alien alien has become stale through over- and mis-use through the years, and the idea of taking the Ripley character out've her seemingly-eternal cycle of avoiding acid blood while killing monsters sounds a lot more interesting than seeing more people get sacrificed to the silent Giger-esque killer.

Sigourney Weaver And Ridley Scott To Team Up For Alien-Less ‘Alien’ Sequel? [MTV Movies Blog]

The blog A Subtle Echo dug up an interview with Adams from the early 80s about his Forever War designs. Adams says the book's Egg suits posed a particular challenge, and his first design was more form-fitting. Gordon looked at this and said, "Well, if you can't do it..." Chastened, Adams went back to the drawing board, "rethought the egg principle" and figured out the necessary arm and leg movement. The only drawback: you couldn't twist your torso in one of them.

With a budget of only $3 million (up from $1 million originally) creating the Taurans posed another challenge. Adams accepted the "man in a suit" look, but tried to distort it by using extra-tall basketball-player figures, with extensions on the hands to make them look even more angular. "Subtly altering body movements, and perhaps changing the eyes, would convey an eerie, alien quality," Adams said.

A third challenge: the spaceships had to evolve, starting with a group of Saturn rockets strapped together. "Each generation of spacecraft got bigger and more fanciful," Adams explained. Sadly, he concluded the interview by saying "I think The Forever War has a good chance of being made" with Gordon as director.

If only. So what went wrong? Haldeman explains on his website:

The Forever War had been optioned by the Chicago public television station, who proposed to do it as a four-part miniseries. I had a few meetings with Stuart Gordon, the director, and it looked pretty exciting: the production was going to be lavish; it was the number-one budget item for the next couple of years.

Then Reagan got elected, and public (or at least political) support for the arts was slashed. The station, its annual budget halved, had to drop the miniseries. But Stuart Gordon didn't want to drop The Forever War. In the course of outlining how to break up the story into four parts, I'd told him that the last part would be the simplest to shoot — you could almost do it as a stage play, with two or three sets.

It turned out that Stuart was also director of the Organic Theater Company, and he tossed down a gauntlet: you write the last part as a stage play, and I'll have it produced.

The stage play was moderately successful, making back its big budget over a six-week run, including the $75,000 spent on special effects. And then two years later, Gordon hired Haldeman to write Robot Jox, which turned into another weird ordeal when Gordon tried to replace Haldeman as scriptwriter halfway through. (The movie's producers eventually sided with Haldeman and brought him back in for emergency rewrites on set.)

Given how great the PBS version of Ursula LeGuin's Lathe Of Heaven was, around that same time, I'm incredibly bummed that we didn't get to see the PBS Forever War. (Especially with mega-genius Gordon involved.) But hopefully the Ridley Scott version will ease the sadness somewhat. More pics and info at the link. [A Subtle Echo]

Haldeman has already blogged about one possibility for Forever War's star. He wonders "if Scott would want to use his buddy Russell Crowe. At 44, he's a bit old for the part as written, though that's why they call it 'acting.'" And he already has a pretty good idea about what might constitute a sequel to the new movie:

I suspect that if the movie is made and is successful, they'll use the rest of the book in a sequel, which will be called Forever Peace. (They've optioned the title to that book, but not the story, so the intent is pretty clear.) I won't complain. It's an honor just to be nominated, as the actor said on the way to the bank.

I'm really hoping that someone with clout will pick up the phone and say, "Dolores, see if this guy Haldeman wrote some other book we might pick up cheap." I've got a couple of dozen of them.

He sure does, and he's not going to turn down the color green in these times:

(A couple of years ago I asked my Hollywood agent whether he could put together a package deal: All of Haldeman's books except TFW for $X million, X being a number big enough to support me and Gay for the rest of our lives. He said no.)

We compare Haldeman's blog notes with our own takes on his adaptable oeuvre:

Tool Of The Trade.
Haldeman's Take: "The most conventionally cinematic is Tool of the Trade," he opines, "which even has a kind of a car chase."
We Say: Tough to find and never recognized on the level with his hard-SF work, Tool of the Trade makes the Jason Bourne series look like Rachel Getting Married. If Haldeman submitted the book to publishing houses today it would be a smash thriller. The problem you have in adapting old spy novels is outdated technology, but there's no such problem with near future espionage tales. Haldeman's characters are rarely all-powerful — he carefully considers the most entertaining reasons and situations in which a person would control another's mind, and outdoes your expectations for what can be done with a familiar concept.

The Hemingway Hoax
Haldeman's Take: "I've always thought The Hemingway Hoax would be a good low-budget film, made-for-teevee," says the author.
We Say: Haldeman is hit or miss in the short form, as he openly acknowledging devoting less time to less lucrative projects. If the idea he's preoccupied with is worthy, the story usually works, and boy does it work here. Easily his most famous shorter work at about the size of a novella, The Hemingway Hoax ranks with Jack Finney and H.G. Wells for best use of time travel, and an affinity for similar subject matter would result in 2007's return to form after a few mediocre novels in The Accidental Time Machine. Truly a must-read if you've never gotten to it.

All My Sins Remembered
Haldeman's Take: Joe recognizes the problem inherent in this three part novel's composition: 1977's All My Sins Remembered is cinematic but has the drawback that the male lead keeps dramatically changing his appearance. Maybe Eddie Murphy could do it."
We Say: Before he tries to cast Richard Pryor, it's important to understand just how awesome All My Sins Remembered is. The man character is perfect for Sacha Baron Cohen: Otto McGavin is a Prime Operator who can assume any disguise — kind of like the prototye for Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs character from Altered Carbon. In three novella-length assignments, McGavin variously takes on the disguise of an overweight alien sociologist, a swarthy feudal duellist, and a questionably intentioned Man of God. Each of these concepts could easily be a feature, and feudal society of the middle part would make perfect material for a series.

"Seasons"
Haldeman's Take: His 1985 epistolatory novella set in the same universe as All My Sins Remembered is called "Seasons." He doesn't mention it in the post, but he chose it to lead off his remarkable short story collection/light autobiography Dealing in Futures.
We Say: The concept revolves around a series of diary entries of an anthropological expedition to a sexless group of aliens that completely changes personality during seasonal depression, it's an action-packed merciless narrative with a harrowing last act. And since it's a longshot that this ever gets filmed, my plan is to trick Haldeman into selling me the rights through light gunplay and begging.

Mindbridge
Haldeman's Take: Joe can't let it rest without putting in a good word for the rare novel from his output in the 1970s that didn't age well, Mindbridge. "Mindbridge would be good," he says, but "it's under a kind of option, stalled."
We Say: One of the early books that burnished his reputation, Mindbridge hasn't aged as well as Haldeman's other universes. The plot now reads like one of the filler episodes of Babylon 5, and the approach to telepathy in this 1976 Nebula-winning novel comes across as a little hokier than we'd expect in a similar story today. At the time it made its author $100,000, and a stern word from critic Leonard Michaels not to waste his "talents on this commercial crap."

The Worlds trilogy
Haldeman's Take: In that particular blog post, Joe doesn't mention his Worlds trilogy, but he's previously acknowledged that it is a work dear to his heart.
We Say: A strong heroine and a ravaged Planet Earth are the highlights of the trilogy, and although the third book Worlds Enough and Time released in 1992, kinda goes to sleep on you, it's a worthy ride. If the Ridley Scott Forever War does well, look for TV to give this series a hard look. It's the perfect eight-hour miniseries and it could capture the curiosity of the Twilight crowd by presenting an accessible heroine in an apocalyptic American setting. At the very least put it in the mail to Angelina Jolie.

Forever Peace
Haldeman's Take: He doesn't even pay lip service to the idea of adapting his spiritual but not actual sequel to The Forever War, Forever Peace.
We Say: That reluctance is more a reflection of the steep hill any screenwriter would face into making this story about the violence of humanity and its continuing evolution a film. The story is both extremely internalized and outwardly action-packed, making it one of the best of Haldeman's novels, but the least likely to ever hit Blu-Ray. The Forever War finally got a true sequel in 1999's Forever Free, but the movie version is unlikely to take it on either because it's so different from the original in plot and setting.

Whatever happens with Haldeman's other works, we encourage Ridley Scott not to toss away the details of The Forever War too lightly. Although he pretends to be at peace with minimal involvement in the production, Joe will fume away on his blog if he doesn't like what he hears — the book is naturally close to his heart.
Joe Haldeman's lecture at MIT this year [The Craft of Science Fiction]

The man isn't just stepping back into the scifi genre he's jumping in head first, and we applaud him for it.

Scott told Variety:

"It’s a science-fiction epic, a bit of The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner, built upon a brilliant, disorienting premise."

This is an exciting project, and it might actually be easier to bring to the big screen then Brave New World. According to the trade, Scott has yet to hire a writer to adapt the novel and still has many other movies on the front burner.

The book follows the story of a war between humans and the Tauran species. The main character, Private William Mandella, works out his duty to the government in space, fighting the good fight, only to return to his home world which has moved ahead centuries past him. Due to the effects of faster-than-light travel, Mandella is centuries younger than the world he left. Forever War also deals with wartime inhumanity and injustice.

[Variety]

Why did you decide to adapt Brave New World into a movie, why do you want to make this story?

I didn't choose to do it, someone came to me with it. In fact it was Leo's [Leonardo DiCaprio's] production company that came to me with that. And it's a big challenge, in fact. Because when you look at the two players or visionaries in the field, at that moment [it] would be Huxley and it would be Orwell and that was 60 or 75 years ago. They were predictions in a way, they weren't aware at the time, but they were predictions. One could argue that Orwell kind of got there first and Orwell was closer to the notion of "big brother," [with the] Cold War. But I don't think that's it, I think that big brother may be the internet. I don't know but I think that's the way it's going to go. And so the Aldous Huxley's [novel] literally what is called Brave New World that's a very hard adaptation. So we're still dancing with that one, but it's a challenge.

Have you finished the script or are you close?

No, no no we're still struggling with that one. I have 40 things on the go at once. But that's a very important one. And sometimes, some surface faster than the others. It's partly luck of the draw. Even with a good writer, he'll do it and screw up. So then you go back to the table and start all over again, it's hard. The hardest single thing is getting it on paper.

I'm very excited about Leo's involvement.

Oh yeah, he is perfect for it.

So while we wait for what will undoubtedly be an amazing look into a classic story, and find out what kind of new spins Ridley will throw in (will there still the year of "our Ford"?) Scott's new movie Body of Lies is out October 10th.