William Gibson's Idoru Coming to Anime

[Taro Toporific]

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William Gibson's Idoru Coming to Anime
Now Playing Magazine, Thursday, 20 April 2006
Steyermark's films Prey for Rock N Roll or One Last Thing, but if he's the guy who finally cracks the William Gibson movie, he'll be our hero. One of his next projects is an adaptation of Idoru, which will be a Japanese anime film.
The studio people that were reading the script all loved it, Steyermark says."They said, 'This is a $150 million movie.' One of them came back and said, 'How would you feel about doing this as an anime film?' I thought that is really cool, really creative...."
...there hasn't been much Gibson on film yet. "It was extremely tough. It's interesting because all of his books have been optioned. None of them have been made into a movie. I'm so on pins and needles about the fact that this could be the first one that goes. Not including Johnny Mnemonic which was really a short story that he wrote. I'm hoping that it all falls into place but adapting it was really difficult. Look, The Matrix is an acknowledged rip off of Mona Lisa Overdrive and Neuromancer and Gibson is known as the father of cyberpunk." ...more..

[Charles]

...there hasn't been much Gibson on film yet. "It was extremely tough. It's interesting because all of his books have been optioned. None of them have been made into a movie. I'm so on pins and needles about the fact that this could be the first one that goes. Not including Johnny Mnemonic which was really a short story that he wrote...

Well, not including Johnny Mnemonic, there's New Rose Hotel, TV episodes of the X-Files and Tomorrow Calling, so yeah, there are only two feature films plus a few hours of TV shows from Gibson's work. Which puts Gibson in the top 0.0000000001% of all writers trying to get their work produced.

So... do you really think that there is a chance in hell of this anime film ever being made, when the producer is so totally ignorant of Gibson's existing filmed works? If it ever does get made, oh man is it going to suck.

[amdg]

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William Gibson's Idoru Coming to Anime
Now Playing Magazine, Thursday, 20 April 2006 Look, The Matrix is an acknowledged rip off of Mona Lisa Overdrive and Neuromancer ...more..

"Rip Off"?? It's been a while since I read the book but if I recall correctly, there's no similarity between the two except for the fact that they both involve a kind of cyber-reality. That's it.

Yes, here (by allscifi.com):

In his third novel, Gibson starts with four disparate threads: 13-year-old Kuniko Yanaka is flown to seclusion in London by her powerful Japanese gangster father; 30-something vagrant Slick Henry hangs out in an abandoned New Jersey warehouse, building robots while his "landlord" Gentry tries to discern the shape of cyberspace; megastar Angela Mitchell tries to recover her equilibrium in Malibu and decide her next career move after undergoing drug detox in Jamaica; and 16-year-old (maybe) Cleveland native Mona Lisa is pimped by her boyfriend Eddy in Florida. Since Mona looks a lot like Angie, her pimp sells her to a secret organization that has a plastic surgeon alter her looks even further. Mitchell's family and romantic background involves creators of, and intelligences that inhabit, large chunks of cyberspace, and the four disparate plotlines steadily come together over the course of this novel, set (I am guessing) in the mid to late 21st century.

[Kuang_Grade]

While rip off might be a bit strong, there are some of common elements between the Matrix and Neuromancer in general (wussy IT dude becomes hero hacker, bad ass female companion, hero becomes pawn in larger game fought by different personas of the AI protagonist, wise elders live in a place called zion, you can be killed in cyberspace resulting in real world death) and if remember mona lisa overdrive correctly, (my primary memory is that I didn't like it very much), I believe there is a whole "uploading one's self into the net to restore balance" plot line. But that said, the matrix borrows a lot of from a lot of different sources.

But Gibson himself has this to say about it...
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp

I was, as you can probably imagine, prepared not to like THE MATRIX. A friend finally dragged me to see it in Santa Monica, when I was taping NO MAPS FOR THESE TERRITORIES.

I liked it a lot. I even went back to see it a second time in theatrical release, which is unusual for me.

I thought it was more like Dick’s work than mine, though more coherent, saner, than I generally take Dick to have been. A Dickian universe with fewer moving parts (for Dick, I suspect, all of the parts were, always, moving parts). A Dickian universe with a solid bottom (or for the one film at least, as there’s no way of knowing yet where the franchise is headed). It’s thematically gnostic, something NEUROMANCER isn’t.

Whatever of my work may be there, it seems to me to have gotten there by exactly the kind of creative cultural osmosis I’ve always depended on myself. If there’s NEUROMANCER in THE MATRIX, there’s THE STARS MY DESTINATION and DHALGREN in NEUROMANCER, and much else besides, down to and including actual bits of embarrassingly undigested gristle. And while I was drawing directly from those originals, and many others, the makers of THE MATRIX were drawing through a pre-existing “cyberpunk” esthetic, which constituted as much of a found object, for them, as “science fiction” did for me. From where they were, they had the added luxury of choosing bits from, say, Billy Idol’s “Neuromancer” as well.

When I began to write NEUROMANCER, there was no “cyberpunk”. THE MATRIX is arguably the ultimate “cyberpunk” artifact. Or will be, if the sequels don’t blow. I hope they don’t, and somehow have a hunch they won’t, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to worry about it.

The other thing I’m glad of is that a film of NEUROMANCER, whatever else I might want it to be, definitely doesn’t, now, have to be THE MATRIX, or even anything very much like it.

And Charles is right about the New Rose Hotel, although Abel Ferrara's screenplay really only works off a Gibson's basic story line and the film seems more of an excuse for Christopher Walken to be....um, Christopher Walken and not much more (it's no King of New York, Ferrara's and Walken's previous collaboration).

But there's also Gibson's first draft of the Alien 3 script (in which Ripley gets killed off in the first couple of minutes and Hicks is the main character), which copies can be floating out on the net. Not the greatest thing ever, but certainly a lot more coherent that what Alien 3's prisoners making steel on an asteroid plot was.

Actually, Idoru is proabably the most Anime friendly of his stories given that one of the characters is virtual and one the protagonists is a teenage girl.

[amdg]

[amdg]

[Charles]

[Kuang_Grade]

Which one was the badass female companion in The Matrix? Molly was Case’]The Matrix[/i] Neo, as the man, and true to Hollywood form, has to be his chick’s protector.

While most films can be boiled down to any number of basic and common plot/subplot lines (say plot line A, subplot a) and character archetypes, it wouldn't be unusual for any two films/stories to share say plot line A OR plot line B AND character c OR character v ...I said there were common elements between the matrix and neuromancer. In this case, it seems more like plot line A AND plot line L AND subplot x AND character m AND subplot r are being shared. It's not any one part of it, it's all the little bits being added up. That and the fact that both call cyberspace “The Matrix”.

And if you want to get prissy about it, Molly protects Case exactly twice (at the knife fights at Sammi's and later a few pages later in Istanbul) but she spends most of her time bossing him around before going solo (but dependant on Case for information) for most of her wet work and Case mans up a tad. Trinity bosses around Neo, albeit more gently, holds her own (she's the first to kill an Agent), and seemingly brings Neo back to life with a kiss at the end of the first film (while risking her own life to save his). Trinity gets killed protecting Neo in the second (although he returns the favor of reviving her) and then she gets killed again in the third. If Neo is her protector, he did a pretty poor job of it. I should have written that both of them contain a "vastly more competent bad ass female companion".