Michael Bay's Next Sham Based on Work of a Fraud
A Million Little Explosions /
Dustin Rowles
Trade News | June 29, 2009 | Comments (13)
Dreamworks is finalizing a deal now that would acquire the rights to the sci-fi novel, I Am Number Four, for Michael Bay to produce and possibly direct. Steven Spielberg, as he’s done with the Transformers franchise, will play an active behind-the-scenes role in the production of the movie, which is about nine earthbound teenage aliens whose planet is destroyed by a hostile species. The teenagers manage to fit in at an American high school, but the title character — Number Four — discovers that he’s being hunted down by the alien folks that blew up his planet.
The real intrigue in this item, however, comes in knowing who one of the two authors of I Am Number Four is: Embattled author, James Frey. As you may recall, Frey published a memoir, A Million Little Pieces, with quite a few untruths in it and was subsequently sandbagged on national TV by Oprah Winfrey.
I actually have nothing against Frey. I loved A Million Little Pieces and its follow-up, My Friend Leonard. In fact, I thought his third book — A Bright, Shiny Morning — was his best work (although, it got slammed by several publications). I really dig the man’s writing style, whether he’s telling the truth or not. Plus, the guy’s brilliantly self-deprecating — in 2007, he worked as a fact-checker for Gawker one day, which is as close as an author can get to a celebrity involved in a scandal appearing on “SNL” to poke fun at him or herself. He earned my eternal forgiveness for that.
The point is: I have no idea whether Frey can write sci-fi, but I know he can write, but it doesn’t really matter how good the novel is, anyway because Michael Bay is sure to fuck it up. The end.
Comments
Posted by: Jerce at June 29, 2009 10:39 AM
1) I read a couple pages of Little Pieces (Amazon's "Look Inside!" feature is underappreciated by most people) and it was wellnigh UNREADABLE. There were sentence fragments. There were several sentence fragments on just two pages. There were other egregious crimes against the language. I don't see how anyone who writes as well as you could've liked writing like that.
2) As a rule, books with more than one author suck sewage out of an old pipe. There are a couple of exceptions (Gaiman/Pratchett), but when I see two authors' names on the cover of a book I can be reasonably certain that it is...not for me.
3) While the premise of the story sounds halfway interesting, adding Michael Bay to the formula leads me to quote the immortal Joe Bob Briggs: Nope.