[Public-List] Aubrey & Maturin

Thu Oct 25 05:53:52 PDT 2018

While the feature film was being made, there was talk of making three… The title of the film was changed during the final stages of post production work (editing) in order for it to stand as part of a series title.   We made the film under the title ‘Far Side of the World’, the book most of the script was adapted from; That was changed to ‘Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World’, the thought being that a series would adopt the title Master and Commander from the first book.    I and some others were displeased with the new title which was inevitably shortened to ‘Master and Commander’… the film had nothing whatsoever to do with the story line in that book.

The end of the film was also tweaked to leave a hanging plot line… that being the discovery that the French ship’s captain was actually alive and likely fomenting a rebellion aboard the prize… that bit of story wasn’t in the series by O’Brian at all, it was made up to create that hanging plot line…

People watched the critical first weekend sales in the USA and Canada… if the film had crossed a critical threshold that would have been the trigger to go for a second film… but it didn’t happen.  Ticket sales fell short so after three weeks in the theatres word came to us to stand down.  The sets were kept intact for about a year or so… as were the props and set decorating collections… but eventually the location at Fox Baja were struck and other items dispersed.    

Rumours kept surfacing that the idea of a series was alive again, some more recent than the article in Atlantic George sent.   My practice has been to ignore them if they came from mainstream media or were in the form of historical reenactors gossip… but occasionally a hint would come from higher in the food chain.  When those infrequently happened, I contacted senior studio executives, one in particular who was a great fan of the novels.   The last time an apparently credible rumour surfaced he told me ‘it just didn’t do well enough for us to go there again… but we do sometimes like to make films we are proud of’.    Well that’s high praise I think.  We all worked very hard to make that film one we were proud of.

So aside from all that, all of us moved on to other projects.   I went into a spate of Great War documentaries and somehow that led to doing consulting work on the SurvivorMan TV series (Les Stroud has remained a friend and actually we expect him here at our place tomorrow night when he’s in town in connection with his music tour).   The feature films keep rolling along, documentaries in between.   As I wrote earlier, I currently doing a feature film set at sea just after the peak of the Battle of the Atlantic… I’ve been working on that one for 13 months now.  I hope it’ll turn out well, there are certainly a lot of very talented people doing their best to make it so.

So there’s a long rambling message… M&C wasn’t my first film, and I didn’t retire after it… and I don’t think there’ll be another based on the Aubrey stories happening soon.  But yes, it would be fun and I do still read and re-read those books.  Funny thing is that after production and release of that film, I couldn’t read the books for pleasure for a long time.  I kept coming across things I’d feel we should have included or depicted some way other than we did… and I couldn’t watch the film and see it as a smoothly progressing story - I’d see it as 370-odd separate scenes tacked together with a lot of work happening to produce each one.   But that’s normal after making a film, and has worn off.   Although M&C is a story 15 years old now, I still get asked sometimes to talk about it.  One time was at a university in Buffalo.  My hosts thought I’d be sick of the movie so planned to feed me a very nice supper while the auditorium full of students watched the movie… I was crestfallen that we couldn’t watch the film with them.  That would have been my last chance to see it on the big screen with theatre sound.  Maybe some day there’ll be another opportunity.

Gord
#426 Surprise

PS I named my boat BEFORE the film… she’s named mostly for the ship in the series of novels, partly because the year I bought her I as hired aboard the production of a film called The Crossing starring Jeff Daniels, about the 1775 crossing the Delaware event during the American Revolution.  In short order my beloved wooden boat suddenly sold to the first person who came to see her, and my role in The Crossing expanded to make funds suddenly available to buy an Alberg 30 which suddenly came for sale at the same marina Touch Wood was wintering in…. What else could I call the new boat but SURPRISE?

> On Oct 25, 2018, at 7:54 AM, Jay Davenport via Public-List <public-list at lists.alberg30.org> wrote:
> 
> Yes, yes, yes. Such a series, well done, would be incredible. Jay Davenport
> Please direct all email to jay at saildriver.com
> 
>      From: George Dinwiddie via Public-List <public-list at lists.alberg30.org>
> To: Alberg 30 Public List -- open to all <public-list at lists.alberg30.org> 
> Cc: George Dinwiddie <gdinwiddie at alberg30.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 11:10 PM
> Subject: [Public-List] Aubrey & Maturin
> 
> Gord,
> 
> I was wondering if you'd seen this: 
> https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/the-next-great-tv-show-if-only-someone-will-make-it/403837/ 
> Maybe you'll have to come out of retirement. ;-)
> 
>   - George
> 
> -- 
>   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>   When I remember bygone days                        George Dinwiddie
>   I think how evening follows morn;            gdinwiddie at alberg30.org
>   So many I loved were not yet dead,          http://www.Alberg30.org
>   So many I love were not yet born.                          also see:
>                 'The Middle' by Ogden Nash    http://idiacomputing.com
>   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
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