Alan Moore doesn’t approve of Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen show—”F*** you; I’m doing it anyway”
By Dan Selcke
Alan Moore is a legendary comics creator responsible for classics like V For Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke, From Hell, and many more. He had a big hand in shaping what the industry is today.
He is also a legendary curmudgeon. He’s famously disowned pretty much every screen adaptation of his work, and has pretty much disowned modern superhero stories in general. “I think it’s a rather alarming sign if we’ve got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s,” he told The Guardian back in 2013. Moore has opinions.
Given all that, it isn’t even a little surprising that Moore isn’t on board with Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof’s upcoming “remix” of Watchmen, Moore’s seminal 1986 comic that grounded superheroes in the real world. HBO is hoping the upcoming show will become one of its tentpole dramas, but Moore’s name is nowhere on it.
“I don’t think I have made peace with it [using Moore’s work when Moore himself doesn’t like seeing it adapted],” Lindelof said at the Television Critics Association press tour. “He has made it clear he wants no ongoing affiliation, and to not use his name to get people to watch it. I made personal overtures to explain what we are doing, and he declined. As someone who has a very complicated relationship with my dad — I constantly need to prove myself to my father – Alan Moore is now my surrogate dad with this. I love [that] Alan has a punk rock spirit. I’m channeling his spirit to tell him, ‘F*** you; I’m doing it anyway.’”
“It remains the case that he is not thrilled,” added HBO programming president Casey Bloys. I’m just going to assume that’s a polite understatement and that Moore actually did something more akin to screaming at Lindelof to take his bad ideas and get off his lawn.
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In terms of what we’re actually going to get from HBO’s Watchmen, Lindelof is taking big swings. For those concerned, the show won’t change anything about the original comic. “We are not going to mess with it, it’s canon,” Lindelof said. The new show will take place some time after the end of that story, with Ozymandias (Jeremy Irons) quite a bit older, Dr. Manhattan living off planet, a masked police force, and a violent cult has sprung up around the dead hero Rorschach. Also there is no internet or smartphones and Robert Redford plays the longest sitting president in American history. “It is not supposed to be a world that you recognize to Trojan horse themes that are in a real world in a fictional one,” Lindelof said. “What is actual history and what is alt-history and things start to get blended in the middle.”
It’s a little odd that he made that comment about not wanting to Trojan horse themes from our world into this fictional one, because it sounds like he’s thinking about that kind of stuff. “What in 2019 is the equivalent of the nuclear standoff between the Americans and the Russians?” he asked, referring to the Cold War conflict that dominated Moore’s original story. “It is race and the police.”
“There is no defeating white supremacy — it’s not going away,” Lindelof continued, referring to the hate groups featured in the nine-episode first season. “There are no easy answers and grandiose solution.”
OKAY. So it sounds like Lindelof could be playing with fire here. I can see this show raising a few eyebrows when it drops, but Lindelof isn’t sweating it:
"One of things I learned from Lost is, fans have demands — but they also want to be surprised. I get confused by the term ‘fan service.’ Is it a good thing or a bad thing? It all depends on execution. My job is to please me, and the people I am making it with. If I woke up having to make decisions to make fans happy every day, I don’t think I could do it."
Damon Lindelof, punk rock showrunner. We’ll see how well that plays when Watchmen premieres in October.
Next. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s final shot will “melt your mind”. dark
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