On this week’s episode of 3rd and Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, the guests are developers-showrunners Dan Dworkin & Jay Beattie (whose works include The Crossing and Matador. They talk about about bringing Dan Brown’s novel The Lost Symbol to the TV screen for Peacock’s new action-adventure series. This was the third in the series of Brown’s novels featuring Robert Langdon that began with The Da Vinci Code. On a totally personal note, I have a few comments about the book. (To repeat, this is about the book, not the mini-series adaptation.) As it happens, I accidentally read the book out of order, and instead read Inferno (which was subsequently made into a movie) before this. That’s just as well, because The Lost Symbol was the first of his Langdon books that I totally hated. To be clear, there’s much of the story that I thought was terrific and wonderfully adventurous, full of fun puzzles. But it veers off in certain directions that were, for me, so head-numbingly unbelievable – even in a Dan Brown World where you suspend disbelief for the pure fun of it – that they had me rolling my eyes, gritting my teeth and snarling. So much so that I lost interest in the book series, and didn’t read the latest, Origins. In fact, had I read them in order, I suspect that I wouldn’t have read Inferno. Actually, it was lucky I read Inferno out of order because, while I generally enjoyed it a lot throughout, I hated the ending – indeed I hated the ending so much that I only saw the movie after being assured by a friend who saw it that the filmmakers showed great wisdom and changed the end. In this podcast Dworkin & Beattie say they did make changes for The Lost Symbol, as well, throughout the production, though I don’t know about what, whether it's the things I thought were so awful or just others things for structural reasons. To be fair, and to acknowledge that this is all personal taste, the interviewer on the podcast enthuses that The Lost Symbol is his favorite book in the series. (Go figure…) I look forward to hearing from others who watch the series how this adaptation is different from the book. Though even if they fixed every one of the problems (to me), I still haven’t decided if I’ll watch. (For those specifically interested in conversation about the adaptation, that begins around the 24-minute mark.) I know this is tangential to the podcast here, but…well, I hated the book so much I thought it worth adding.
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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