March 8, 2009

Movie vs. Maxi Series

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Matt Yglesias saw Watchmen last night and says:

All-in-all, I’m torn between immense admiration for the film and regret that it was done as a movie at all. In retrospect, I kind of wish we’d instead gotten a 12 part HBO maxi-series that was really uncompromising and didn’t leave anything out.

You could think that about a lot of movies, couldn’t you? And I have! Which is a little odd since I don’t subscribe to HBO and wouldn’t get to see any of these maxi-series ideas if they actually got made.

Watchmen, of course, would present a challenge here. At least I think it would. The problem is that the original chapters are pretty self-contained and it really would make sense to keep them that way. So, one episode per chapter. Unfortunately, that would require a fair amount of padding. Most of the chapters just don’t have enough substance to take up an hour of screen time.

So a movie it is. I haven’t seen it yet, so I have no comment on how it turned out. But I’m looking forward to it even though the reviews so far have been pretty lukewarm. I don’t think I’ll be buying a Rorschach doll any time soon, though.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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