George R.R. Martin told a packed New York crowd that the in-development adaptation of his Wild Card series will “maybe happen, but not today.”
Martin gave the update while answering a question from moderator and horror author Joe Hill about the series’ status as part of a spotlight panel hosted on Saturday at New York Comic Con. Martin later clarified that it wasn’t because he wasn’t invested in Wild Cards. “I had a post a month or so ago about this where I just [said], ‘Yes, I do love Winds of Winter. I haven’t lost interest in it. I’m still working on it, but honestly, I love these other things, too. I don’t have any kids. Some of you probably have kids. Maybe you have more than one kid, Johnny and Freddie and Susie. Maybe some of them become coke heads, and you still love them. I love Wild Cards.”
Martin spoke about the series adaptation while answering a fan question about imposter syndrome. He once again addressed the internet uproar over his incomplete Winds of Winter book, noting it kicks up whenever there is an update or announcement about his other projects.
“I came out of Beauty and the Beast, and I was in development for five years,” while recalling his journey as a screenwriter, the second of what he describes as two career failures. “I did a number of feature film scripts that you’ve never seen, and I created a number of shows that you’ve never seen… But I was tired of nothing actually being made. I don’t want to write for four guys in a room. I want people to know these characters and these worlds and stories. I do fall in love with them, so I went back to prose.”
He continued: “The TV-film thing reached a certain level, but I couldn’t seem to get beyond that. I couldn’t seem to get my own show on here. Now, of course, the weird thing that’s happening is people are buying all those old things and making movies and TV shows about them. And every time one of those happens, and I announce it on my website, half the internet goes crazy. ‘Why the fuck is George R.R. Martin writing this other thing? I want to say, ‘I did it in 1993, guys. Come on. It was lying in my drawer, and they wanted it.”
At another point in the panel, Martin also addressed headlines around how he talks about one of his greatest influences, J.R.R. Tolkien, telling the crowd, “The internet is constantly running these stories, ‘George R.R. Martin blasts Tolkien.’ Tolkien is the most influential writer in my life.” He added, “No matter how much you love a writer, you don’t want to just duplicate him. That’s not creative at all. You want to bring your own thoughts. So when I say Gandalf should have stayed dead, that’s not an attack, that’s a discussion of literary choice.”
While Martin appeared on the panel at New York Comic Con, he spoke extensively about the literary origins of his characters Dunk and Egg, who lead the new Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, his career spanning TV and books, his comics, fantasy and historical fiction influences, why he doesn’t like the “silly Batman period in which you had the stupid TV show,” how he helped get the AMC Dark Winds series to the screen, and more.
It would be towards the end of the panel when Martin took a fan question about his involvement in the critically acclaimed AMC show, with the author regaling how a weekly gathering of authors at the Albuquerque press club in the late ‘70s introduced him to Tony Hillerman, the writer behind the Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Navajo Tribal Police mystery series.
According to Martin, Hillerman’s agent sold film and TV rights to one studio, and they prevented Hillerman from writing a fifth book with his Joe Leaphorn character, something that “needless to say, Tony was pretty pissed off to discover that they were not just going to make movies of existing books, but they thought they own the character now — and they did own the character.” Hillerman would fire his agent, and the studio would never make the movie, so the rights would ultimately revert back to the author, opening the door for Robert Redford — a fan of the late Hillerman — to swoop in.
“He produced a Joe Leaphorn feature film, which he hoped to release to theaters and start a whole James Bond-like thing. But unfortunately, it didn’t turn out as well as he had hoped, so he couldn’t get a distributor. He couldn’t get a theatrical release. They wound up doing that one direct-to-video. Then he sold three more of the Leaphorn books to PBS, and it was made for television movies. Those turned out better. Those had West Studi as Joe Leaphorn,” Martin recalled.
‘But then that deal went away, he said. He was then contacted by Redford’s people around 2005, and “also Chris Eyre, who had directed several of these things, and was probably the leading Native American director in the country,” he continued. “They invited me to lunch, and when the Sundance Kid invites you to lunch, you go to lunch.” Martin noted they approached him to help sell it to HBO because he had an overall deal with the network and a connection to Hillerman, and thus hoped he could help them “get it going as a TV series.”
The scribe says he, Redford and Eyre “interviewed a lot of potential screenwriters, and we put together a package for the show, went in and pitched it to HBO, and HBO bought it, and we continued to develop it and work it and then film it, but HBO did not pick it up to series, to our disappointment. They thought it was too similar to True Detective.” After passing, the trio got the rights back and looked to the Sundance Network. “We thought they might like it, and they did, so that’s how it wound up on AMC,” Martin said. “It’s a great show, and I’m glad I could do my little bit of opening doors, being part of it, and reviewing some of the scripts and all that, but I’m not involved in that.”
Speaking specifically to the late actor, producer, advocate, and film festival founder, “Redford was fucking amazing. It was an honor just to meet him and his wife, [Sibylle Szaggars],” Martin said. “All of these things that he did left such an imprint on the world. He left the world a better place than he found it.”
As part of a weaving conversation that touched on his expansion writing around books like A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and more, Martin noted how he blew a deadline on that first set of books, “a first sign of difficulties ahead,” before nearly blowing a deadline on the 1998 anthology that birthed Dunk and Egg’s journey. With his entry for Legends: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy, Martin noted that his Dunk and Egg novella almost got cut by editor Robert Silverberg due to Martin being behind.
“It was September or something, and he sent me an email saying, ‘I hear that you’re way behind on your book. You couldn’t fit the whole one in. You had to do another book, and now you’re late on that one. This anthology got a really big advance, and the publisher is very serious about wanting it in by the last day of the year. I cannot be late, because then they’ll take some money away,’ or something like that. ‘So I’m going to have to drop you from the series because I hear you’re running late,’” Martin recalled. “That was very traumatic.”
Martin said instead of backing down, he looked at his contract and told the editor he couldn’t drop him. “I’m not late yet, so you can’t drop me from the book, and if you did, you have to pay me all this money,” he said. “I insisted that I remain in the book, and I continued to write… Silvera had actually already replaced me. I don’t know with whom, but that’s why, if you look at Legends, it has 11 stories in it.”
“I finished it barely in time that week between Christmas and New Year’s,” he added. “The interesting thing about that is, like two, three other writers also got their stories in on the last day of the year. So I may not have been the one that they were worried about.”
As part of the hour-long discussion, Martin also spoke candidly about several low points in his career, including after his book The Armageddon Rag didn’t sell, and how The Twilight Zone and screenwriting pulled him out of it. “I’d bought a house and a new car,” he said. “That was the pretty bad period here. I, at one point, thought we would lose our house. And I was getting more credit cards. I had good credit, so I could always get credit cards, but then the debt got higher and higher. Fortunately, around the same time, I got an invitation to work for television by [Philip DeGuere Jr.].”
He continued: “A few years later, Phil revived The Twilight Zone. He said, ‘You want to do a script? And I said, ‘Yeah. I don’t know how to do a script. I’ve never seen a script, but I have watched television… So I did. I wound up writing five episodes of The Twilight Zone in the mid-80s.”
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