Hi Ryan;

A nice and well-written piece. Rather than have to register and log in on the website in order to comment, I’ll place my comments here and you can reposition them where and as you prefer on the Gate page.

All of us grew up on Ray Harryhausen. I can’t count the number of times I saw the 7th Voyage of Sinbad . . . initially in a drive-in theater. So the opportunity to novelize one of his films was a particular delight.

As Ryan Harvey notes, there were a lot of changes in story and visuals while the film was finishing up. These are, naturally, the bane of the writer doing the book version of a film. They’re even more hand-wringing to the publisher, who is on a deadline for the book’s release. As Ryan notes in his article, the mythology in the film is hardly canon. But that never seemed to bother Harryhausen. What intrigued him were the potential visuals. His long-time producer Charlie Schneer confirmed this for me when we sat down for a discussion about the film prior to my getting to work on the book. “He’s not writing a text . . . he’s making a movie”, Charlie told me.

I thought the structure awkward, with jumping back and forth from the gods on Olympus to “real” life down on Earth. I always felt that way about everything from Homer to Herakles. If the gods can interfere in human existence any time they like, then what’s the point of trying to beat the odds? But since it was all about the visuals. . . .

There are contemporary analogues to this film-making approach that I need not point out.

I once asked Charlie why Ray didn’t do Lovecraft. Nowadays when Guillermo del Toro or whoever gets there first does HPL, it will all be CGI, but back then Ray was the only one who could have possibly done justice to Lovecraft’s visions. “All he wants to do is Greek mythology,” Charlie told me, in a tone that suggested that he personally was maybe just a little bit sick of Greek mythology and would have been delighted to essay something else.

A cinematic opportunity missed.

I hope this is useful to you, Ryan, and thanks for the kind words in the article regarding my work. As I recall, I had 3-4 weeks to do the book.

Regards,
Alan F