Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Allen Steele's "V-S Day," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: V-S Day by Allen Steele.

The entry begins:
It's not hard at all to see V-S Day becoming a movie. In no small way, this book springs from a past attempt to do just that.

One of my first published stories was "Goddard's People," an alternate-history story about what might have happened if the Space Race had occurred during World War II, with Robert H. Goddard and Wernher von Braun as the antagonists. As I explain in a long afterword to the novel, the story was originally intended to be a novel, but for various reasons I decided instead to reduce it to short-fiction length. After it was published in 1991, the story was twice optioned for the movies. The first time, I wrote the screenplay myself, expanding the original story (which took the form of pseudo-journalism) by expanding and dramatizing the major scenes while also adding new ones . The screenplay went through several drafts, but ultimately went nowhere; the producer-director who optioned "Goddard's People" was unable to find studio interest, so in the end it wound up in my file cabinet, where it remained for the next decade or so (the second time the story was optioned, I had nothing to do with the production; this attempt failed as well).

A couple of years ago, while searching my files for something else entirely, I stumbled upon the screenplay, and out of curiosity I pulled it out and re-read it. It was then that I realized that...[read on]
Learn more about the book and author at Allen Steele's website.

My Book, The Movie: V-S Day.

--Marshal Zeringue