and on a more depressing note

[selenak]

I seem to have done something wrong with my Yuletide nominations. I just checked whether or not they were accepted, and they came across as unsent altogether. :(

ETA: Thankfully, I worried for naught. I was instructed on how to look properly, and lo, the nominations were sent. PHEW.

Also I just returned from a great matinee celebrating Michael Ende (the writer) and his father, the painter Edgar Ende (the occasion is the 20th anniversary of Michael's death and the 40th of Edgar's), and while the matinee itself was fabulous, a great mixture of prose text excerpts and songs written by Michael Ende together with anecdotes by his illustrator and friend, plus an exhibition of Edgar's paintings, I learned something terribly sad. Now I've known ever since his original indignant interviews back in the 80s that Michael Ende despised and hated (the later term is not too strong in this case) the movie version of The Never-Ending Story, but I hadn't known until today there was an additional reason for this beyond "author despises film version of work due to it getting all he cares about completely wrong". Michael Ende and his wife, actress Ingeborg Hoffmann, lived in Genzano di Roma, and when the movie The Never-Ending Story hit the local cinema, Ende told his wife "you don't have to watch it" - he himself had done so at a preview in Munich, and had been vocally appalled - "but if you must, it's here now, it'll probably be your last chance". She went and watched. And got so upset that she got a pulmonary embolism and died. She literally got transported out of the cinema by the ambulance to her deathbed in the hospital.

There are a lot of authors who feel wronged by translations of their work into other media, and you might agree or disagree with this, but this event certainly sets a kind of morbid record for "author's life ruined by film based on his work"....

Comments

[lonelywalker]

I think you may be looking at the wrong page. Click on "Back to Yuletide 2015 Tag Set" at the top right of the page. Then click "My Nominations".

[selenak]

Hallelujah! And phew. Thank you so much.

[lonelywalker]

Hurrah! I had exactly that same moment of panic.

[the_rck]

I think the nomination page may always look like you need to send it. If you go to the nominations page and the stuff you nominated is listed already, you sent it. If you didn't send it, it would have vanished completely when you left the page originally.

[selenak]

Did just that, and lo, they're sent. Phew. THANK YOU for calming me down.

[monanotlisa]

Oh dear, that IS a terrible turn of events (I'm not a fan of the movie myself; it flattens what's a layered and lovely book (and no, it's not just the medium, because with the exception of the rapes that made me stop watching Game of Thrones managed the transition very well)).

[selenak]

Agreed about the medium. Though I wouldn't call GoT a good comparison because a tv series has far more narrative space than a movie. (Come to think of tv shows: Michael Ende's own favourite among versions of his books in another medium was the tv version the Augsburger Puppenkiste did of Jim Knopf. *hums the Lummerland song*) I can think of a couple of well done transitions within the limits of one film, too, though.

reNeverending Story the movie, if you cast a thin attractive kid as Bastian and end your movie in a way that directly breaks one of the most essential rules (creatures from Phantásien can NOT get to our world other than via the Nothing, i.e. by becoming lies) previously established, which is indeed one of the key reason why Bastian has to come from our world to Phantásien, in favour of a lame scene where Bastian, riding Fuchur, hunts down the school bullies, it's means you never grasped several of the core points. Not to mention that revenge is so very anti Ende. This is the writer who redeems Frau Mahlzahn the Dragon, for God's sake. That's why I never looked further than the movie itself as an explanation for Ende's feelings towards it.

....and it's such an awful way to lose your wife of decades. Not that there's a good way, but you know what I mean. And for her, who was her husband's first reader and critic and deeply involved in his work, to have to spend her last conscious hour like that.

[nenya_kanadka]

Holy shit.

[selenak]

Bloody awful. Makes one almost believe in curses.