Kurtzman & Orci On Screenwriting, Khan And… Viewmasters?
2 min readScreenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci this week spoke about the way they craft film stories even as they signed on for what may be their unlikeliest project yet… a film adaptation of the popular 1980s toy the View-Master.
According to an article in the Hollywood Reporter, Kurtzman and Orci would merely be producing the View-Master film, for which Fringe writer Brad Caleb Kane would be writing the script. “It’ll be like the old ’80s Amblin movies: Goonies, Young Sherlock … in that vein,” Kane reportedly wrote in a Twitter post before later taking it down. It’s not known what kind of story could be based on a toy that’s essentially nothing more than a way to watch a slide show, but Kurtzman and Orci already have some experience adapting toys into best-selling movies, as they’re also responsible for the Transformers franchise.
Besides the View-Master film, Kurtzman and Orci will also be working on the next Star Trek film, scheduled to be released in 2011. Speaking to the Welland Tribune, they pondered whether to introduce a new villian for the film or go for an established character like Khan. Orci said someone like Khan would immediately attract the attention of “the media-sphere,” and the article went on to float Javier Bardem as a possible actor who could play the role. “[On] the other hand,” Orci said, “who doesn’t love an original story?”
Finally, Screen International recently posted a long profile of the writers, tracking their career from Hercules and Xena to their current status as Hollywood’s hot-shot writers. In the article, they compared Transformers, which they brought to the big screen for the first time, to Star Trek, for which they had to deal with a large amount of established background material. “You’ve had 10 movies, five TV shows, novels, comics, 43 years of stuff and with that we had to make sure it was a story worth telling. Fortunately there was this unbelievable gap in the Star Trek history of how Kirk and Spock and the Enterprise crew come together.”
For insights from the two writers on how they approached many of their other film projects, please head over to the full article at ScreenDaily.com.
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