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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7732495" data-attributes="member: 4937">The dialogue of the screenplay of Heavenly Creatures was just a word for word treatment of every word that had been released from the diaries of the two girls during the trial.  It's the purest lift of someone else's words I've ever seen.  It's the only time I've seen pure quotation not be plagiarism, and I accept that it is not plagiarism, but it doesn't prove his chops as a writer.   It's the literary equivalent of Duchamp's 'Fountain', and he got away with it (just like Duchamp).As above the normal grade b-rate gore fests.  The really amazing thing is that he managed to get someone to trust him to film it as thin as his credentials were before LotR.   I personally never considered it unfilmable.  There are plenty of texts that are nearly unfilmable, but Tolkien doesn't employ any literary devices that are difficult to film (compare 'Dune', which is much harder to write a screenplay for since most of it occurs in the minds of the characters through internal monologue).  I did consider that it needed a 9 hour run time, which he amazingly manage to get approved.What he's been doing since then is taking stories that don't need long run times and trying to give them long run times, which only reinforces to me that he hadn't a clue what he was doing, he just lucked into something.  Even within the LotR, there are numerous times he clearly fails to understand when less is more (such as his strange fascination with exaggerated vertical distortion, that is, so many tall and skinny things to make them 'big') or his famous demands for a bigger flail for the Witch King.  He lucked into a story where that worked some of the time, but he has no idea why.UPDATE: I don't want to get in a long debate on this.  My core point is that I wouldn't tap Peter Jackson to helm any film I wanted to succeed.And further, that I've been in this debate on the internet several times before, and have always felt subsequently vindicated.  After 'Sixth Sense' came out, I got in a debate with someone that argued that MNS was the best director in Hollywood, particularly calling him out as being "so subtle".   I had a good laugh and said he'd written a terrific script, gotten a great cast, and filmed a good movie, but that the directing was nothing special.   I feel vindicated by later events since them.   When LotR came out, I said, great cast, great music, great art direction, unbelievably good costuming, but mediocre script and terrible direction.   And I feel vindicated by later events for having that opinion as well.</blockquote>

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