One of the uncomfortable truths about Game of Thrones is that the production of the HBO television series based on George R.R. Martin’s beloved books is outpacing the production of said books by a significant margin. What this means is that at some point in the very near future, the TV show may catch the books and blow by them in a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote style situation. To deal with this issue — namely, the thing where the show’s child stars are rapidly outgrowing their roles, and if they wait for Martin to finish all the books before filming, 11-year-old Arya Stark could be spouting gray hairs by the finale — the show’s co-executive producers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, sat down with Martin last year to map out the rest of series, as they explain in this month’s Vanity Fair cover story.
“Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him [Martin] and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be. If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character.” Martin tells [Vanity Fair contributing editor Jim] Windolf, “I can give them the broad strokes of what I intend to write, but the details aren’t there yet. I’m hopeful that I can not let them catch up with me.”
Now, this isn’t exactly “new” news, as die-hard Game of Thrones obsessives probably already knew that this was the plan. But I just wanted to bring it up again today to address three points:
- If George R.R. Martin doesn’t want the TV series to catch him, he better start CRANKING out some dragon prose, pronto. After publishing the first three books between 1996 and 2000, the most recent two have been much more spaced out, with one dropping — Do books “drop” like rap albums? Discuss — in 2005 and the other six years later in 2011. Producers of the show reiterated in the Vanity Fair article that they’d ideally wrap up the series in “seven or eight seasons,” and at their current one-season-per-calendar-year pace (which they really can’t slow down for the reasons mentioned above), this puts the show’s end date somewhere around 2017 or 2018, at the latest. So, even if Martin releases the next book, The Winds of Winter, sometime later this year, he’ll still have to turn this last one around in about two years to give the show time to adapt it for television and film it. Doable? Yes. But he best get to steppin’.
- It was probably a lot easier to pump out 1500-page books every 24 months before he was World Famous Author George R.R. Martin, with a travel and appearance schedule befitting his new status. (And, as the banner picture of this post illustrates, who the hell can blame him?)
- What if he gave them some terrible, fake ending — “Yeah, and then the spaceship comes down like … [makes Jetsons flying car noise with mouth] … and everyone puts on sunglasses and is all ‘What took you so long?’ — and then puts the “real” one in the books?
I kind of hope that last thing happens. It would be madness.
Source: Vanity Fair
