The Stars My Destination

[:eek:]

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures is talks to acquire the feature film rights for the classic sci-fi novel The Stars My Destination for producer Mary Parent. Written by Alfred Bester, the story (which often is referred to as Tiger! Tiger!) follows a man who is shipwrecked in space for years when one day a rescue crew passes him by. Angered, he channels his energies into seeking revenge and begins scheming. The key art of the book is enough to get anyone intrigued.

The Stars My Destination is considered one of the best science fiction stories of the genre, and if they can make a deal and get a movie made, it would an accomplishment. It has had a long history in trying to make it to screen with various people lining up at one point or another during the past two decades trying to make it, including reportedly Richard Gere, Paul W.S. Anderson and also Bernd Eichinger.
The story was written by Bester as part of a series of stories in a magazine back in 1956 and was said to be inspired by a National Geographic article about a shipwrecked sailor who was surviving on a raft but other ships wouldn’t help him because it was wartime and they assumed that it was a decoy to lure them in to be torpedoed by the Nazis.

Parent is currently the producer on live action/animation feature Monster Trucks, which bows Christmas Day from Paramount, and also on Same Kind Of Different As Me, which stars Renee Zellweger, Djimon Hounsou, Jon Voight and Greg Kinnear.

 

[Octoberist]

Why did it take THIS LONG?

 

[Gabe99]

io9 8/10/12:
100 Wonderful and Terrible Movies That Never Existed

8. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

According to Hughes' Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, Richard Gere owned the rights to this novel right after his success with Pretty Woman, and wanted to star in it. Later, NeverEnding Story producer Bernd Eichinger had the rights and hired Neal Adams to do concept art. Still later, Paul W.S. Anderson was set to direct it, but wound up doing Event Horizon instead. Since then, a number of scripts have been written, but the film's gotten no closer to happening.

The Top Sci-Fi Movies You’ll Never See (Part 6) Apr 19, 2012:
This week: Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination . . .

WHO’S INVOLVED? Producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura (Transformers, G.I. Joe), scriptwriter Daniel Pyne (Alcatraz, Manchurian Candidate).

LAST WE HEARD: In 2006 Universal Studios picked up the rights for the movie adaption and placed Di Bonaventura in charge of production. One year later asked by aintitcoolnews.com on the project’s progress, he answered:

“… it’s in development; the writer’s working on it right now. Its greatest challenge, I’ll say, is its ending; as phenomenal as it is in the book, it is completely un-cinematic and so that’s the thing that we’re going to struggle with for a long time, figuring out how to execute the emotional construct of that ending.

The ideas behind it… the expansiveness… there’s bold thinking that is impossible to figure out, I’ll say, on a construction level how to do it, how you do it emotionally, so we’re underway and… fingers crossed. I knew, when I got involved with that book, that the third act was always going to be, from a movie point of view, the most complicated and difficult thing, because the book doesn’t help you get there.”

Daniel Pyne, this aforementioned writer, on the other hand stated in the biography part of his homepage, ” … recently completed adapting the Alfred Bester sci-fi classic, The Stars My Destination (only to have it spiral into turnaround hell), and my first novel, Twentynine Palms, was published by Counterpoint Press eighteen months ago.”

So it seems that active development had stopped around the same time Pyne’s novel was published, which would be June 2010.

Mr. Di Bonaventura is still pretty busy producing movies but doesn’t have an IMDb.com entry for The Stars My Destination within the next two years, so Gully Foyle is once again lost in space, waiting at another movie opportunity to pass by.

WHY IT’D BE GREAT: It’s the proto-cyberpunk version of The Count of Monte Cristo, a classic revenge story now set in the 25th century, with teleportation thrown in as a bonus.

Gully Foyle is a flawed and driven anti-hero in a dark future ruled by mighty corporations and makes Snake Plisken look pale in comparison. The Stars My Destination has unique twists and visually strong and imaginative passages, which could look awesome on the big screen, if handled properly.

THE PROBLEM: No word from Di Bonaventura if he’s still attached or not, he might not be the right guy for a true adaption of the book anyway. He’s obviously great at producing action packed blockbuster stuff, but would probably sacrifice the complex and dense story for a handful of explosions easily. Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky that Gully Foyle won’t have his revenge on the big screen anytime soon.

CHANCES OF GETTING MADE: Uncertain, but Gully Foyle is still out there.

 

[:eek:]

David DiGilio To Script ‘The Stars My Destination’ Based On Sci-Fi Classic

http://deadline.com/2015/12/the-sta...tation-lands-writer-david-digilio-1201648362/