by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/05/21 00:59 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/05/20/603011.aspx
(Nothing technical in this post?)
I suppose it was probably a long shot that Love Monkey was ever going to be continued. I think I have gone through all the stages of grief about the whole thing (a task made much easier by the fact that I did not have a whole lot to bargain with!).
I decided to re-read the book today, and did it from cover to cover, including the interview at the end which I had skipped first time around.
And I was reminded that
I'll stop there for a moment to point out that putting Ivana Miličević in for Julia did something really weird for me since I had mentally put in an amalgam of no fewer than three women who were in my life various pieces of Tom's Julia (which is not to say that Julia was ever really Tom's in the book). In any case, none of those women who I was thinking of as "my Julia" was an Ivana Miličević.
But music was central even to the book, so removing the Tabloid an adding the whole record label thing allowed it to be even closer to the center. And the show was still very cool, and I thought so before Aimee's part in episode 4. :-)
But after looking at the High Fidelity movie that transplanted Rob Gordon from Britain to Chicago yet was a fairly faithful to the plot elements of Nick Hornby's story (the one major scene that was missing ended up on the DVD extras!), I can't help but wonder whether a Love Monkey that was closer to Kyle Smith's original vision would have done better in a TV show. Or a movie.
When I think about all of the pieces of the book that hit me, from Dwayne to Liesl to 9/11 to Bran to the Tabloid to Katie to Rollo to of course to Julia, I can almost convince myself that it would be awesome. And the book did well so a movie would too, right?
I can almost talk myself into it. I mean, if I can't tell my 9/11 story or my Julia stories or my Liesl stories then I can at least see a movie with them, right?
Unfortunately, though I would probably see the movie over 100 times within the first few years of its release, the folks in Hollywood probably need a bigger demographic than me, myself, and I.... :-)