Last week’s announcement of an Edgar Wright-directed adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley‘s Scott Pilgrim books was greeted enthusiastically by many — but it may not have been 100 percent correct.
Hold on, hold on — don’t get freaked out just yet. Yes, we’re going to have a Scott Pilgrim movie, yes, Wright is directing it, and yes, Michael Cera is starring in the title role. But the devil is in the details, as Pilgrim creator O’Malley learned firsthand. In a LiveJournal post published over the weekend, O’Malley summed up his experience succinctly: “The Hollywood Reporter prints a story hastily sent in by someone’s publicist. Nobody fact-checks anything. The rest of the Internet/world hastily copies the facts in the article into their own hastily-published articles. It’s amazing!”
After summing up the way the Web works in four sentences, O’Malley proceeded to fill fans in on what’s really going on with the Scott Pilgrim movie. First, although he “can ‘confirm’ that Michael Cera is going to play Scott Pilgrim,” he wants you to know that the film isn’t being called Scott Pilgrim’s Little Life (as The Hollywood Reporter announced) or even Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life (the title of the first book in the series). The real title is, unfortunately, still a mystery; as O’Malley puts it, “I defer to the film’s creators as to when and how they want to make their announcements.”
The Reporter isn’t the only source of erroneous Scott Pilgrim-related information, either. O’Malley refutes the IMDB‘s claim that the film doesn’t have a screenplay, saying he read the first draft in March of ’06, and that the second draft “was submitted in October, just before the writers’ strike.” He names Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright as the writers.
Perhaps most importantly, O’Malley says the Pilgrim movie will be “based on the entire story arc” of the series, “not just the first book,” and tells readers that they have “already diverged significantly” from the graphic novels, referring to the film as “a complimentary story, not an exact copy.”
One thing the original reports did get right, according to O’Malley, is Universal’s projected fall start date — so we should all get to see the end result sooner than later.
Source: Bryan Lee O’Malley
Source: Comics2Film
