It is important to remember that the civilization in most Westerns stories is Victorian ... socially repressive, morally strict, and limiting of thought and entrepreneurship. It's rarely mentioned but this is what the "Wild West" was rubbing up against and what people who came west were trying to escape from.

TSR was a response to Doug's not being able to revitalize The Sackett's franchise because of some contract and partnership issues. If memory has got this right, Verne Nobles ended up in partnership with manager Dennis Durney, who was connected with Selleck, Elliot, and Sackett screenwriter Jim Byrnes. After some discussion with Dad they decided they would try to do an end run around the Sackett problem. Dad wrote an outline on a napkin while at lunch at the Beverly Hills hotel and they got started.

My take on it is that it is no great shakes as a movie but it did cash in on the energy of the great cast upping the game with others from The Sacketts and people like Katherine Ross and Geoff Lewis.

There are aspects of Byrnes writing I love. There's a scene with one of the bad guys and a prostitute in The Sacketts that freaking had me on the floor: Him: What's your name? Her: De-lila! Him: "... don't talk." But then there's all that "big brother/ little brother" crud that feels like Bonanza.

Probably the best part and the worst part of The Sacketts was using a great cast of younger actors and a great cast of older actors ... it's just that the old guys, many of them the "bad" guys, were too old to be scary.

TSR suffered greatly from an executive at the network ordering the script to be cut "because Sam Elliot talks slow." Yeah, maybe a little slow, but not the sort of slow you cut a script over. But that's the way it goes. They are the boss and when they have a dumb idea everyone suffers ... except them because their name is not on the picture. Anyway, every damn thing we shot, good or bad, had to be thrown into TSR to try to make it long enough ... that's not the way to make a good movie. Its much better if there is so much good stuff you have to leave other good stuff on the editing room floor!

There were similar things that happened in TDOJ. I wrote several drafts of the script under the authority of one executive then another took over and started working to remove everything his predecessor and touched. Then other people jumped in to try to demonstrate that they had the power to change the script (a common political battle on movies unless you have a producer who cares and has the power to stop them) we left for Australia with the script in tatters.

They hired another writer who was ordered to make certain (idiotic) changes. He did but, surprise, surprise, the execs didn't like them because ... they were idiotic. At the last minute the director did a cut and paste edit of all the old drafts to construct some sort of script. As shooting started I found that I could have conversations with some of the actors and, as a last minute "fix", get some of the stuff that was needed to make it all work back in. Other actors would take the opportunity to tear everything apart to fulfill their own ego or to show that they had the power to do so (as above).

Other writing challenges showed up because of budgetary constraints but this is expected just needs to be dealt with. The waterfall scene in the beginning was created because we didn't have the money to travel to a big enough river to stage a canoe wreck in fast water. None of us liked it because it suggests that the Borneo interior might be too dangerous for tourists but we had to have Kardec lose his diamonds and meed Raj.

Jeru was originally an older man and we even cast a rather evil looking, and quite old looking, guy who was into marshal arts. But as we were creating the schedule we realized that we would only have 2 days to shoot the Kardec/Jeru fight ... not long enough to shoot all the little details that prove Jeru is a master at fighting with a parang (machete). Without those we were worried that it would look like Billy Zane was beating up a little old man. Thus Jeru became a 6'7" 300lb Maori in his late 30s.

So there's stupid reasons movies change, not just from the original work but from the script, and there are practical ones. All of them happen on most movies, the question is do they do serious damage or not?

Movies and books are totally different mediums. What you do in one cannot be done in another. Dad's short story of Jeru and my novella of Jeru were first person from the point of view of Kardec. This was NEVER going to make a good movie, let alone one that was long enough. My film script added in scenes with the John and Helen Lacklan and rounded out the story a good deal. Films are generally third person point of view. In the Audio of The Diamond of Jeru, I was able to add in a good deal of detail about the Borneo native characters, to the point where you realize that it's their part of the story that actually created everything that's happening. This is just what happens when you work with adapting a story and keep learning from it about what it wants to be. It's what happens when you keep looking deeper even into a sort of superficial piece of pulp like Jeru.

No writer can work on a story without making it theirs. In Jeru you can even see the difference between me in 1998, 2000, and 2008. Almost like three different writers. But you have to take it seriously and you have to be ALLOWED to take it seriously. Too often that last part does not happen in movies.

If I was to say anything about other adaptations of my Dad's I'd say that something about his writing tells the writers and producers that they can treat it superficially and get away with it. "Oh, it's just another western, whatever that is ... horses and cows, guns and revenge."

Dad was addictive as a writer not because he gave you a lot of detail, he didn't. He gave out enough to activate your imagination and enough to activate that imagination on different levels. You, the reader make it into the story that you want it to be. That is IMPOSSIBLE to do in a movie. Every level of interpretation locks in the "reality" of that interpretation and excludes layers of your imagination, the director's shot, the actor's performance, replace your imagination and if they don't do it in the way you want then you find the experience lacking.

Worse yet many do the faded look because it's "in the past", which is fine for some interpretations but in general it takes much of the immediacy out of a story. It's hard to ramp up the excitement when the photography hints that it's all over and in the past.

How did LL feel about any of the films from his sources? Were there any he was pleased with?

He liked Hondo ... but then he used it to change his life ... and it worked.

I typically have no faith in an adaptation capturing the book so I'm always pleasantly surprised when it does. That says a lot for the filmmakers.

I recently caught ICE STATION ZEBRA on TV somewhere and realized I hadn't seen it before. It's a really terrific first person MacLean thriller that I thought would be impossible to film adequately. It certainly wasn't very good.

The first several seasons of Game of Thrones is similar (before the screen writers ran out of novels and enthusiasm for the series). There were significant "differences" (though it was clear that they were doing their best to stay accurate) but few complaints because those seasons were very good. However, make a crappy movie and you get a lot of complaints about it not being "the same."

As you can see from my notes above, sometimes making a good movie is not in the cards. Many are cursed from the beginning or have underlying flaws which sometimes could have been repaired but often could not.