Okay. At last, months of phone tag pay off, and since it has ended at last, I will now tell you, O Readers, about the very cool thing that, alas, did not work out (but it’s nice that they even thought about it.)
So the Jim Henson Company was interested in Digger.
They thought it was brilliant, they said very nice things about it, they gave it serious and painful thought–but alas, in the end, it comes down to money. The nice vice president there said that as much as he’d love to make a movie out of Digger, as fabulous a feature film as he thought it would make–he can’t get backers for talking animal movies these days (they glutted the market a year ago) and he’d want to do it with puppet/cgi, which is bloody expensive stuff, and the Henson company’s not known for its vast financial reserves. People just don’t make “Watership Down” or “Dark Crystal” any more (they’re only making Dark Crystal 2 because it had the first one–you couldn’t sell a backer on it cold these days.) We all agreed that it was a damn shame they weren’t making movies like that any more, and he went on to say that it was largely a matter of timing–if it’d come across his desk a year or two ago, he’d have optioned it, but alas, not today, unless something changes radically in the near future.
But he had a lot of nice things to say about the writing, anyway, and let’s face it–there are far worse things than having the Jim Henson Company tell you you’re brilliant, give you their e-mail, and ask to see any future projects you work on.
My agent, who arranged this, is flooding producers with copies of Digger. Neither of us, in all honesty, are all that hopeful, though–it’s the same problem as the Henson guy mentioned. It’s too far out of the mainstream, and people don’t make those kinds of movies anymore. But hey, you never know.
So while a movie option would have been cool (let’s face it, most options never get made into movies anyway) I figure that being at a point in my life where the Jim Henson Company tells me my comic is brilliant and they wish like hell they could make it work is a lot better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
