Zak Penn has delivered to the WB's script Ready Player One, but can he study to obtain licenses in video games and movies of the 80 nominated in the script?
After the sale - a check for seven figures of Random House - publishing rights for North America's first book of Ernie Cline (Fanboys), Ready Player One (in Italian Player One, ed.), The novel was to the center of a heated auction for the film rights, which saw the Warner Bros emerge winner against Paramount, Fox and the Temple Hill entartainment. The interest of the buyers was born by the opportunity to use the technology to create a virtual world, also he liked the opportunity to be able to empathize with the protagonist, Wade.
Here is the synopsis of the book available on Amazon.it:
The world is a bad place. Wade is eighteen years old and spends his days in a virtual universe called OASIS, where you socialize, you fall in love, it does what it is now impossible to do in the real world, oppressed by war and famine. But one day, James Halliday, brilliant creator of OASIS, dies without heirs. The only way to save OASIS by a ruthless multinational is put up for grabs among its inhabitants: to inherit will be the winner of the most amazing game ever imagined. Wade solves almost by accident the first enigma, suddenly becoming, along with some friends, the only hope of mankind. It will be only the first of many tests: recite the lines of Wargames, penetrate the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, play the perfect game of Pac-Man, challenge Japanese giant robots, and so on, in a review of missions of all types, acclimatized in the imaginary pop of the 80s, which is inspired by OASIS.
The book not only has received several awards but has become required reading for freshmen from different universities and for new employees of companies like Zynga and Oculus.
Initially, the adaptation of the novel had been entrusted to Cline and Eric Eason but four years later, this summer, the task is passed to Zak Penn (The Avengers). The two writers (Penn and Cline) have become good friends thanks to the excavation of the copies of ET Atari at a site in New Mexico, Penn also interviewed Cline for her documentary Atari: Game Over.
The screenplay was just ended but the study has not yet begun to ask the holders of the works mentioned in the script, the respective licenses. Penn explained to Nerd Report:
"That will not happen until we begin to do the film. Put it this way, I took the large freedom in the script, not so many as in the book. If we were to have the licenses of the things that are in the book, it would cost us a billion dollars. Write a script and then exploit your chances and say 'This is what we will do, here is where we will take the machines and the scenes from these movies and these properties', and then hope that you'll get the rights, but we are not there yet score. I just finished the script.
When you start to get into production and casting, then you begin to look and say, 'Okay, we can obtain the rights to Donkey Kong?' Or what have you. It is very different in a film than a documentary where you can declare the fair use and do it. "
Lately were made several films for which it was requested of multiple licenses, Wreck-It Ralph, The Lego Movie, Pixels, Real Player One will manage to get licenses that allow the making of the film? We will see.
Penn has also found a ploy for the realization of the scenes set in OASIS (the virtual reality of the book), without giving the impression of seeing someone while playing a video game:
"I'll tell you how I did it but I did it and I got the approval of Ernie. The script has already been delivered, I'm really happy. There are a number of things in the book that are incredibly visual and really easy to translate into a screenplay, and then there are other things you absolutely do not want to keep in the same form in which they are present in the book. It was really providential that I was often close to Ernie, so periodically I said 'Ernie, you hear this. That's the way I think to do this', if he said 'It's amazing foul', I was quite happy, if he did not, I went back to the drawing board. "
Donald De Line and Dan Farah will take care of the production of Ready Player One for Warner Bros.
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