Movie Matchmaker: The Perfect Director for a Discworld Movie
by Tom Burns

When it comes down to it, the internet is really only good for three main things – global wireless access to a cache of pornography that would make Caligula blush, the ability to anonymously tell the world how much you hate something, and computer-aided match-making. Putting the porno and complaining aside for a moment, you really can’t underestimate the web’s power to bring elements together – whether that’s hopeful couples on Match.com, buyers and sellers on eBay, or filmmakers and really amazing books at... TheDeadbolt.com.

That’s right. We’re sick of letting literary agents and actors with “passion projects” dominate all of the book-to-film adaptations in Hollywood. While they’re out there adapting The Nanny Diaries and Stephen King (again), we’ve got bookshelves and bookshelves FULL of novels that are just screaming to hit the big-screen, and yet no one seems to be doing anything about it. Well, not anymore. The Deadbolt’s Movie Matchmaker is dedicated to jamming together the perfect filmmakers with the perfect literary source material in the hopes of inspiring movies that kick way, way more ass than an umpteenth adaptation of Great Expectations.

This week, our match brings together one of the most promising comedy directors in recent memory (we’ll get to him later) with one of the best-selling book franchises of all time – Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

THE BOOKS

If you don’t know who Terry Pratchett is, chances are, you’re not British. Before a saucy dame named J.K. Rowling came along, Pratchett was THE best-selling English author of the past 20 years. During the 1990s, he was responsible for 6.5% of all book sales in England alone. Let that number sink in for a minute. The man is a book industry unto himself. He’s probably the closest thing the UK has to a Stephen King – a wildly prolific and popular author who almost everyone has read (Susanna Clarke once said, “There is a rule now, that no British train may leave the station until there's someone on board reading Terry Pratchett”) and who often gets ignored critically just because he happens to write genre fiction. (Pratchett is to fantasy what King is to horror.) Pratchett’s biggest claim to fame is, unquestionably, Discworld, a comedic fantasy series encompassing over 30 plus novels and still counting. But don’t let the word “fantasy” turn you off of Terry if you’re not a fan of Tolkien or dragons – Discworld is about so, so much more.

The series takes all of the familiar trappings of fantasy fiction – elves, dwarves, wizards, and such – and uses them to construct some of the funniest, most engaging, and most biting social satires around. Pratchett’s dragons and demons aren’t just used to arouse chainmail-clad, role-playing geeks. Every fantastic element he employs is used as a reflection of some real-world issue or analog, giving the series a much wider appeal than most sword and sorcery fiction. Pratchett does for fantasy what Joss Whedon did for vampires. His favorite setting, Discworld, is a round, flat planet that glides across the universe on the back of four giant elephants riding the massive turtle Great A'Tuin. The hub of the Disc is Ankh-Morpork, a frighteningly diverse metropolis, complete with Assassins and Thieves Guilds and a wizard university, which joyfully brings together the magical and the mundane and gives Pratchett an ideally exaggerated canvas for showing off the best and worst that humanity has to offer. But, beyond all those lofty goals, the Discworld books are funny – really, really damn funny. Pratchett has satirized almost every aspect of modern society in the Discworld series, turning his skewed authorial eye on everything from gender roles to Hollywood to religion to the freakin’ post office, to name a dear few.

Discworld has an amazingly rich and (let’s be honest) enormous cast of recurring characters that crop up from book to book, and there are several “series within the series” in which certain characters return with over-arching storylines. There are storyarcs following Rincewind, a cowardly wizard-reject who constantly finds himself thrown into the role of the reluctant hero; Granny Weatherwax and her coven of surprisingly-feminist and not-wicked-at-all witches, Commander Sam Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch (more on them later); Moist von Lipwig, a scam artist turned public bureaucrat; and Death... that’s right, Death is one of Pratchett’s most popular (and strangely empathetic) recurring characters.

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