Very exciting news – Terry Pratchett, in conjunction with Rod Brown, is setting up a new TV and film production company called Narrativia (named after the Discworld godness of narrative who always smiles down upon writers). The company will be run by Terry’s daughter, Rhianna Pratchett, alongside Rod Brown and Rob Wilkins.
This is excellent news because it should be a HUGE bolster to the UK broadcast and film industry. I also firmly believe that if Narrativia branches out further than just works based around Pratchett’s material, we could see bigger and better fantasy and sci-fi productions being commissioned and made right here in the UK.
I suspect the web site to visit when the company is fully operational will be narrativia.com or narrativia.co.uk (according to WHOIS, it’s – shudder – a 1&1 registered and hosted domain – vomits uncontrollably – should have gone to Memset.com)
At least nobody will ever again be able to tell Terry to “lose the Death angle..” from the Discworld books that get adapted (source: lspace):
A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which went down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said ‘Hey, we’ve been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centres of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn’t work for us, it’s a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton.’ The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it’s GREAT, it’s HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys.
“Whereupon, I’m happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years.”