09:00am ET, 20-January-04

Minear To Adapt Moon

Genre TV producer Tim Minear (Angel, Wonderfalls) told SCI FI Wire that he has been hired to write a screenplay adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 SF novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The novel deals with a 2076 rebellion on a former penal colony on the moon and has been read as an allegory about libertarianism and its costs.

"I'm going to write the script," Minear, an avowed Heinlein fan, said in an interview. "My take on the story is to try to stay as close to Heinlein's politics and Heinlein's vision of the future that I can, while still taking the story and trying to make it into a movie. You know, that book is not a movie. There's a lot of very interesting talk about cells and sort of the anatomy of a revolution, which is not that interesting in a movie. But there are other elements."

Minear got hired to adapt the book when he set out to discover who held the rights to Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. That turned out to be producer David Heyman (the Harry Potter movies). Heyman and producer Mike Medavoy eventually hired Minear to adapt the other Heinlein work, Minear said.

Minear said that he wants to follow the example of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who adapted J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the screen. "Those are magnificently adapted screenplays," he said. "Things are moved around. Things are changed. Just like you would have to when you're adapting something that extensive. But really, really an impressive job of staying so close to ... Tolkien. ... Like, it smells the same as the novels."