New Book Gives Insights on HBO’s Game of Thrones

[Westeros]

A new book released today, James Andrew Miller’s Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, is a massive 1,000 page tome that looks at the rise of HBO as the destination for prestige television from the past and all the way to the present. In the course of it, of course, the book can’t but help touch on Game of Thrones. While it covers ground already revealed in past interviews and books (such as James Hibberd’s Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon), there’s a few new details… particularly from a voice fans have not heard before, George R.R. Martin’s long-time entertainment agent, Paul Haas, concerning the final season and its relation to GRRM’s plans for A Song of Ice and Fire.

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[Ser Drewy]

Honestly, it'll be interesting when Winds comes out to see just how divergent the next books and the second half of the show are. I sometimes wonder that, aside from some overlapping plot points, there may not actually be much in common. 

[The Dragon Demands]

The Long Night pilot cost $30 million....how bad was it that they were willing to take a complete loss on that?

The Game of Thrones pilot was $10 million, the most expensive up to that point....adjusted for inflation that's over $12 million in 2019 money...still, over two times, cost nearly three times as much to make...and they were willing to take the loss rather than give it a chance for one season.

If HALF the rumors we've heard about it are true...

At least now there's finally admission that GRRM was barely involved and this was a stupid idea in general principle. When they announced the Long Night prequel in summer 2018 they treated it as "THE" prequel, a lock to go into full production even though it was a pilot, and based on NOTHING - no source material, no further information about it other than "it's the Long Night".....the bizarre blind hype there was for this project, so mainstream media was shocked when it was canceled in October 2019.

....then again, I think most of that was...blind hype rubbing off from the hype for Season 8. Which had reached true mass hysteria. HBO promoted their own show of course, but the "access journalism" news media types NEEDED to hype up "OMG the final Game of Thrones season! It's a cultural event! Like the end of Breaking Bad!"....when even TV only viewers thought Season 7 wasn't very good, Season 5 was bad, though they loved the big battle scene in Season 6...Season 7 generated real criticism in the mainstream. But they suddenly forgot it all...swept up in the hype for "a cultural moment-defining final season!"..."News as Entertainment" websites built it up, much of the fault is theirs. 

And it sort of just rubbed off on the Long Night prequel. White Walkers aren't considered exciting now - the BOOK ones are, not the TV show's cliche "Evil Overlord" Night King who isn't in the books at all - but think back to just how absurd, how all-consuming, the White Walker hype was in the leadup to Season 8. So announcing "hey we're making a Long Night prequel about the rise of the White Walkers"....9 months before Season 8 premiered...it was amazing seeing all the YouTube videos and podcasts GUSHING over how great the Long Night would be, based on....nothing. Blind hype and empty catch phrases.

[The Dragon Demands]

Richard Plepler got what he deserved. After Season 5 with the Sansa rape, also TV Dorne, etc., after that whole controversy, he bluntly waved off the controversy in interviews with "Benioff and Weiss can do whatever they want, I have a non-interference policy with the creatives".

And that's a major theme with Plepler, good to see the book covers: he had this whole philosophy for HBO that "we have total creative freedom, we never exert oversight on writers and directors, it's what attracts A-list writers and directors to our network - we're not TV, we're HBO".  But no, you cancel shows all the time when they're doing poorly!

So his response to the INVENTED Sansa rape, throwing out her book storyline and replacing it with a rape subplot....was to feed us his warped dedication to his philosophy that "I have a hands-off approach to our creatives, I NEVER exert oversight".

.....only for Benioff to then reveal he doesn't care about HBO's best interests, he intentionally wrote the show into a corner - waiting until Season 6 to tell Plepler he had no intention of finishing the project on HBO itself but wanted to end it with theatrically released movies (which HBO NEVER does, and would make all their subscriber base angry). Benioff admitted he'd wanted to end with movies since around Season 3 ( he made Hibberd swear not to tell HBO about this plan).  Benioff did this a lot, the old strategy of "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" - he'd wait to spring things on people long after it was too late to easily say "no" to him (i.e. the failed pilot). 

This wasn't about serving the story, it's doubtful he even had a coherent plan for the ending other than "it will be big" - he just says "big" over and over when describing it, even work on Season 8, in other interviews....so many interviews with Riley and Sapochnik where they say "Benioff told us it had to be Big" but not going into details, then slowly revealing they came up with all the specific action points, until you seriously question if Benioff had a plan other than "hire 300 stunt men to make it the biggest battle in history" - I mean literally just that sentence and nothing more.

Benioff basically wanted to end with a massive movie spectacle, to hide the weakness in his own writing; if the empty spectacle is big enough people won't care about storytelling - hey, it's EXACTLY what they did for the Battle of the Bastards!  A hilariously awful failure of writing, filled with plot holes, but which the casual viewers hailed as a "triumph of television"...simply because it had a movie-level budget!  He wanted to basically just repeat that trick on a larger scale....though at least, it turns out that Benioff's own ego got the better of him; BoB at least had good action because Sapochnik knows how to film that. By Season 8...we have so many interviews about how Benioff micromanaged it, INSISTING on bad screen darkness, bizarre to nonsensical army movements, etc. That's all on him. Because fundamentally he doesn't know what he's doing.  

So Richard Plepler didn't exert oversight when the Sansa rape happened in Season 5, waved aside the backlash to it...who was left to cry for Plepler when Benioff turned on him? When not exerting oversight on Benioff turned into Benioff writing the show into a corner, and only springing it on them when Season 6 aired that "we want Season 7 to be only 8 episodes, then end with two theatrical movies instead of HBO itself"? Who did he have to blame, other than himself for letting Benioff run rampant for a decade with no oversight?

As the old saying goes, "Foisted By His Own Petard".  

But...this was before Season 7 began production. Then...they announced that "Confederate" show right after the Season 7 premiere. That had to have come AFTER this argument about how to end the show in Seasons 7 and 8. Chronologically after it. 

....So Plepler got into this fight with Benioff that "NO, you cannot end with theatrical movies", was deeply upset that Benioff sprung this on him, that he would rather truncate the ending....and a year later, Plepler instantly greenlit a new TV show idea Benioff pitched, a controversial alternate history "Confederate" about the south winning the civil war? (which is a common alternate history book topic, the issue was that Benioff of all people should not be trusted to do it). 

....why did they greenlight Confederate after all that? Based on a VERBAL meeting Benioff, not even a formal written pitch?

The mind boggles. I don't think Plepler was trying to trick Benioff by agreeing to a toxic project, they're not that convoluted....I...my only functional theory is that the only way the weak-willed Plepler could argue down Benioff from a Game of Thrones finale as theatrical movies, but to end it on HBO....was to promise him a blank check for whatever new project he wanted after that. Sort of like "if you stop trying to make the finale theatrical movies, I promise to blindly accept whatever new series you pitch after this, no questions asked"....even though this is a man who has demonstrated he's willing to lie to Plepler or make stupid decisions behind his back. Wow.

If Richard Plepler was good at running HBO...Richard Plepler would still be running HBO.

 

[The Bard of Banefort]

1 hour ago, The Dragon Demands said:

The Long Night pilot cost $30 million....how bad was it that they were willing to take a complete loss on that?

The Game of Thrones pilot was $10 million, the most expensive up to that point....adjusted for inflation that's over $12 million in 2019 money...still, over two times, cost nearly three times as much to make...and they were willing to take the loss rather than give it a chance for one season.

If HALF the rumors we've heard about it are true...

At least now there's finally admission that GRRM was barely involved and this was a stupid idea in general principle. When they announced the Long Night prequel in summer 2018 they treated it as "THE" prequel, a lock to go into full production even though it was a pilot, and based on NOTHING - no source material, no further information about it other than "it's the Long Night".....the bizarre blind hype there was for this project, so mainstream media was shocked when it was canceled in October 2019.

....then again, I think most of that was...blind hype rubbing off from the hype for Season 8. Which had reached true mass hysteria. HBO promoted their own show of course, but the "access journalism" news media types NEEDED to hype up "OMG the final Game of Thrones season! It's a cultural event! Like the end of Breaking Bad!"....when even TV only viewers thought Season 7 wasn't very good, Season 5 was bad, though they loved the big battle scene in Season 6...Season 7 generated real criticism in the mainstream. But they suddenly forgot it all...swept up in the hype for "a cultural moment-defining final season!"..."News as Entertainment" websites built it up, much of the fault is theirs. 

And it sort of just rubbed off on the Long Night prequel. White Walkers aren't considered exciting now - the BOOK ones are, not the TV show's cliche "Evil Overlord" Night King who isn't in the books at all - but think back to just how absurd, how all-consuming, the White Walker hype was in the leadup to Season 8. So announcing "hey we're making a Long Night prequel about the rise of the White Walkers"....9 months before Season 8 premiered...it was amazing seeing all the YouTube videos and podcasts GUSHING over how great the Long Night would be, based on....nothing. Blind hype and empty catch phrases.

The Long Night was the one where the brown COTF were going to magically transform into white COTF, right? Sounds like a real winner.

[The Dragon Demands]

That was the rumor. I never saw it with my own eyes, but…months after it was cancelled, a casting report came from reliable news site Redanian Intelligence listing three Children of the Forest, including Leaf, and all three actors were black children.

https://redanianintelligence.com/2020/07/21/new-tidbits-about-the-cancelled-game-of-thrones-prequel-leaf/

So it’s not 100% certain, but… casting info was starting to line up with it. Which is frightening.

[HokieStone]

" the bottom line is that the book’s ending is a more satisfying experience than the show’s"

I mean...it seems unlikely we'll ever get that "satisfying experience" at this point....

[The Bard of Banefort]

I wonder if he'll give us another update at the end of this year. After a while, it's hard not to feel discouraged, although I'm sure he feels discouraged too. . . 

I can't shake the feeling that George more or less finished the book and then decided to completely rewrite it. In 2015, he thought he could finish it in a few months. Fast forward to 2020, lockdown year, and he said that he had written hundreds of pages that year, but still had hundreds more to go.

What I don't understand is why he's so wedded to the idea of seven books, especially since he wasn't originally planning on seven anyway. No one will care how long the series is so long as they're getting new reading material--just look at The Wheel of Time. Instead of killing yourself over a 1500 page book, release a 750 page book (which is plenty long enough) and don't worry about how many books it'll take to finish the series.

Speaking of long books, this HBO tome is apparently a thousand pages long. Who on Earth is that excited about HBO that they'd buy that?

[EggBlue]

I can only say WOW!!! all these were shocking... turn into movies? pitching literally a slavery-winning-fan-fiction?!!.... and black children turning white??? 

.

I hope we do get the satisfactory ending... the Bard , I think you're right and he is re-writing.. it's not like it's his first time... I've got a feeling that George will either finish the winds by the end of 2023 , gets his subplots together and then will have an easier time finishing the rest of the book or he'll never finish it at all!

 

[The Bard of Banefort]

Man, the D’s got SO lucky with that awful RamSan plot. Season 5 premiered in 2015, and the Harvey Weinstein story broke in 2017. Before then, women who were upset about rape plot lines were accused of being pearl-clutching “prudes.” (And if I remember correctly, D&D did write in a scene making fun of them in season 6 that the director cut). 
 

Plus it was just bad storytelling. Sansa had this big, triumphant “dark Sansa” moment at the end of season four that they hyped up for the next year, only to then have her get locked in Ramsay’s bedroom for most of season five. It was honestly a way worse plot than most of what was in season 8.

[EggBlue]

53 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Man, the D’s got SO lucky with that awful RamSan plot. Season 5 premiered in 2015, and the Harvey Weinstein story broke in 2017. Before then, women who were upset about rape plot lines were accused of being pearl-clutching “prudes.”

they did get lucky.. though I never got why they had to bring that up again in such shameful ways! first Bran's comment on "that beautiful snowy night" to the sister he was just reunited with in season 7 that made him a total creep and far worse in season 8 with Sansa's comment on " I would have still been a little bird if not for Ramsay.."!!! were they literally asking for backlash in season 8?!

53 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

(And if I remember correctly, D&D did write in a scene making fun of them in season 6 that the director cut). 
 

what was this?

53 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Plus it was just bad storytelling. Sansa had this big, triumphant “dark Sansa” moment at the end of season four that they hyped up for the next year, only to then have her get locked in Ramsay’s bedroom for most of season five. It was honestly a way worse plot than most of what was in season 8.

yes , they totally killed the character by that. they had time to develop the smart Sansa through seasons 5 to 8 , instead they just "told" the audience she is the smartest person in the room by Arya to convince the audience she deserves queenship! even the "fan service " was bad! 

[The Dragon Demands]

There's a deleted scene in Season 6 at the Braavos play, of play-Sansa being raped, two women in the crowd criticize it, and Arya turns to them and says "if you don't like it don't watch". They actually filmed this.

There must be a god-damned story behind whoever decided to ultimately cut that. Imagine if it had aired. Deeply offensive, openly mocking their rape critics with in-show dialogue?!  And they actually said that in interviews; "if you don't like it don't watch".  Because they're entitled frat boys. I point to what NK Jemisin said after the Austin Film Fest debacle: it's not just "watch something else" - there are a limited number of slots open for million dollar TV shows. The fact that Benioff and Weiss got to run this show, that their errand boy Cogman got to be a staff writer, means that other real writers didn't get to make it.

I mean when people raise criticism about "Oscars So White", you make a counterargument about merit or something...you don't bluntly say "Watch something else if you don't like it".

[The Dragon Demands]

Intriguing...another excerpt from GRRM in the "Tinderbox" book:

https://twitter.com/zionius/status/1463366941599416327

He makes the off-hand remark that the Dance of the Dragons has "seventeen dragons in it". The story, not the show, as he's referring to when he pitched it. This isn't the first time he's said this, he also recently said it in that podcast with Ryan Condal.

So that wasn't a one-shot mistake, it seems Martin has the number "seventeen" stuck in his head, even though there are twenty living dragons at the start of the Dance.

[The Dragon Demands]

Quote

D. B. WEISS:

Books aren’t TV shows. They have different strengths, they make different demands, they impose different limitations. One obvious example that pertains to George’s books specifically: each chapter in his books comes from the point of view of one character, and George makes this work elegantly and brilliantly. With a cast of characters as large as Game of Thrones’, however, there is no equally elegant way to apply that same technique over eight seasons of television. And the sheer size of the cast of characters is something we had to confront, eventually. George’s books keep widening in scope, bringing more and more characters into play as its core characters spin out across the world. But when it comes to the number of characters a viewer can keep track of, a television show has a carrying capacity. Even after paring down the number of characters significantly, we were right up against that carrying capacity, possibly over it for a season or two.

After the first season, when school started, our families would go home, and we would do as much shuttling back and forth as we could, making sure there was always at least one of us on set. At the outset, we had the naive notion that, if we were fortunate enough for the show to become an ongoing concern, the machine would sort of start running itself, and the demands on our time would be lessened. The opposite ended up happening. The scale of the production consistently outstripped any increases in understanding or efficiency we’d managed to accumulate. And plans to reduce to a single main unit from two (or three, or four) failed to materialize. But we kept the pattern going and made it back whenever possible. The longest either of us was ever away from our family was six weeks, I think. My six-week stretch was in Morocco. When it was done, I told myself I was never going to do that again if I could help it, and I didn’t.

I think it was David’s idea to send a short video back home from set every day, which we both started doing, especially in places where FaceTime wasn’t an option. Most of them are pretty mundane, but over the years they kept us in front of the kids’ faces and built up a nice little record of where we were when we weren’t at home. I hope they all look back at them fondly someday, when they show them to their therapists.

....dear god, they knew so little about logistics...about filming logistics...that they seriously had the goal, around the time of season one, this sort of mental fantasy or aspiration...that they'd eventually be able to scale back from two or three simultaneously running filming units to only one unit. When they always film in at least two countries, home base unit and travel unit. What, they thought Home Unit (Dragon Unit) was going to travel to Croatia to film King's Landing scenes?  

Just how utterly naive that....the blind confidence of a man who knows nothing about what he's saying. The Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

It's...it was "the World's Most Expensive Film School".

[SeanF]

5 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Man, the D’s got SO lucky with that awful RamSan plot. Season 5 premiered in 2015, and the Harvey Weinstein story broke in 2017. Before then, women who were upset about rape plot lines were accused of being pearl-clutching “prudes.” (And if I remember correctly, D&D did write in a scene making fun of them in season 6 that the director cut). 
 

Plus it was just bad storytelling. Sansa had this big, triumphant “dark Sansa” moment at the end of season four that they hyped up for the next year, only to then have her get locked in Ramsay’s bedroom for most of season five. It was honestly a way worse plot than most of what was in season 8.

I was looking forward to Dark Sansa poisoning Sweetrobin in Season 5, and marrying Ser Harold Hardyng.

Honestly, it was unbelievable she would ever agree to marry the son of a man who murdered her mother, brother, and sister-in-law.

As for rape, they did film Ser Gregor raping Unella, but were persuaded to drop it.

[The Dragon Demands]

Which means they learned nothing from the Sansa rape backlash if OTHER PEOPLE had to talk them out of it.

I actually think book Sansa will kill Harrold and marry Sweetrobin.

[The Bard of Banefort]

I know some of you don’t like Cogman, but at least he took a more respectful approach to the rape backlash from fans. D&D were indignant that anyone would dare criticize them.

People online are really tying themselves up in knots over George’s comment about how Dany goes from a scared child to someone who “burns cities to the ground,” trying to rationalize that he couldn’t have meant King’s Landing. To me, it seems obvious that she would, because the Ds would never have opened themselves up to that kind of criticism on their own—we’ve seen how well they’ve dealt with sexism accusations in the past. This is probably also why they made Sansa Queen in the North, despite northern secession making no sense, to lessen those accusations a bit (she’ll probably be the first Lady of Winterfell in the books). They received a boatload of praise for creating a “feminist icon” in Daenerys, and judging by how they always portrayed her as morally righteous, no matter how many people she killed, they clearly didn’t want that to stop. It’s similar to how they continued to write Arya as a feisty twelve year old (which got real stupid in season seven), Tyrion as the kind-hearted jokester, and Jon as the noble stoic. They kept popular characters unchanged to preserve their popularity.

[SeanF]

56 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I know some of you don’t like Cogman, but at least he took a more respectful approach to the rape backlash from fans. D&D were indignant that anyone would dare criticize them.

People online are really tying themselves up in knots over George’s comment about how Dany goes from a scared child to someone who “burns cities to the ground,” trying to rationalize that he couldn’t have meant King’s Landing. To me, it seems obvious that she would, because the Ds would never have opened themselves up to that kind of criticism on their own—we’ve seen how well they’ve dealt with sexism accusations in the past. This is probably also why they made Sansa Queen in the North, despite northern secession making no sense, to lessen those accusations a bit (she’ll probably be the first Lady of Winterfell in the books). They received a boatload of praise for creating a “feminist icon” in Daenerys, and judging by how they always portrayed her as morally righteous, no matter how many people she killed, they clearly didn’t want that to stop. It’s similar to how they continued to write Arya as a feisty twelve year old (which got real stupid in season seven), Tyrion as the kind-hearted jokester, and Jon as the noble stoic. They kept popular characters unchanged to preserve their popularity.

I'm sure Kings Landing will burn, and most likely when Daenerys' army storms the place.  The issue is what are the circumstances of the burning?  An act of pure spite?  An act of military necessity?  An act which adheres to the military conventions of this world, or an act which violates them?  A surrender that goes wrong?  Or a tragic accident?  There are a lot of possibilities. 

Even in the very recent past, our own leaders have burned cities in war. It's a fact of war.

Viewed on its own, the sack and burning of Kings Landing was filmed well.  It's just there was a great deal of silliness on the way there.  Like Tyrion and Varys wanting a surrender even after Cersei rejected quarter and executed Missandei;  or their advocating mass starvation as a humane alternative to taking the city by storm;  or their forgetting the secret passages in and out of the city;  or the utter nonsense that ringing bells meant surrender (remember Ser Davos "I've never known bells to mean surrender", a line from George Martin himself);  or Jon being completely unaware of the mood of his own soldiers. 

They needed the burning of Kings Landing to be a reason for Jon to kill Daenerys without looking terrible, when the actual reason why he killed her (the one argument of Tyrion's that finally struck home) was that she and his siblings were fundamentally at odds with each other.  Up till the point that Tyrion said "what about your sisters?", Jon's attitude was basically "Whelp,  It sucks to be you, Tyrion.

[The Bard of Banefort]

35 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I'm sure Kings Landing will burn, and most likely when Daenerys' army storms the place.  The issue is what are the circumstances of the burning?  An act of pure spite?  An act of military necessity?  An act which adheres to the military conventions of this world, or an act which violates them?  A surrender that goes wrong?  Or a tragic accident?  There are a lot of possibilities. 

Even in the very recent past, our own leaders have burned cities in war. It's a fact of war.

Viewed on its own, the sack and burning of Kings Landing was filmed well.  It's just there was a great deal of silliness on the way there.  Like Tyrion and Varys wanting a surrender even after Cersei rejected quarter and executed Missandei;  or their advocating mass starvation as a humane alternative to taking the city by storm;  or their forgetting the secret passages in and out of the city;  or the utter nonsense that ringing bells meant surrender (remember Ser Davos "I've never known bells to mean surrender", a line from George Martin himself);  or Jon being completely unaware of the mood of his own soldiers. 

They needed the burning of Kings Landing to be a reason for Jon to kill Daenerys without looking terrible, when the actual reason why he killed her (the one argument of Tyrion's that finally struck home) was that she and his siblings were fundamentally at odds with each other.  Up till the point that Tyrion said "what about your sisters?", Jon's attitude was basically "Whelp,  It sucks to be you, Tyrion.

I think one of the reasons why these books take so long is that George is great at having everything make logical sense. For a series this detailed, there are remarkably few plot holes. I have confidence in George’s ability to make the attack make sense for the character. I think Dany’s fans can take comfort in that.

Jon’s righteousness goes back to their refusal to change popular characters. Jon should have been radically changed by his resurrection, but instead he came back the same as before. I think that if Jon kills Dany, it will still be portrayed as morally questionable, but he also won’t be “our” Jon by then either.

[SeanF]

12 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I think one of the reasons why these books take so long is that George is great at having everything make logical sense. For a series this detailed, there are remarkably few plot holes. I have confidence in George’s ability to make the attack make sense for the character. I think Dany’s fans can take comfort in that.

Jon’s righteousness goes back to their refusal to change popular characters. Jon should have been radically changed by his resurrection, but instead he came back the same as before. I think that if Jon kills Dany, it will still be portrayed as morally questionable, but he also won’t be “our” Jon by then either.

Sure.  Were I a medieval (or even mid 19th century) general, and I rolled up to a city, and offered quarter, and the defending commander responded by executing someone I loved as sister in front of me, I’d command my buglers to play el toque a deguello.  No mercy;  quarter, none.