![]() "There comes point where, supposing Josh said to me, 'I want to turn the covers into posters'. There's some jigsaw puzzles coming out - one of them's of the map, and some of the Josh Kirby covers. Then there's the Discworld game - I had a lot of involvement in the look and feel of that. I think he makes the odd bob or two out of it, although to be frank I thought if he actually worked out the storage costs, heating and lighting, he wouldn't be making a profit at all. The T-shirt/Unseen University scarf/holy anorak bit is really something that Stephen more or less does out of a kind of grown-up fannishness. There's the Clarecraft models, and making allowance for the fact that the modellers have got to be allowed to do their own thing, I think I've got a lot of control there. There's a lot of spin-offs, considering that what we have here is almost entirely a book-based phenomenon. People think there's a lot of spin-offs, and yet. There have been little changes over the years.”ĭo you keep a taste- or quality-control over it? What if somebody wanted to do Corporal Carrot boxer shorts? But if someone's not described as any particular height and they decide he is a short person or a tall person, then I say that's fair enough, that's what they've extrapolated from the book. And the rule that I go by is: can I prove it wrong, according to the book? So if someone is described as tall and they've done him short, that's wrong. For example, with Clarecraft I get to see the things while they're still in the roughs, as they call them. “I think it's fairly true to say I have absolute control, but you have to give people some leeway. ![]() How much control do you keep over Discworld spin-offs, such as the maps, the Clarecraft figures, and so on? And all the men made certain they turned up by the third act because that always started with the ballet, and you could look at the actresses' ankles.” However, I think there's probably a difference between opera as we think of it now and late Victorian opera, especially as they did it at the Paris Opera House: 'Can we have one with two elephants, fifteen horses, fireworks, a complete volcanic explosion, and the destruction of an entire city?' It got to the point where it was special effects that they were after all the time. I know it's not as bad as it used to be,but I think that the acting, which is usually not that good, gets in the way. I like opera as music, I don't like opera as stage. Of course, they shouldn't go mad, but in order to get that whole thing done a lot of people have to be very, very on edge, that's what I mean.”ĭid you a develop an interest in opera, then think it would make a good book? Opera consists of 150 people almost going mad. Because I have gone backstage at opera houses, and I talked to people, and the whole thing has a very enclosed, hot-house atmosphere. I wanted to set it as much as possible in the one building. “Oh no! with no offence to Stephen 's upcoming production, I didn't think: 'Gosh! There's going to be an amateur production of this!' I actually wanted it to be claustrophobic. Was that because it was a theatrical story, or knowing that it was going to be adapted for the stage? It came across to me as a very theatrical book. I haven't used the Phantom of the Opera plot, I've used a plot which would have been the Phantom of the Opera plot had it gone the other way, had Granny Weatherwax not started to interfere, had the two girls not swapped rooms, and things like that.” You simply cannot open a book about the history of horror film without seeing that shot from the original film of the Phantom as the skeleton, the Masque of the Red Death. The Phantom is now a stock horror player. This guy, in a mask, running round in an opera house, killing people. ![]() I thought that by and large, everybody vaguely knows about Phantom of the Opera. How familiar are you expecting the readers to be with the original story? It was based on the original book rather than the movie, which rather surprised me.” I was actually quite impressed that Lloyd Webber's musical has some vague relationship to the original book. The thing's effectively become public domain. Actually, there's other Phantom of the Opera books. I read the book, I saw the first movie, I've been to the musical, I've seen some of the other movies, including some of the weird things like Phantom of the Paradise. How familiar are you with the other versions of Phantom of the Opera?
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