Londonist would have loved to have seen a faithful rendition of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta make it to the big screen, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon. Moore has not only distanced himself as far as possible from the movie he's gone a step further and withdrawn his future work from DC Comics. This is big news in itself for the comic fans out there, but as happy as we are that Moore has told DC to get stuffed we want to linger a moment over the car wreck that the adaptation has suddenly revealed itself to be. Moore had this to say about the shooting script:
"It was imbecilic; it had plot holes you couldn't have got away with in Whizzer And Chips in the nineteen sixties. Plot holes no one had noticed... They don't know what British people have for breakfast, they couldn't be bothered. 'Eggy in a basket' apparently. Now the US have 'eggs in a basket,' whish is fried bread with a fried egg in a hole in the middle. I guess they thought we must eat that as well, and thought 'eggy in a basket' was a quaint and Olde Worlde version. And they decided that the British postal service is called Fedco. They'll have thought something like, 'well, what's a British version of FedEx... how about FedCo? A friend of mine had to point out to them that the Fed, in FedEx comes from 'Federal Express.' America is a federal republic, Britain is not."
More vitriol after the jump
James McTeigue, the director, made the mistake of mentioning during a press conference that November the 5th 2005 was the 100th anniversary of the gunpowder plot (although the article says it was Joel Silver who made that blunder it is quite possible that they both thought that - who needs a grasp of history when you have Keanu Reeves on speed-dial?) before producer Joel Silver went on to piss off Moore even more by caliming that he had endorsed the movie. You can read the hastily edited transcript of that conference here.
Moore had already been pushed to breaking point after the frankly stupid adaptation of his sublime The League of Extraordinary Gentleman was accused of plagiarism:
This led to Moore giving a ten-hour deposition - he believes he'd have suffered less if he'd "sodomised and murdered a busload of children after giving them heroin."
So we're back to expecting very little of the movie despite the director's assurance that "it runs very close to what Alan Moore wrote and what he was trying to say". Excuse us then if we just re-read the book and see exactly what the author had to say for himself rather than relying on the interpretation of the people partly responsible for Jean-Claude Van Damme's Street Fighter.
Looks like we'll continue to pin our hopes on Watchmen... and once the upcoming War of the Worlds movie turns out to be fool's gold we can go back to our beloved League and watch Hyde make his stand against those bastard Martians one more time.
Note: There's a chance to see Alan Moore at the Meltdown festival for an evening of homage to William Burroughs on the 16th June, attended by Barry Adamson, Portishead, Tom Verlaine and Jason Spaceman. Moore will either read extracts of Burroughs, or a suitable work of his own composition.
