A Tourney at Ashford

October 10, 2024 at 9:54 am

After Belfast, the next stop on our summer travels was Ashford Meadows, where I’d heard there was a tournament going on. No way I was going to miss that, so off we went. Rumor was that some Targaryen princelings would be attending.

Yes, I am talking about the newest GAME OF THRONES spinoff show. It’s an adaptation of “The Hedge Knight,” the first of my Dunk & Egg stories. There were two more after that, “The Sworn Sword” and “The Mystery Knight.” They have all been collected in a book called A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS. That’s probably going to be the title of the show as well… unless we go with THE HEDGE KNIGHT. That’s still under discussion. Filming wrapped not long ago, and Ira Parker and his team are now in post, looking toward a debut some time next year. Spring, I am hoping, but that’s just a guess, no date has been set yet.

If you haven’t read the Dunk & Egg stories– you ought to, you can grab a copy from your favorite local bookshop, or a signed copy from my own Beastly Books here in Santa Fe — well, “The Hedge Knight” is set some ninety years before A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, during the reign of King Daeron II. You may find the tone quite different from that of GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON; smaller in scale, more personal, with more humor, more focus on character… but there is danger and death as well. Lords and ladies and princes it has, but they share the stage with more smallfolk this time around.

“The Hedge Knight” is a novella of about 30,000 words, much much shorter than the huge novels that make up A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. It was written for LEGENDS, a landmark original anthology edited by Robert Silverberg back in the 90s. Bob invited ten of the leading fantasists of the day to write original never-before-published stories set in their own worlds. It was an all star lineup, featuring Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Robert Jordan, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffery, Terry Goodkind, Tad Williams, Raymond Feist, Ursula Le Guin, Silverbob himself… and me. I am still not quite certain how I got in. At the time, A GAME OF THRONES was the only one of my Westeros novels that had been published, and while it had done okay, its sales did not come close to matching that of the other contributors. LEGENDS was a great book to be in, however, and being in such company won me a lot of new readers.

I had no idea what I would write when I accepted Silverberg’s invitation. A Westeros story, certainly, that was the concept. It could not be a sequel, not without spoiling the things I had in mind for A CLASH OF KINGS and the later volumes. I could do a sidebar, perhaps. A stand-alone story featuring one of my supporting players, maybe. Robert Baratheon before he was king, say. Barristan Selmy might do, or one of his brothers of the Kingsguard… maybe the Sword of the Morning. I could write about Robert’s Rebellion or the Ninepenny Kings, or maybe set something in Oldtown at the Citadel. I mulled all the possibilities. but in the end I decided to go back even further, to a period of Westeros history I had not yet explored at all… virgin territory. And the setting would be…

… a tournament.

Back way when, I saw IVANHOE — the MGM version from 1952, with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor (she never looked more beautiful), Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, and the best jousting scenes ever put on film — and it left a huge impression on me. The tilts, the battles, the heraldry. I’d featured a tournament in A GAME OF THRONES, to be sure, but that was a sideshow of sorts. I wanted to make the tourney the center of my novella. I did not think any of the other writers in LEGENDS would be doing that.

That was how Dunk & Egg were born.

It may shock and surprise my long-time readers, but I actually delivered “The Hedge Knight” by the deadline Silverberg had given us.

(Barely. Stories for LEGENDS were due by the end of the year, and Bob was very very serious about that. He warned us that anyone who did not have their story in on time would be out of the book. “The Hedge Knight” landed on his desk on December 31. And that only because I used express mail. Whew. Later, Bob told me that three of the other writers came in on the last day too, though, so at least I wasn’t last).

By the time I finished the story, I was in love with Dunk & Egg. Still am. I have written a lot of stories over the decades and created a lot of characters. They are all my literary children… some m0re than others… but Dunk & Egg were special. I mean to write the rest of their tales as well … in my copious spare time after I finish THE WINDS OF WINTER, yes, yes, I know.

Heading up to the shoot, I was as anxious as I was eager. KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS is a smaller show than either GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, with a much smaller budget, but I really want it to be great. Ninety per cent of the story is set in a field, surrounded by tents, we would not need the huge sets the other shows had featured, but it couldn’t look fake or cheap either, and the costumes and the heraldry and the fights all had to be splendid, and…

I was so so happy when I got there, and saw what Ira and his team had built.

The tourney grounds were one of the first things I saw. The three days I visited were grey and rainy, so there was mud everywhere, but the lists were so real, just right for a place like Ashford, far from the big cities and the great seats of power. As in IVANHOE, multiple jousts could be run at once, rather than having one contest at a time, as in A KNIGHT’S TALE or the tourneys in GAME OF THRONES and HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Meeting the cast and crew was also a thrill. Despite the drizzle and the mud, the excitement on the set was palpable. Everyone I met seemed to be in great spirits, and loved what they were doing.

And Dunk and Egg — Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell , respectively — looked as if they just walked out of the pages of my book, and the chemistry between them was just perfect.

The rest of the cast were wonderful as well. Below is the scene where Dunk first encounters the Fossoway cousins — Ser Steffon (Edward Ashley) and his squire Raymun (Shaun Thomas).

And below we have our director Owen Harris, yours truly, Peter Claffey (Dunk), and showrunner Ira Parker.

And here’s me again, this time with Tanzyn Crawford, who will be playing Tanselle Too-Tall.

And here’s Ti Mikkel, a writer producer on the Dunk & Egg show and part of Ira’s team; also a writer of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Ti has been a big part of all the other spinoffs HBO has been developing. She probably knows more about Westeros than I do.

I could go on and on. Tanselle’s dragon puppet was very cool as well; can’t wait to see it in action. The various Targaryen princelings were not working on the days we were visiting, but I saw some scenes with the Laughing Storm (played by Daniel Ings), and he was outrageous and fun and Baratheon through and through.

Ashford was one of the highlights of our travels.

A few weeks after I got back home, I saw a rough cut of the first episode. I loved it. I can’t wait to see more.

Current Mood: excited excited

Tags: hbo, television, The Hedge Knight

Blood, Cheese, and Grief

July 5, 2024 at 9:33 am

I made a visit to London last November. Checked in with the editors and publishers at Voyager, my British publisher, saw friends both old and new, caught some plays on the West End (CABARET and THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE among them), had lunch with the playwright and director on our own play-in-progress… and headed out to Leavesden Studio to tour the HOUSE OF THE DRAGON sets. That part was spectacular. I have visited real castles that did not look half as imposing as the Red Keep and Dragonstone did. And they were HUGE. I could easily have gotten lost, just like Blood and Cheese did.

I also got a sneak peak at the first two episodes of season 2: “A Son for A Son” and “Rhaenyra the Cruel.”

What a great way to start the season. The directing was superb. GAME OF THRONES veteran Alan Taylor directed the first episode, and Clare Kilner the second. Both of them did a magnificent job. And I cannot say enough about the acting. Emma d’Arcy has only one line in “A Son for a Son,” but they do so much with their eyes and their face that they absolutely dominate the episode; her grief for her slain son is palpable. Tom Glynn-Carney brings Aegon alive in ways we have not seen before; he’s more than a villain here, he shows us the king’s rage, his pain, his fears and doubts. His humanity. Rhys Ifans has been splendid as Otto Hightower every time he has been on screen, but he exceeded himself in “Rhaenyra the Cruel.” His scene with King Aegon and Criston Cole after the ratcatchers are hanged just crackles with wit, tension, drama, a performance that cries out for awards attention. Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Fabien Frankel, Eve Best, and the other regulars were wonderful as well. The Tittensor twins were terrific as the Kingsuard twins, and their climactic swordfight is right up there with the Mountain and the Red Viper of Dorne, and Brienne’s fight with Jaime Lannister.

And Phia Saban gave a wrenching, powerful, heart-breaking performance as Helaena Targaryen, Aegon’s doomed, haunted queen and mother to his children.

Saban’s performance is especially noteworthy; very little of what she brings to the part was in my source material. . Last season HOUSE OF THE DRAGON essentially recreated King Viserys, giving him a much different backstory and far more depth than the jolly party-loving king I created for FIRE & BLOOD. I talked about that last year, so I won’t repeat myself, save to say it was very well done, and DAMN but Paddy Considine was glorious in the role. (He should have won an Emmy).

The HotD team have done the same thing here with Helaena. In the book, she is a plump, pleasant, and happy young woman, cheerful and kindly, adored by the smallfolk. A dragonrider since the age of twelve, Helaena’s greatest joy in life is to take to the skies on the back of her dragon Dreamfyre. None of the strangeness she displays in the show was in evidence in the book, nor is her gift for prophecy. Those were born in the writers’ room… but once I met the show’s version of Helaena, I could hardly take issue. Phia Saban’s Helaena is a richer and more fascinating character than the one I created in FIRE & BLOOD, and in “Rhaenyra the Cruel” you can scarcely take your eyes off her.

The show added a brand new character as well. The dog.

I am… ahem… not usually a fan of screenwriters adding characters to the source material when adapting a story. Especially not when the source material is mine. But that dog was brilliant. I was prepared to hate Cheese, but I hated him even more when he kicked that dog. And later, when the dog say at his feet, gazing up… that damn near broke my heart. Such a little thing… such a little dog… but his presence, the few short moments he was on screen, gave the ratcatcher so much humanity. Human beings are such complex creatures. The silent presence of that dog reminded us that even the worst of men, the vile and the venal, can love and be loved.

I wish I’d thought of that dog. I didn’t, but someone else did. I am glad of that.

“Rhaenyra the Cruel” has been getting great reviews, for the most part. A lot of the fans are proclaiming it the best episode of HotD, and some are even ranking it higher than the best episodes of GAME OF THRONES. I can hardly be objective about these things, but I would certainly say it deserves to be in contention. The only part of the show that is drawing criticism is the conclusion of the Blood and Cheese storyline. Which ending was powerful, I thought… a gut punch, especially for viewers who had never read FIRE & BLOOD. For those who had read the book, however…

Well, there’s a lot of be said about that, but this is not the place for me to say it. The issues are too complicated. Somewhere down the line, I will do a separate post about all the issues raised by Blood and Cheese… and Maelor the Missing. There’s a lot to say.

For the nonce, I will just say that I really really liked “Rhaenyra the Cruel.” I liked it in London the first time I saw it, and I liked it even more on second watching. I hope you did as well. Maybe it even made you cry.

Current Mood: melancholy

Tags: hbo, House of the Dragon, television

Dunk Takes the Field

June 22, 2024 at 10:00 am

There’s a tournament in Ashford Meadow, and a hedge knight who wants to enter. He call himself Ser Duncan the Tall, but goes by Dunk to his friends. “Dunk the Lunk, thick as a castle wall,” some will say, but he means to be a champion.

Provided he can scrape up enough coin for some armor.

Dunk’s a large lad, and good steel does not come cheap.

Peter Claffey will be playing our favorite hedge knight, and he’s already been sighted around Ashford. HBO was kind enough to provide a picture… and hot damn, he looks as though he just stepped out of the pages of LEGENDS.

Filming started last week in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where much of the original GAME OF THRONES as shot. Based on my novella “The Hedge Knight,” the new show will debut in 2025. Only six episodes for this one. A novella is considerably shorter than a novel (particularly one of my novels), so there’s less source material.

I hear that everything is going very well just now. Next month I will get to see for myself. Parris and I will be taking a few of our minions over to Belfast in mid July, to visit the set, meet the cast, and take in some jousting.

Current Mood: excited excited

Tags: hbo, television, The Hedge Knight, Westeros

Amazing Animation

December 31, 2023 at 8:24 am

There is so much on television these days, in the age of streaming, it is hard to keep up. The days when we had only three networks, and we pretty much knew what was on each of them every night of the week are long gone. One thing is the same, though. It is always a joy to stumble on a show that you haven’t seen before, a great show that just blows you away, that sinks its claws into you and won’t let go.

Parris and I found one just last week; an animated series called BLUE EYE SAMURAI.

I hardly know where to start on this one. Once we started watching it, we could not stop. Binged the whole thing in three nights, and I am already hungry for the second season. They are doing some amazing things with animation these days, as series like LOVE, DEATH, AND ROBOTS have shown… and this is coming from a kid who was weaned on the classic Disney features (my favorites being PINOCCHIO and DUMBO, but really, I loved them all — the originals, please, not these “live action” rehashes). Even so, BLUE EYE SAMURAI has the most gorgeous art that I have ever seen. The story is terrific as well. Set in Japan during the Edo period, it is violent, visceral, sexy (and more than a little kinky in spots), with amazing action sequences and a cast of well-developed characters, colorful and complex and real. Flawed heroes, villains who are more than cartoons (though they are cartoons, being drawn, after all).

It reminded me of some books I read… what was the title of that series, now? Something about a song…

Ah, never mind…

BLUE EYE SAMURAI is very much its own thing, and it is magnificent. Even if you don’t normally watch animation, give it a try. It’s terrific. If you like my own stuff, I think you’ll love it.

As it happens, HBO and I have our own animated projects, set in the world of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. None of them have been greenlit yet, but I think we are getting close to taking the next step with a couple of them. When this last round of development started a few years back, we had four ideas for animated shows, with some great talents attached. Writers rooms and summits, outline and scripts followed in due course… but, alas, two of the original projects were subsequently shelved.

(Those of you who have read my reports in years past may recall that I prefer to say “shelved” rather than “killed,” as nothing is ever dead for good in Hollywood, and a project put on the shelf one year can be taken off the shelf a few years later). (( I still have hopes of presenting the stories that we shelved in another form, perhaps as graphic novels)).

Work on the other two animated projects continues apace, however…and meanwhile, we have moved NINE VOYAGES, our series about the legendary voyages of the Sea Snake, over from live action to animation. A move I support fully. Budgetary constraints would likely have made a live action version prohibitively expensive, what with half the show taking place at sea, and the necessity of creating a different port every week, from Driftmark to Lys to the Basilisk Isles to Volantis to Qarth to… well, on and on and on. There’s a whole world out there. And we have a lot better chance of showing it all with animation. So we now have three animated projects underway.

Will any of them make it to air? happen? No way to know. Nothing is certain in Hollywood. But if it does happen, with one or two or all three shows, I hope we can make them as good as gorgeous and gripping as BLUE EYE SAMURAI. We will for damn sure try.

Tags: animation, artwork, hbo, television

Perfect Episodes

August 29, 2023 at 8:41 am

I have never claimed to be perfect… but if the good folks at VANITY FAIR want to say so, who I am to argue?

Of course, they are not actually saying I am perfect. They are talking about “Blackwater,” one of the episodes I wrote for GAME OF THRONES. (I scripted four. And yes, “Blackwater” is my own favorite of those, although I thought “The Lion and the Rose” turned out very well too, and I have a soft spot for that one).

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2 023/08/best-tv-episodes

I haven’t seen all of the other episodes on the list… but I have to say, the ones that I have watched were by and large extraordinary, so I can’t take issue with many of VANITY FAIR’s choices. “The Suitcase” from MAD MEN, the heart-wrenching “Ozymandias” episode from BREAKING BAD… THE SOPRANOS had lots of great episodes, but “The Pine Barrens” was special, and for the entire rest of the series I kept waiting for that Russian to turn up again when we least expected… for “The Wire” they picked the episode where Stringer died, and one can’t argue with that, though Omar’s death hit me maybe a tiny bit harder… but the show was so good, it came close to perfection pretty frequently… and BLACK MIRROR is an extraordinary series in so many ways, but “San Junipero” is the episode I love to watch over and over, and tell my friends to watch… if I had to pick one episode that was even more perfect than all the others on the list, though, it would have to be the final episode of SIX FEET UNDER. I liked that series well enough, though I cannot say I loved it as much as I loved ROME or DEADWOOD or FARGO or a few other shows missing from the list, but that last episode was far and away the best finale in the entire history of television, and I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly do better.

Anyway… I feel very pleased and flattered to be in such great company. No work of art is ever truly perfect, of course… but it is very gratifying to hear that maybe you achieved it, or at least came close… for some of your readers (or viewers)… once in a very great while. There is always a next time, though… and regardless of how well (or poorly) one of my tales is received, I always want to do better the next time I sit down in front of the computer.

Tags: game of thrones, hbo, television

A Knight and a Squire

April 14, 2023 at 7:12 am

The news is all over the internet by now. The announcement was made on the 12th, at Warner Media’s big press event for the rollout and rebranding of their new streamer, MAX, coming your way on May 23. I was sworn to secrecy till then, but now that the word is out, I can go ahead and confirm it. Yes, it’s true. There’s another successor show on its way to you.

Dunk & Egg are coming to HBO.

The working title will be A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS: THE HEDGE KNIGHT. Whether that will be the final title, I can’t say for sure… beyond saying that no, it won’t be called TALES OF DUNK & EGG or THE ADVENTURES OF DUNK & EGG or DUNK & EGG or anything along those lines. I love Dunk and I love Egg, and I know that fans refer to my novellas as “the Dunk & Egg stories,” sure, but there are millions of people out there who do not know the stories and the title needs to intrigue them too. If you don’t know the characters, DUNK & EGG sounds like a sitcom. LAVERNE & SHIRLEY. ABBOTT & COSTELLO. BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD. So, no. We want “knight” in the title. Knighthood and chivalry are central to the themes of these stories.

Aside from the title, what else can I tell you?

Not a lot.

HBO has given us a greenlight to film for a full season (not just a pilot), most likely of six episodes… though that is not set in stone, and won’t be until considerably later in the process. To date I have written and published three novellas about Dunk & Egg — “The Hedge Knight,” “The Sworn Sword,” and “The Mystery Knight,” each of them initially published independently in various anthologies before being collected together in A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS.

Our premiere season will be an adaptation of the first of the three published novellas, “The Hedge Knight,” the tale of how Dunk & Egg first met during a tournament at Ashford Meadow. The pilot script is already written, and I think it’s terrific. It was written by Ira Parker, who is no stranger to Westeros. He was part of Ryan Condal’s writing staff for the first season of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, and wrote the fourth episode of Hot D’s first season, “King of the Narrow Sea.” That’s the one where Prince Daemon returns to King’s Landing after conquering the Stepstones, and takes Princess Rhaenyra down into the stews of Flea Bottom. Ryan Condal is on board as well, as an Executive Producer. So am I.

There is no date set yet for the series premiere, or even for the show to begin shooting… but the writing is well underway. Ira has assembled a small but very talented team, and they are at it already, building on the foundations laid down last year in previous creative summits… and of course on the original novella. The Dunk & Egg novellas are fully-fleshed narratives more like the novels of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE than the imaginary history of FIRE & BLOOD; the stories are right there on the page, and our goal is to produce faithful adaptations of those tales for the screen.

If THE HEDGE KNIGHT turns out as well as we hope it will, our hope would be to go on and adapt THE SWORN SWORD and THE MYSTERY KNIGHT as well. That will take a few years. Then comes the hard part. Before we reach the end of the published stories, I will need to find time to write all the other Dunk & Egg novellas that I have planned. There are… gulp… more of them than I had once thought. There’s “The Village Hero” and the Winterfell story, the one with the She-Wolves, and maybe I need to write that Dornish adventure too to slip in between “The Hedge Knight” and “The Sworn Sword,” and after that there are… ah… more. I just need to finish THE WINDS OF WINTER, and then do either A DREAM OF SPRING or volume two of FIRE & BLOOD, and slip in a new Dunk & Egg between each of those in my copious spare time… and that will keep me ahead of Ira and his merry crew… for a few more years.

Well, I will worry about that tomorrow. Today, we’re celebrating. Dunk & Egg are coming.

Those of you who have not yet made their acquaintance should pick up a copy of A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS from your favorite local bookshop or online bookseller. (We have autographed copies at Beastly Books in Santa Fe).

You could check out your local comics shop as well. All three of the Dunk & Egg novellas have been done as graphic novels, and done very well, with some great artwork by Mike S. Miller, who captured both characters perfectly.

One more thing before I close…

Way back in the summer of 2016, when HBO first started thinking about GAME OF THRONES spinoffs, I pitched them two ideas: the Dance of the Dragons, which in due time became HOUSE OF THE DRAGON… and Dunk & Egg. That was seven years ago. (I can hardly believe it myself). The lesson there is that development takes time. I see all these stories on the net about other spinoffs being killed or abandoned… no idea where they get this stuff… and it just makes me shake my head. The Nymeria show is still in development. So is the Sea Snake show. Just had a great week on that one, working with writers. And there are others, both live action and animated. How many will get the greenlight like Dunk & Egg? Impossible to say. How long will it take? It depends. No one knows for sure. When I was in grade school, there was a cop show that ended every week with, “There are eight million stories in The Naked City. This has been one of them.” And that was only New York City. Westeros and Essos are a lot bigger, with even more stories. We just need time to tell them.

Current Mood: excited excited

Tags: hbo, television, The Hedge Knight

The Globe of Gold

April 12, 2023 at 4:36 pm

All of us at HBO and HOUSE OF THE DRAGON were thrilled when Hot D won this year’s Golden Globe Award as Best Dramatic Series. I was pretty surprised as well. It was great to be nominated, as it was in past years when GAME OF THRONES was selected as one of the finalists by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but GOT had never won, and I did not expect that HOUSE would either. The competition was fierce.

But hey, I have seldom been more pleased to be wrong.

I was not able to attend the awards ceremony in Hollywood (I did attend some in past years, including the year when Ron Perlman won his Globe for his portrayal of Vincent on BEAUTY & THE BEAST). Milly Alcock, Emma d’Arcy, and Miguel Sapochnik were on hand to accept on behalf of the show.

The Hollywood Foreign Press and HBO were kind enough to ship the Globes to those of us who were not able to attend, however, and mine has now turned up at the Water Gardens here in Santa Fe.

(I have to say, it is one impressive trophy. Beautiful… and HEAVY. Much heavier than any other award on my shelves, even the Emmy, which is also heftier than you might think. You could bludgeon someone to death with a Globe very easily, and I am sure some cop shop will have that happen on an episode one of these days).

((Not that I would ever need to do that. My house is full of swords)).

Anyway… my thanks to the Hollywood Foreign Press, to everyone who voted for us, to our fans and viewers, and of course to the astonishing cast and crew and writing staff of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, who brought the beast home at last.

Current Mood: happy happy