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<\/p>\nThe Grim Reaper just keeps on reaping, sad to say.<\/p>\n
I have lost another friend.\u00a0\u00a0 Last night I got a phone call from Michael Cassutt in LA to tell me that our mutual friend Dr. Michael Engelberg had died.\u00a0\u00a0 He was a victim of Covid-19, one of the half million we have lost.<\/p>\n
Dr. Michael was a physician himself, an oncologist at Cedar-Sinai in Los Angeles, and one of the leaders in his field, though he retired from active practice a few years ago.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thankfully (knock wood) neither I nor anyone in my immediate circle ever needed to call upon his expertise in the treatment of cancer… but having a good friend who was also a doctor at one of the leading hospitals in the country was definitely something to be thankful for.\u00a0\u00a0 He was always the first person I turned to for a second opinion whenever Parris or I had a medical issue of any sort.\u00a0\u00a0 There was no one better.\u00a0\u00a0 Twenty years ago, asking him for that second opinion saved Parris from having an entirely unnecessary heart procedure, for which we will be eternally grateful.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dr. Michael lived a double life, however.\u00a0\u00a0 By day he was a physician, one of the country’s leading oncologists.\u00a0\u00a0 But he was also a hardcore science fiction and fantasy fan, and a film producer… and it was in that capacity that I first met him, back in the early 90s.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I was doing a lot of screenwriting in those days, and Engelberg was looking for writers to script some of the projects he had in development at Disney, so my agent set up a breakfast for us… at Hugo’s, I believe.\u00a0\u00a0 (That was a big industry breakfast-and-lunch place in those days.\u00a0\u00a0 The food was great…. and, of course, with a name like that, there was no place better for two old fanboys to get together and talk SF).\u00a0\u00a0 We hit it off at once, and two decades of friendship ensued.<\/p>\n
We also worked together.\u00a0\u00a0 Michael was a decade older than me and had been reading SF all his life.\u00a0\u00a0 He had an amazing collection, especially of Golden Age material.\u00a0\u00a0 He loved Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Simak, and his dream was to bring some of their classic works to the silver screen.<\/p>\n
His favorite was Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Barsoom novels.\u00a0\u00a0 Michael was the producer who first brought A PRINCESS OF MARS to Disney, and got it optioned by Hollywood Pictures, a Disney subsidiary.\u00a0\u00a0 For more than a decade he fought to get it filmed.\u00a0\u00a0 Writer after writer took a crack at it, and at least once the project got a greenlight with a director attached… but then the director demanded another rewrite, and the studio did not like it much, and the green light turned to red.\u00a0\u00a0 The director left, and more writers came and went… the last team being me and Melinda Snodgrass.\u00a0\u00a0 We did a couple of passes ourselves, and for a while it seemed we were going to get a green light for our version… but then the Mouse changed his mind, decided PRINCESS needed to be animated instead of live action, and took it away from us and Hollywood Pictures and assigned it to Disney proper.\u00a0 Where nothing happened.\u00a0\u00a0 In later years the Disney option expired, and the Burroughs estate sold the rights to Paramount.\u00a0\u00a0 Nothing happened there either, alas.\u00a0\u00a0 So Disney came back into the picture and bought back the rights to Barsoom, but the Hollywood Pictures division was defunct by then, so a whole new group of people took charge of the project.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t think they ever even looked at the old scripts.\u00a0\u00a0 Instead they made JOHN CARTER.\u00a0\u00a0 Dr. Michael was not connected with that, and I think it broke his heart a little… but that’s development for you.<\/p>\n
A PRINCESS OF MARS was his passion project, but by no means the only one he worked on.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There was a time back in the 90s when I had four — yes, count ’em, four<\/em><\/strong> — films in active development at Hollywood Pictures, and Dr. Michael Engelberg was the executive producer and guiding hand on all of them.\u00a0\u00a0 Besides PRINCESS, Melinda and I were also developing WILD CARDS as a feature film, collaborating on a screenplay built around our own most iconic characters, Dr. Tachyon and the Great and Powerful Turtle.\u00a0\u00a0 Michael also picked up the rights to FADEOUT, an original SF screenplay I had written for a small independent that had gone bust.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For a time there was talk of attaching Sharon Stone to that one, but when that fell through, so did the project.\u00a0 And Hollywood also optioned my historical horror novel, FEVRE DREAM.\u00a0 I was so busy with other work — the aforementioned PRINCESS, WILD CARDS, FADEOUT, as well as three television pilots, the Wild Cards books, and this fantasy novel I had started in 1991 — that I did not get around to writing the screenplay for FEVRE DREAM for a while, alas.\u00a0\u00a0 Big mistake.\u00a0\u00a0 By the time I turned in the script, Hollywood Pictures was on its last legs and had lost all interest in steamboats and vampires.\u00a0\u00a0 They put the script in turnaround the day after I turned it in.<\/p>\n None of that was Dr. Michael’s fault.\u00a0\u00a0 He was as frustrated as any of us by the vagaries of development hell.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe more so.\u00a0\u00a0 I loved working with him, maybe because he had a trufan’s reverence for the original material.\u00a0 Whether dealing with ERB, RAH, or GRRM, he always argued for staying with the book and doing faithful adaptations.<\/p>\n In the end, Dr. Michael only got one of his numerous projects filmed: the 1994 adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s THE PUPPET MASTERS.\u00a0 That was another book he brought to Disney, and it gave him great joy when the cameras finally began to roll… although I know he would rather that one had stayed a bit closer to RAH’s novel as well.\u00a0\u00a0 If Hollywood had more sense, PUPPET MASTERS would have been the first of many Michael Engelberg productions.\u00a0 Instead it proved to be the first and last.<\/p>\n My friendship with Michael lasted much longer than our working relationship.\u00a0\u00a0 Whenever I visited LA, I would make sure I made time to visit him, so we could catch up and talk about the books we’d loved and the movies we wanted to make.\u00a0\u00a0 Our favorite haunt was Hop Li, a Chinese restaurant in LA’s Chinatown, where we would gather around a big round table and share a feast with other writers, fans, and movie people.\u00a0\u00a0 Melinda Snodgrass, Michael Cassutt, Alan Brennert, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, David Goyer, Len Wein, Chris Valada were all regulars at our Hop Li gatherings.\u00a0 And you never knew who else might turn up.\u00a0\u00a0 One time it was Deke Slayton, which was pretty damn exciting.<\/p>\n If Covid ever ends and I get to return to LA again, I hope those of us who are left can gather at Hop Li once more and raise a toast to Dr. Michael Engelberg over some tangerine beef, peking duck, and walnut shrimp.\u00a0\u00a0 He was one of the good ones.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Grim Reaper just keeps on reaping, sad to say. I have lost another friend.\u00a0\u00a0 Last night I got a phone call from Michael Cassutt in LA to tell me that our mutual friend Dr. Michael Engelberg had died.\u00a0\u00a0 He was a victim of Covid-19, one of the half million we have lost. Dr. Michael […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[89,58,18],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6902"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6916,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902\/revisions\/6916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}