you can get a free rabies vaccination at your nearest emergency center pesci...

Who was the knight that couldn't sit a horse? I'm thinking that part.

VonLent

That kid better be a stroppy little bad-ass.

I can't imagine a more fitting Illyrio.

Could George be anyone *but* Fat Tom?

mark addy? He's that short fat funny guy from Knights Tale, right?

Wasn't Bobby Baretheon supposed to be like, 6'5, and in his prime resemble something like Arnold Schwarzaneggar? I don't see Addy showing the "I used to be hard" back in the day, towering over others with a booming command voice.

anyhow, just an opinion

If Martin played anyone it wouldn't be Butterbumps, he may be fat, but he's no fool. He's been smart enough to make a pretty good living out of doing nothing for the last few years.
Chris, the Aussie one

More posts. Please. This is the best site on the internet, I've gotten more amusement reading your archives than I've gotten reading all of Ice and Fire (and Wheel of Time, too, and Goodkind's preachy ramblings).

I love how one can currently see the relative popularity of Martin's series right now on his blog. News about casting for the HBO ASOIAF TV series: 217 comments. News about the latest Wild Cards book: 2 comments. Granted, the Wild Cards news has just been posted, but I wouldn't be surprised if it got less than 1/10th the comments for the ASOIAF-related post.

- Krafus

I wanted to ask Pesci, Liotta and the readership at large here about their thoughts on something that I've been pondering for some time now. Because I'm honestly undecided on this myself.

By now, do you have more contempt for:

a) GRRM himself

or

b) The sycophantic posters on his LJ who simper something along the lines of "Take as much time as you need on ADWD" or "Tell me more about Wild Cards and miniatures"

My favorite role for Bean was in “Ronin.” He played a great, fucked up, totally manic, in-way-over-his-head, got no idea of his arse from titties, role.

Kind of an inspiration really…

I agree with several of the posters here that Mark Addy is questionable for Robert. And it doesn't matter if he's a great actor or not, physical presence and facial appearance do count somewhat.

For instance, yes, the four actors who played the hobbits in LotR weren't three feet tall, but they ARE all short actors. There are limits to what can be done even with a large budget.

Otherwise, why not just say Russell Crowe is a great actor, let's get him for the role of Jon?

Age, size, race, body type, beauty, facial expressions, past audience association, it all plays a factor in good casting.

Roland of Gilead

I actually like the casting choices.

I just wish Georgie would type some Dragons Dancing, and not casting updates with his spare time.

I'm also quite satisfied with the casting choices thus far. Peter Dinklage for Tyrion and Sean Bean for Ned are IMO major coups; now if they could get Tricia Helfer for Cersei, you'd have a perfect trinity (quite unlikely, I know).

As for Kit Harrington, have him put on a shoulder-length wig and he'd actually look pretty close to how I envision Jon (Michael Komarck's depiction of Jon in the ASOIAF calendar is my favorite image of him thus far). It remains to be seen whether Harrington has the physicality needed to at least look like a swordsman, but even if he doesn't right now, a training regimen until shooting begins could help him. Given HBO's IMO good to excellent casting choices thus far, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until I see the pilot.

- Krafus

tv is for retards

First, please pardon me for my ignorance of the wild card series as I've heard from numerous people its complete crap and therefore haven't even remotely looked into it. George just posted the cover for suicide kings and i noticed that it doesn't even mention the author of the book. And then in his post George wrote that it is actually written by 6 different people? Are they all huge group projects like this and do the wild card covers usually not even mention the authors, instead having the editor's name emblazoned larger than the title? I'm new here so go easy on me...
rube

So I was straighting a table of clearance books at the bookstore I work at tonight and lo and behold I run across a copy of Inside Straight (Wild Cards novel). Looks like our company decided to put all of our copies of it on our 50% off clearance sale. Not a good sign for GRRM there... which isn't terribly surprising as I (gasp) asked for a wild cards novel a copy of Christmases ago and the family members that tried to locate it later told me it was one of the harder gifts to find as most stores didn't seem to carry them.

After reading it, I understood. Bleah.

Either Ty’s not on the job or Martin’s skin has gotten thicker. In amongst all the ‘you are a God amongst men’ posts there are a few actually daring to question the Mountain That Writes. One mentions that his website needs an upgrade to look as if it was designed some time after 1996 and the others question the practice of putting his name in huge print on the Wild Cards books to dupe unsuspecting buyers into thinking that he did more than just proof read other people’s work. There’s also a comment or two about how it seems disrespectful to not give some sort of mention on the cover to the actual authors. Come to think of it other anthologies I’ve seen do have some sort of credit to some, if not all, of the authors listed on the cover. To answer someone else’s questions about Wild Cards: it’s collections of short stories, originally they were written by a group of gamers of whom Martin was one. His name as editor (he used to contribute the occasional story or two) has always been front and centre in large type, this was even before A Game of Thrones was published. Wild Cards brought out a whole lot of books between the mid 80’s to the mid 90’s and eventually went out of print due to an overwhelming lack of interest from the book buying public. Martin’s ASoIaF driven popularity and his incessant blogging about Wild Cards resurrected the concept and eventually got some of the early books republished (at least they will be inflicted on people soon, they’re still hammering out the deal from what I understand). I did buy the 1st book when it was first out, read a few of the stories, found that the concept and the stories didn’t interest me and tossed it aside without a second thought. I don’t even know if I read the story Martin wrote in that one. The fact that they went out of print and it took interest in Martin created by ASoIaF to get people to read them again speaks volumes for the quality of the idea and the lack of interest in it.

Chris, the Aussie one.

BTW, I think Addy will do fine as Robert. He can do bombastic very well and that’s pretty much what Robert does most of the time, as for his height put lifts in his shoes or film him sitting down most of the time, problem solved.

I'm sure there are multiple factors in casting and I'm largely ignorant about movie making but I don't care, I'm giving my opinion anyway. I like most of the casting choices. I love Sean Bean. I don't like Mark Addy. I want someone who looks gigantic! He'd better look big on my screen. I'm excited about seeing this on screen in spite of myself. I love TV!

Dammit! That was me. I thought I was signed in.

I've never been much of a fan of the "shared worlds" concept myself, even in its heydey in the eighties. Mainly because I don't care how skilled the authors are, they can't match styles well enough for the book not to just feel like a regular anthology.

So basically all Wild Cards can be is a group of stories (written primarily by unknowns or otherwise barely published authors) about super-heroes. And not even well-known comics super-heroes, but one-time superheroes created by the unknown author.

This spells boredom to me, and the fact that the great GRRM edits these books means nothing to me. It just tells me that Martin promotes and supports newbies and friends and tries to get them sales with his popularity and connections in the industry. Good for him, and if that's your bag as consumer and reader, go buy it.

But anybody in these days of misleading advertising, spin doctors, and shady business practices, who doesn't take the five seconds while in the bookstore, to check the cover to make sure whether the "big name" they like is editor or author, is a damned fool.

Roland of Gilead

I'm just off from watching Obama's address about health care reform. My favorite part was when he said that without deadlines, Washington tends to stand still.

You can guess who I thought of when Obama said that line... Although, in all fairness, The Man doesn't stand still, what with all his conventions in foreign countries.

But still. The point is that without a deadline, important stuff doesn't get done on time.

- Krafus

Two late night items -

1) Thanks for the thoughtful responses on whether GRRM or his sycophants are more worthy of contempt. Now to pony up and answer my own query... it's a close call, but I'm going to have to go with his blog-enablers as the greater of two evils. Why? Because I was once one of them. As were many of you, I'd guess. I cut GRRM a lot of slack, I eagerly traveled one state over to attend a AFFC book signing and meet the Man himself, but I can only take so much. After 9 years of him writing with both thumbs up his ass, I'm Chris Rocking it and declaring myself tired, tired, tired of this shit. There's only so much neglect you can take. And that's why the GRRM sycophants are truly worthy of contempt. Because they should know better. GRRM's disdainful contempt for his readership and the series should by now be nakedly obvious and if you can't see that after 4.5 years than I just don't know what to say. And seeing those lemmings chirp "I'm ok if it takes you til 2020 to finish the book, because I've got Wild Cards to tide me over, lolololol" just sickens me. It's like watching your friend silently suffering through her 9th consecutive doomed relationship with a jobless alcoholic asshole boyfriend because she knows she can change him because she *really* loves him. Yes, you hate the asshole boyfriend but at some point you kinda despise your friend even more because she NEVER FKN LEARNS.

2) Thought I'd throw this name out for people looking for something else to read - David Anthony Durham and his 2007 book "Acacia: The War with the Mein." It's definitely in the ASoIaF vein, but it brings some unique elements of its own to the table.
Echoes of A Game of Thronesin this novel will be immediately apparent to anyone who's read Martin's series, such as the shade-of-gray morality, the liberal dosage of blood and treachery, emphasis on the divergent fates of the royal children and even the alternating POV's in each chapter - but hey you could do far worse. Also worth nothing is the ethnic diversity amongst Acacia's characters and regions, which gives it an additional layer of cultural subtext that's missing from most fantasy. Durham, who made his mark as a historical novelist (see Pride of Carthage, loses some points for being one of the upcoming Wild Card contributors, but I've been pretty impressed with his professionalism and accessibility - from his website he sounds like a really cool guy. Best of all, he's got the second Acacia book coming out this fall - a reasonable enough 2 year wait. He may not be Erikson, but I highly recommend him.

I took Krafus' 'advice' and did my own comparison between the AGoT casting thread and the latest 'goodie' from Wild Cards. At the time when I compared the postings, Wild Cards had garnered a mammoth 13 responses and at least 3 of those had nothing to do with the book, but were riding the blog owner about the somewhat questionable advertising that the publishers do to sell the book and one was telling him that his website is an old disgrace (much like the owner, but I digress). Over at the casting thread we had a rather paltry 247 and rising comments. You know most people would look at that and think: my ASoIaF posts get way more responses than my Wild Cards ones. Could it be that 90% (and I'm being very optimistic there) of my fans prefer ASoIaF to Wild Cards? Maybe I should devote more time to the thing that made my name and enabled me to live my current lifestyle. Not our boy. You have to admire a man who simply just keeps on flogging that dead horse in the hopes that it will rise up and carry him to his destination.
Chris, the Aussie one.

Right now, the rankings are:

Post for Wild Cards: 16 comments. Of those, 2 are by The Man, 3 are by the same guy who's new at this and could easily have packed them into a single post, and 3 openly question why there's only Martin's name on the cover. Unquestionably a rousing success.

Post for ASOIAF casting: 250 comments. Meh, what *professional* author would care about an apparent 15-to-1 popularity ratio between the book series he's involved in?

- Krafus