If you've ever read the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, you'll have run across Letter 210, in which Tolkien comprehensively deconstructs and slams a prospective Lord of the Rings movie script. He pulls no punches, and along the way manages to give us an excellent view of both what he thinks is important in his books - and what Zimmerman thinks is. (They don't really match up.)

If this is a genre of letter that interests you, good news! Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians &c) has just shared his own version:

Memories from my TV/Movie Experience, by Rick Riordan

Featuring scathing comments on the Lightning Thief movie like:

"The dialogue needs to sparkle. I’d like to see it be fresh and original and funny. Right now there are some good areas, but mostly it is flat, tired, and uninspired. It’s certainly not funny. I’m not expecting lines to be lifted from the book verbatim, but it would be nice if they resembled the source material at least in tone and spirit."

"These kids are the seed audience for the movie. They are the ones who will show up first with their families, then tell their friends to go, or not go, depending on how they liked it. They are looking for one thing: How faithful was the movie to the book? Make Percy seventeen, and that battle is lost before filming even begins."

and of course:

"If the script goes forward in its present form, I don’t need to be the Oracle of Delphi to foresee what will happen. You will lose the fans of the series 100%, but more importantly the script will fail to impress even regular moviegoers who haven’t read the book. The movie will become another statistic in a long line of failed movies badly adapted from children’s books. No one wants that, and a year from now I really would prefer not to be saying: “I told you so.”"

hS