A Gamer’s World, but a Dramatist’s Sensibility
THE producer Jerry Bruckheimer likes to say that he can make a movie from almost anything. In his long and box-office-friendly career, he has conjured movies from books (“Black Hawk Down”), from magazine articles (“Coyote Ugly” and “Top Gun”), from the real-life story of a woman who was both a welder and a stripper (“Flashdance”), from a notion tossed around the office (“Hey, let’s make a movie about submarines!” which led to “Crimson Tide”). Most famously, and most lucratively, he has made not just a movie but a franchise, “Pirates of the Caribbean,” from a theme-park ride.
By that standard, Mr. Bruckheimer’s newest picture, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which is directed by Mike Newell and stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Ben Kingsley, doesn’t seem much of a stretch. “Prince of Persia,” which opens Friday, is based on a popular video game. You could even argue that video games are what most Bruckheimer movies yearn to be: nonstop action, without the distractions of too much plot or complicated characters. But except for the two “Lara Croft” movies, which may owe their success more to Angelina Jolie than to their Tomb Raider provenance, the track record of movies based on video games is not uplifting. “Street Fighter” was notoriously unwatchable. The official Nintendo magazine said of the film based on Super Mario Brothers: “Yes, it happened. Let us speak no more of it.”
If “Prince of Persia” does buck the odds then part of the credit should go to Jordan Mechner, who created the video game on which the movie is based and wrote the first draft of the screenplay. Mr. Mechner is also a blogger, with his own Web site (http://jordanmechner.com/), and a graphic novelist, with two books coming out at roughly the same time as the movie: “Solomon’s Thieves,” illustrated by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland, the first volume in a projected trilogy about the Knights Templar; and “Prince of Persia: Before the Sandstorm,” illustrated by several different artists, which is a prequel to both the film and the game that inspired it.
He is a sort of a nerd’s nerd, in other words — a Renaissance man in the overlapping worlds of games and comics and now movies. He is the first video game creator to be involved in a subsequent movie version, and he pitched the project to Mr. Bruckheimer by showing him a “trailer” he had put together of clips from PlayStation 2 game footage: lots of wall-jumping and ledge-walking interspersed with shots of a scantily clad princess. Keith Boesky, a video game agent and intellectual property lawyer who helped broker the deal with Mr. Bruckheimer, said recently, “Everybody these days is talking about transmedia, but Jordan is the first guy to actually do it.”
Film - Jordan Mechner’s Multiplatform ‘Prince of Persia’ - NYTimes.com
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