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racebending:

Deadline.com reports that the studio and producers behind The Last Airbender (2010) have acquired the rights to Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash.

The Kennedy/Marshall Company will produce. The Kennedy/Marshall company is the production company headed by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, two of the producers of The Last Airbender (2010).

In 2008, fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender wrote hundreds of letters to Kennedy and Marshall asking them not to cast white actors to play characters of color in their adaptation of The Last Airbender. These letters were returned to sender or otherwise ignored. Even after Asian American advocacy organizations stepped in, producer Frank Marshall did not acknowledge that the casting of The Last Airbender had a discriminatory impact on actors of color.

Marshall did, however, acknkowledge that casting breakdowns asking for “Caucasian or any other ethnicity” to play the characters of Airbender were “poorly worded and offensive.” He told UGO.com that:

“Ultimately, we all take responsibility for not doing a more thorough job monitoring these frequently used third-party [casting] agents and Paramount has since been in regular dialogue with Asian American advocacy groups including the Japanese American Citizens League and the Media Action Network for Asian Americans to ensure that such a mistake does not happen in the future.” – Frank Marshall, 2010

How will this all play out in the adaptation of Snow Crash, a 1992 novel about a futuristic Los Angeles featuring several characters of color? The main character is hacker and pizza delivery guy Hiro Protagonist, who is of mixed Asian and African American descent. Other characters include a street smart skateboarder named Yours Truly (Y.T.), Hiro’s ex-girlfriend Juanita Marquez, and the antagonist Raven, who is of Aleut descent. Themes of racism and sexism intersect the text and the characters’ experiences.

Read the full article at Racebending.com

This is one of my favorite books. First of all, please don’t let it be made into a film. I nearly had palpitations when they did a bit about it on Party Down, and that was fake. Second of all, DO IT RIGHT.

There is so much that could go so wrong with this adaptation omg

I think Snow Crash could be done right, and excellently so, as a miniseries.  Anything shorter would lop off big chunks of the book.  I can’t imagine losing the different threads of the plot.  It would ruin it.  Snow Crash isn’t a huge book but it has a lot of ideas in it, and those ideas all come together to make it the unique and interesting read it is.  I fear at the worst they’ll make a hacker samurai against a crazed guy with a nuke in his bike and that’s it.  I have high hopes for the upcoming series adaptation of American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and I think that Snow Crash deserves a similar approach.  Lots of locations, lots of secondary and tertiary characters, the weird future society with franchise governments, exposition in both real and virtual environments, and cults and Sumerian mythology?  That just invites big open spaces and pauses, the way some screen adaptations need to be.  Interesting news.  If you haven’t read the book, do so.