Can Minear bring "Mistress" to the screen?

I’ve probably read Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress five or six times. It brims with so many unique ideas that I still find new things in it. But until this week, I hadn’t heard that the novel may be moving to the Big Screen. An article by Paul Davidson reports that Tim Minear, writer for and executive producer (with Joss Whedon) of Firefly, is working on a Harsh Mistress script for producers Mike Medavoy (Holes, this summer’s Stealth) and David Hayman (the Harry Potter movies). Minear says that writing the screenplay presents a lot of challenges, one of them being the political preferences of Hollywood:

“This is about a revolution. It’s big and it has a lot of really complex political ideas. It’s hard in that respect. How do you personalize this? There’s a lot of talking in the book — theoretical talking about Libertarian ideals and political structure and that sort of thing — how do you take that and make it immediate and dramatic and emotional? How do you say that stuff through scenes and action, as opposed to characters sitting around and having a conversation? That’s difficult.

“The other thing is to make sure the powers that be in Hollywood don’t force you to turn it into some Marxist screed on socialism, when Heinlein was a Libertarian and it’s about free-market capitalism. You want to try and not make it about an evil corporation. That’s the trick.”

No kidding. When it comes right down to it, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress not only paints a vivid picture of a market anarchist society, it’s also an explicit instruction guide on how to get there, from cadre-building to revolution to, well, “governance.” Minear’s got his work cut out for him. And I’m anxious to see the results of this project.

Thanks, Anders Monsen, for pointing me to Davidson’s article.

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