Gaiman Completes “Anansi Boys” Screenplay

Hugo-award winning and best-selling author Neal Gaiman blogs that he’s completed the screenplay for a big-screen version of “Anansi Boys.”

Gaiman writes that while he usually doesn’t like to adapt his own material for television, radio or movies, he was inspired to do it this case after hearing a BBC Radio dramatization of the best-selling sequel to “American Gods.”

“The biggest thing that went wrong went wrong right at the beginning, when the World Service, coping as best they could with budget cutbacks and less broadcasting time for drama, decided it would have to be an hour-long adaptation,” he said. “And bad things happen when novels get cut down to an hour. So despite a really terrific cast and production and as solid a script as could be in the circumstances, I was not happy. It felt like one of those Readers’ Digest condensed books.”

Gaiman decided he’d adapt the book for television but then he got a call from Hollywood producers interested in making it into a movie. They also offered him the chance to adapting the script.

” I wanted an Anansi Boys adaptation I could be proud of, and the radio adaption had left me wanting to go “No, this is what I meant”. So I said yes,” he says.

Gaiman says that he toiled on the script for about a year and has now turned in his first draft. He also says he took a break from his popular blog while working on the script to focus on it–and to focus on his script for the upcoming series of “Doctor Who.”

“I wrote a Very Expensive Episode. I didn’t mean to. It just happened that way, and there was not enough money left in the Season 5 budget to make it,” he says.”