Sometimes Tim Wagner can make up scenes, sometimes not.
take over his job terrorist 2is a novel of the popular 2022 killer clown horror movie. The studio wanted to adapt a 100,000-word prose adaptation of a film that was less than two and a half hours long, so it needed to get some creative license from the author. “If Art the Clown was running around killing people, I could have him kill some more people,” Wagner said of the book, which was released last October. “At one point in the movie, he’s driving a van, so I thought, ‘Oh, where does he get his van?’ So I wrote a scene where he gets his van.
But Wagner’s first published work for A24 – a book adaptation of “A24” X Trilogy – A Different Mission: Don’t complicate writer-director Dee West’s creative vision. So in X (released September 24), pearl (November 19) and upcoming Maggie Xin (Slated for release in early 2025) Wagner is working on bringing Mia Goss-starring horror movies to life in novel form, likening the way they’re written to journalism. As a result, he noted, the books were thin and similar in appearance to pulp novels from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
Wagner is a veteran of the Hollywood tie-in industry and has written novels for movies Halloween Kills, XXX: Return of Xander Cage, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, alien, Kingsman: The Golden Circle and TV series paranormal, green and Stargate SG-1. He is also a novelist, writing his own original material, and is a Bram Stoker Award winner who has written books on how to write horror novels.
in an extensive interview hollywood reporterWagner spoke of the specific challenges posed by the job X trilogy, the state of the media tie-in business and his thought process on how to envision screen characters.
Did writing these books for A24 present you with any new creative challenges compared to your past work in the tie-in space?
One of the things that usually happens with novelization is the studio gives you a script and that’s the only thing. You never interact with the filmmakers in any way, shape, or form; there is always someone responsible for licensing the studio, protecting the intellectual property, or monitoring any work done using the intellectual property. Since the movie isn’t out yet and they won’t show you a projector or anything – usually when you write a book they’re still making the movie – you have to do what the script says. So you have to imagine a lot. Sometimes I try to find any kind of promotional images or videos or if someone has secretly stolen the video [during] Shooting, anything I could find to give me an idea of what things might be like.
But with X The trilogy, they’ve all been out before, and not only have I watched them all, but I’ve been able to watch each one on streaming. So I can write about it in a way that’s almost like I’m reporting on it. I have a script, but I can also watch it live. I was able to capture the mood and atmosphere because of the lighting, the direction, and I was also able to capitalize on the actors’ performances. I think all of this makes my writing experience richer. It feels more like an overall collaboration. [In this case] The writers, directors, actors, and others who made the film all influenced the book in some way.
How did you get started in the media tie-in business?
When I was a preteen and teenager, this was right before VCRs, so the only way you could rewatch a canceled movie or favorite TV show was through tie-ins. We do turn to these books just to learn more. They always fascinated me because there were no special features so it was the only way you could get extra content in the script. But more importantly to me, you get the chance to understand what Captain Kirk was thinking or feeling in one of StarCraft Movie. I find this different perspective really interesting.
Eighteen is when I started committing to writing and started sending things out. Eventually, I had a mentor, fantasy writer Denis McKiernan, [who] Introduced me to Mike Stackpole, another writer Star Wars match and shadowrun and Combat TechnologyMike told me the ins and outs of the tying business and introduced me to some people. Little by little, you start working in the field, you start to become known, and once you know enough, people start approaching you or your agent and asking if you’re interested.
How does your writing process for film and TV novels differ from writing original books?
The process is really, really different. As far as mechanics go, the first thing I did [in a novelization] Reading the script, then I type all the dialogue because I know I’m going to keep it, and then I fill in the stuff around it. In some ways it was easier because I already had a template to follow, so I could move forward and learn more about the characters and their minds. i did it terrorist 2this X Trilogy of Books, I wrote some original novels based on the Trilogy a few years ago supernatural: You know all these fans are out there and they all have different ideas of what these characters’ stories should be. So you want to think about respecting that and giving them something they’ll enjoy, rather than letting it limit your creativity to the point where you can’t write. When I was writing my own book, it wasn’t something I had to think about. Then there is also, with Terrorist Shuhe X trilogy, with the writer and director involved. I know they’re going to read the work, they’re going to comment on the work and give me advice, so it’s something completely new. I’ve never had such an experience before.
Do you enjoy the process of collaborating with another artist to realize their vision?
I really enjoy it because it’s a chance for me to interact with someone else’s vision. I exercise a very different set of creativity. I started studying the script and understanding it from the inside out. It’s also fun because I get to see how other writers construct stories. I see how they carry the conversation, and then I can try to find a way to not only match their voice, but incorporate my voice into it as well. Every novel I do is different in terms of what the studio, director, or writer wants. for terrorist 2they wanted me to write 100,000 words, and I said, “Your movie is two and a half hours long, but even that long only fills about half of it.” And they were like, “Okay, go ahead and make something up.” .” Butti didn’t want to add anything to his script, and I totally understand that. This was his vision, and I wouldn’t have added scenes from Pearl’s childhood or anything if he wanted to realize that vision in novel form. That’s why these books X trilogy, they’re probably thinner than any novel I’ve ever written. They’re kind of retro; a lot of paperbacks from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s were thin, thin adventures and stuff. Because the movies have this aesthetic in some ways, especially the first one, the book endings are cool.
Tim Wagner
Christine Avery
Since fiction is perhaps a more intrinsic medium than film or television, what is your course of action when it comes to the thought process of a character originally conceived for the screen?
I’m often asked, what’s the first piece of advice you’d give a new author? I tell them, one of the things that we have to overcome is that in our culture, most people, even if you love to read and read a bunch of books, you still experience thousands and thousands of hours of visual media. And the perspective from which you experience it is [that of] A passive spectator, removed from the action, will only let the action overwhelm you. When you write, you have to imagine that you are the actor in that scene. I started out as a theater major in college and then switched to English, and I drew on that background a lot, which was the few years of acting classes I took. So what I do is I imagine I’m Pearl, I imagine I’m her husband, or I imagine I’m Maxine: What would I see at this moment? What would I be thinking or feeling at this moment?
What content can be added to film and television novels that is not found in movies?
If you’re lucky, there will be extra scenes in the script that people don’t see [in the movie/TV show]. If these scenes had never been filmed, they would never have appeared on the Blu-ray’s special features. It’s really cool because writers create things that will move audiences who have never been dramatized. One of the things that surprised me when I first started writing a novel was how important Terrorist movie or for X trilogy, but with other movies I’ve done, people would complain, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of action scenes. There’s no character. But there was a lot of characterization in these scripts. Those bits were cut out because the action took up It’s so great to be able to bring that to people.
Have you noticed the market for film and television novels changing over time? Has their popularity increased or decreased?
Once the tapes appear, they literally disappear, especially if the tapes come with special features [home video]. And then for some reason, fiction, especially horror fiction, has really taken off in the last few years. There’s a small publishing house called Encyclopocalypse, and one of the things they do is adapt old horror movies into novels. So they might find a script from the ’80s and then go to whoever owns that IP and say, “We’d like to be contracted to do this.” So they’ve been bringing in all kinds of interesting stuff [books]. I think what they’re looking into right now is felling mall From a collaboration with Barbara Crampton in the 1980s.
For a contemporary film brand like A24, does it mean anything to you to be committed to film novelization at this time?
I really think so. one thing i noticed Terrorist Shuhe X Books, it’s anecdotal, people say, “I haven’t picked up a book in X years and I just loved this book and I can’t wait to read another one. I’m just going to pick up another book and read it .So that makes me really happy, especially because of the people who actually do the research. [find that] American men tend to read less than women. A lot of the people I’ve seen make these comments are men, so I thought, “Well, that’s good. That’s something. Because one of the things that fiction can do, and they’ve looked at this, is it adds Empathy, it increases the use of your own imagination, and if you think of it as a technology, it can do things that other types of media can’t do for us, and it can have a very profound impact. .So if a book is marketed as Terrorist or a X A trilogy novel or anything that draws people in and then reads it, I think that’s a great thing. Just enjoying the story is a wonderful reward.
If you could choose to write one, what would be your dream novel for film or television?
When I was a kid I really liked Kolchak: Nightcrawler Series by Darren McGavin. I did do a short comic script for the anthology [about it]but it would be really nice to write a full novel. I’ve loved superheroes since I was a kid, but I’ve never done anything superhero-y, so if James Gunn were to put out any novels about the new DC movies, I’d love to do it. I haven’t done it yet Friday the 13th However. I wrote a Freddy Krueger book many years ago and also wrote Michael Myers, so if I could get Jason, that would be a trifecta of ’80s horror movies. But really, any of them are interesting because they’re all different. They’re different challenges and they stretch me in different ways – that’s why I love it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
