On Wednesday, August 18 2010, in an interview with Adi Tantimedh, Alan Moore spoke his big mind, didn't hold anything back and was blunt as could be...
(long interview), so I'm posting the more interesting of his answers..
(1st on the misunderstanding and misconception of his exit from the comics world and his refusal to accept the right to watchmen...)
Moore :''Well, I suppose the short answer is on one level, I am finished with Comics and disgusted with the practices of the comic book industry. With regard to the specific issue of WATCHMEN. I think it’s more fair to say that I would never dream of taking the rights to WATCHMEN back under the terms that they were offered to me.''
(What are the terms you may ask, its technical, Moore explains)
Moore :''Sometime shortly before I heard there was going to be a film, I had a phone call from Steve Moore saying that perhaps there wasn’t any kind of blacklist, because he’d just had an offer from DC to write the computer game based upon WATCHMEN. They also said to him, “We haven’t told Alan about this yet.” At which Steve, who had got a little bit of work of his own around that time, said, “Well, I can’t take on any work because I have work of my own, and also I would never dream of taking anything if Alan hadn’t been consulted.''
''And it seems to me that possibly because they know that I would do almost anything to make Steve Moore’s life easier, since he is my oldest and dearest friend, that they were hoping to present the WATCHMEN computer game to me as a fait accompli; that they would put me in a position of either playing along cheerily with the computer game or having to refuse work to my oldest and dearest friend, when I knew that he needed it. Now, what they didn’t know at the time was that Steve’s brother Chris had just been diagnosed with Motor Neuron disease, which is a disease which is fatal, which is incurable, and which in 99% of cases will just make you steadily more paralyzed until eventually either your heart or your lungs stop''
''Now, I phoned up Wildstorm and asked them to pass on a message to DC, that I understood that they had been trying to put moral pressure on me through Steve Moore, and that they didn’t know that Steve’s brother had recently been diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease, but I was informing them of that point, and also was stressing that they really shouldn’t try pulling any nasty little tricks through the medium of Steve Moore because Steve Moore had a dying brother. And a matter like a dying brother, as I put it, is more important to ordinary people than the machinations of the people who publish Batman comics.''
''Later, I had a phone call from Steve Moore saying that he’d been contacted by Warner Books, for whom he’d done an extraordinary job of writing the novelisation fo the V FOR VENDETTA movie. He wrote the entire book in a month, which is something very few writers these days would even think about doing. And they had talked to him about how he would be the only possible writer they knew that I would be happy with writing the WATCHMEN novelisation. And they offered him the job. This was at a time when Steve really needed the money because he didn’t have any work and it was the year in which he expected to lose his brother.''
''So I said that I was really happy to hear that and yes, there wasn’t anybody else that I would have cheerfully allowed to do the film adaptation, and that he would be the best person for the job, so we left it at that.''
(Then the call by Dave Gibbons.....out reach)
Moore :Then I had a phone call from Dave Gibbons. It wasn’t to thank me for the money, which I assumed hadn’t gotten to him yet at that point. But it was to somewhat apologetically say that he knew I wasn’t really interested in the WATCHMEN film but there was an idea that he wanted to run by me. This was the idea for a reproduction pirate comic book which would extract all of the bits of pirate narrative from WATCHMEN and somehow glue them together into a narrative and would be released as a facsimile of THE TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER comic that is a comic book within the WATCHMEN comic....''not a particularly good idea'' (he says)
''I didn’t want to receive any payment for it because it was obviously something that was connected to the movie. Dave said at that point, and he sounded quite pleased with himself, that yes, his contacts at DC had said that they expected “Alan to be quietly compliant”,
(Quietly compliant, I don't think so)
Moore :''kind of stopped me in my tracks, and I remember asking him, “Why on Earth did they say that? What was the meaning of that phrase?” And he said the he’d got no idea what it meant, he just repeated again that I’d be ‘quietly compliant’ as if the musicality of the phrase had appealed to him and stuck in his mind. So I said, “Well, it’s more completely indifferent, Dave, rather than quietly compliant.''
(Moore says no to The Black Freighter)
Moore :''The next thing I knew was that the project had been cancelled — I suspect — because DC didn’t really want anything out there in public that was actually saying that I was divorcing myself from the project. The project vanished.''
(Is DC inhumane ?)
Moore :''I got a phone call from Steve Moore saying he’d been contacted by Warner Books and that they told him that they weren’t going to be doing a WATCHMEN book and that the job was off. At that point, it seems to me, I understood what ‘Alan will be quietly compliant’ had meant. It seems to me that what they meant by that was that “Alan realises that if he says no to this or kicks up any trouble, then we’re going to take away the money from his friend, as we’ve been informed, whose brother is dying from Motor Neuron Disease.” So it seems to me that they were exerting a kind of pressure upon me through Steven and his dying brother that was execrable, that was inhuman.''(Dave Gibbons couldn't believe his ''friends at DC'' could do that)
''So I said to Dave Gibbons, “For the sake of our friendship, Dave, I think it would be better if you and I did not discuss WATCHMEN ever again.” Obviously, it was something that both of us felt a little upset about, but it was the only way that I could stop Dave from ever being used to pass on creepy little messages to me, with or without his knowledge''
(he gets a ''little bit irked'' by a Dave Gibbons interview)
Moore :''During the course of the interview, although my name wasn’t supposed to be attached to this film, the interviewer, presumably somebody on the Film end of things, had asked Dave if he’d had any contact with Alan Moore, at which Dave said that he was assured we were still friends, but I had asked him to never talk to me about WATCHMEN again. This was said without any supporting reason more or less as if it was just an example of ‘that crazy Alan Moore with his crazy long hair and his crazy ideas’. So I was a little bit irked by that, particularly because I hadn’t received a phone call from Dave yet thanking me for the WATCHMEN money. I don’t know… because I had a friendship with Dave that went back 25 years, I was thinking maybe he thinks that thanking me for the WATCHMEN money would constitute a conversation about WATCHMEN, so I was in two minds about what was happening.
''I received a phone call from Dave Gibbons in which I probably did sound a little bit unfriendly on the phone, because it was very clear that he wasn’t phoning up to thank me for the WATCHMEN film money and I figured that he was probably phoning up to talk to me about something else to do with WATCHMEN.''
''I had heard that the new Head of DC had announced that she really wanted to pursue some of DC’s key properties, by which I assume she probably meant WATCHMEN. I think she may have even mentioned it, I don’t know. So I said to Dave that yes, I had heard about this and he was saying that he knew the thing that I always wanted was the rights to WATCHMEN back. This was said with the kind of understanding that if they gave me back the rights to WATCHMEN, then I would in return sign over the rights to secondary properties such as, oh I don’t know, Rorschach comic books, sequels, prequels, all of these things…''
(Then it gets personal)
Moore :''Now, I stepped in and said to Dave that actually, no I had grown so sick of WATCHMEN over these last 18 months that I didn’t want the rights back anymore. If they had offered them back to me back when I wanted them, ten, twenty years ago, then maybe this could have all been resolved in a friendly fashion. But no, I wasn’t going to take the rights back at this stage after they had pretty much, in my opinion, raped what I had thought to be a pretty decent work of art. I didn’t want them throwing me back the spent and exhausted carcass of my work and certainly not under terms that would apparently allow them to go on producing witless sequels and prequels ad infinitum.''
(On whether they(DC)they wanted him to waive his moral rights in order to let them further exploit the property in the media?)
Moore :''Exactly. It sounded like to me — when I said I didn’t want the rights back, Dave Gibbons quickly switched to Plan B, which is apparently that they would make me a very large offer, I got the sense that they were talking, what, a couple of million, something like that, to sign over all of my rights to WATCHMEN. Which I again rejected for much the same reasons.''
(Clouds over DC)
Moore :''There are clouds of question marks that hang over some of their properties… I mean, I don’t know whether the ongoing Superboy case has been settled…''
Adi Tantimedh :''It hasn’t. It’s getting uglier as we speak, in fact.''
Moore :''That’s pretty much what I’ve heard. That of course puts a big question mark over some of DC’s characters.''
(Christopher Nolan)
Moore :''The Batman movie films, I understand that the last couple have been done by a better-than-average director, but I wouldn’t have thought that he’d be sticking with that franchise forever or if that’s what he wants to be known for.''
(Marvel more marketable ?..that has to hurt dc)
Moore :''I mean, compared to Marvel Comics, at least for the moment, Marvel seem to have a much large raft of marketable characters than DC-Warner, who have practically nothing except for properties like WATCHMEN, which could conceivably spin off into games, movies and potentially TV series and all of these different areas and could bring in a huge amount of money. I should imagine that DC also would not have made me these offers out of the kindness of their heart or because they felt bad about the way they treated me in the past.''
(Why DC needs his permission to exploit watchmen further)
Moore :''There may some problem with contract, or some potential problem that may require my actual signature saying its ok to go ahead with these prequels and sequels. It might be that they can't just do this.''
''As I understood it, they didn’t realise until after they’d made the film for, what, 200 million? That was ostensibly what they said it cost to make the film. When they’d made that film, they were then notified by 20th Century Fox that actually they had sold all the rights to make that film and distribute back when I was talking to Terry Gilliam back in the 1980s. And I understand that this led to a fairly punitive settlement between Warner Brothers and Fox whereby a ton of money had to be handed over in order for Warner Brothers to release their already very expensive film. So contractually, I’m not sure that the people at DC always know what they’re doing. I’m reminded of the fact that apparently they possessed the comic book rights to James Bond. From about 1960 onwards, they published a SHOWCASE title of DR. NO. It didn’t do very much and they promptly forgot about it. I presume that it was about 20 years later… so maybe they’d got the rights for 20 years during which James Bond was at the height of its popularity, they didn’t even realise that they owned the rights to the property. So these are people who are a bit slapdash in their contractual work in the past.''
(On what Watchmen did for the American novel market)
Moore :''It revitalized a moribund industry. It changed the face of Comics''
(Its Not About The Money)
Moore :''I don’t wish to make money out of my characters being put through a lot of lame moves, which can do nothing but discredit the original work.''
(Hate the industry, not the medium)
Moore :''Absolutely. I’ve always said that I will probably love the comic book medium forever....I mean, I’m still having a great deal of fun doing THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN with Kevin, you know, and various other bits and pieces, but the Comics Industry I am repulsed by, and this is not anything that I went out of my way to engineer. I had nothing but love for the comics industry when I entered it. It could all have been so different. The only thing that happened was that when I felt that I was being cheated and robbed, where initially we put forward lots of sensible ways that that situation could be rectified with no hard feelings on either side, these were completely ignored and indeed everything I’ve said since has been completely ignored, even my request that Dave Gibbons shouldn’t phone me up with more messages from his bosses at DC.''
(Moore's Royalty check was 2 months late. Is DC in trouble or just trying to manipulate Moore's moral rights)
Moore :''Well, yeah, we’ll see what they do. I’m hoping that since I’m definitely not going to be signing these rights over to them, that they might just desist, and, I mean, all right, I can understand this, if Warners don’t have any properties that are worth anything, or at least not worth very much in comparison to someone like Marvel Comics, I can understand that they might get a bit desperate. I mean, just recently, my latest royalty cheque was two months late, which I can only interpret in two ways: either everybody’s royalty cheque was two months late, which would indicate that DC are perhaps a bit short of money? I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s certainly one way that you can construe it, or the other way is that only my royalty cheque was six weeks late, which again would look like this was some clumsy attempt to put financial pressure upon me to go for this multimillion pound WATCHMEN offer, which again would suggest a level of desperation and creative impoverishment regarding Warner Brothers.'' (ouch).
That was Hell of an interview...
He gave Marvel props while dissing DC, that was fun...
So what does the CBM community have to say ?