Sci-Fi Film and Television Developments

The Raw Shark Texts
11/11/08 – SCI FI Wire reported that Simon Beaufoy has finished a draft of a screenplay based on the book The Raw Shark Texts, a novel by Steven Hall that deals with the metaphysical erasure of memory.  "OK, get this," Beaufoy said. "It's about conceptual sharks that eat your memory. It's like Memento and Jaws and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Just pair it all up. It's the most amazing flight of imagination I've read for 20 years."  With his work complete, pending any eventual rewrites, it is still a director's job to figure out what conceptual sharks look like. Beaufoy just dealt with the plot. "Yeah, I just write, 'Shark attacks.' It's not my problem."  Whether or not Beaufoy's script attaches a director or cast, he remains a fan of Hall's novel. "[The title] is a pun on the Rorschach test, the inkblot test. It's full of all that. It's extraordinary. You will never have read anything like it, so I really recommend it. You might only get halfway through and go, 'OK, that's enough madness.' But it is genuinely original. It's brilliant."  The Raw Shark Texts is published by Canongate in the United States.

AlienAlmanac.com 2008