Book of the Day
A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin · 1996
He wrote it specifically so that nobody could ever film it. It became the most expensive show on television.
A decade of being told no
Before he was a novelist again, George R. R. Martin spent years working in American television. It was steady work, and it was a decade of hearing the same sentence in different words: this is too big.
Scripts came back cut. Characters were removed for being too dangerous. Scenes were reduced because they cost too much.
One verdict he has quoted since became the whole problem in a single line — we love it, but it's five times our budget.
Writing something they couldn't touch
So he stopped writing for people who would tell him what a page could afford.
Most novelists write hoping for a film deal. Martin sat down in the opposite frame of mind entirely: he would write a book with no ceiling at all. Hundreds of speaking characters. Battles with armies in them. Direwolves. Dragons. Continents. A cast so large that a major figure could die and the story would carry on without them.
Deliberately, gleefully unfilmable. A Game of Thrones was published in 1996 and became the first volume of A Song of Ice and Fire.
The joke that reversed
Television came for it anyway.
The thing built to be too expensive was made — and then made at a scale television had never previously attempted, becoming for a time the most costly and most watched drama on air, and dragging the entire industry's budgets up behind it.
He wrote a book to escape the budget conversation. The book changed what the budget could be.
Awards and screen
HBO's Game of Thrones ran from 2011 to 2019 and became one of the most awarded dramas in television history, making large-scale fantasy commercially respectable for major studios in a way it had never previously been.
Did you know
- He deliberately tried to write a novel that could not be adapted.
- The decision came from a decade in television being told his scripts were too expensive.
- One producer's verdict — "we love it, but it's five times our budget" — is a line he has repeated for years.
- The unfilmable book became, for a time, the most expensive show on television.
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