Review of John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood by a Hollywood Producer

We are up to 48 customer reviews on Amazon with an average rating of 4.6, and now there are some blog reviews starting to come out in the aftermath of last week’s free promotion which produced 17,000 downloads.  The indie publishing adventure continues . . .

Frank Demartini is a Hollywood producer who makes movies for NuImage.  He is the founder of a blogsite called The Hollywood Republican and has written a review of John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood.  

A Well Researched Look at Disney’s Folly 

I’m not an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan — but as a film producer myself I saw the horrible marketing campaign for this film unfold and could only shake my head at the stubborn clumsiness of it. As the tracking numbers came in and it was clear the campaign wasn’t working, like everyone else in Hollywood, I became increasingly certain that Stanton’s film was doomed to failure before it was ever released.

With this book, Sellers—who is a producer himself and knows his way around Hollywood and film production and distribution — offers a  smart, knowledgeable “crash investigation” of Disney’s mishandling of the property. He looks insightfully and in detail at what went wrong and offers plausible explanations about why people who should have been capable of creating a successful outcome failed to do so.

It’s also interesting to see how Sellers went from an interested but passive observer to an active participant in the promotion,  first with his blogsite The John Carter Files , then with his two fan trailers, both of which were better than anything  Disney put out, and both of which were lauded by Andrew Stanton which helped cause them to go viral.  This part of the story is an interesting commentary on how, with the modern tools of social media (and book publishing), anyone who sets out to have an impact has a legitimate chance to use their voice and be heard in ways that were impossible until very recently.

Read More:  http://www.hollywoodrepublican.net/2013/02/john-carter-and-the-gods-of-hollywood/

Also from the blogsite Vic’s Big Walk

John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood by Michael D. Sellers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read the wonderful series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs about John Carter of Mars (which he wrote before he got round to Tarzan of the Apes) when I was a small boy. They occupied my father’s bookshelves which I was devouring at the age of 10 or so. My brother still remembers me excitedly telling him how great the books were and he became a fan too – and still is.

John Carter first arrived in print 100 years ago but Burrough’s imagination was so stupendous that film-makers have felt unable, until the arrival of the digital age, to bring the books to the screen – although this has not prevented the extensive strip-mining of the books for such cinematic efforts as Flash Gordon, Star Wars and Avatar, all of which were heavily influenced by John Carter.

John Carter fans, who were legion, because these books dominated the paperback market for decades and are regarded as the basis for the whole science fiction market, have waited patiently all this time for a film company to be a) capable and b) willing, to put John Carter into the cinemas.

Read the rest: http://vicsbigwalk.blogspot.com/2013/02/book-review-john-carter-and-gods-of.html

Check out John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood at Amazon.