George R.R. Martin still has a dragon in his craw about unfaithful adaptations

For an author who's been adapted as many times as he has—including by shows where he's ostensibly on the production team, like Game Of Thrones and House Of The Dragon—George R.R. Martin doesn't seem to enjoy the process (or at least the parts where they alter his stories in any way, shape, or form) very much. In fact, it's a strong enough feeling that it can even intrude on conversations that are ostensibly about something much different and sweeter, like, say, Martin's current goal of making short films out of the works of his fellow author and long-time friend, the late Howard Waldrop.

Martin was talking to THR about the project, which kicks off with an adaptation of Waldrop's dodo-focused 1980 short story The Ugly Chickens, starring Felicia Day, and which is currently making the festival circuit rounds. While acknowledging that he changed one aspect of Waldrop's story—Day's part was a guy in the original tale—Martin apparently can't help himself from getting on the topic of those other, far more awful changes that TV and film people typically impose on sweet, innocent books like his. "Maybe I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who still thinks that when you adapt a work of art, a novel, a short story, you should do a faithful adaptation,” Martin opined. “[It] annoys me too much because they change things and I don’t think they generally improve them.”

It is, of course, very hard to read these comments and not think immediately of the fairly massive stink Martin made earlier this year about House Of The Dragon, which he prefaced with lead-up hints of dark and terrible accusations to be made, and which then turned out to be about the absence of what certainly seemed to us like a fairly minor character from a show with, like, a hundred loose Targaryens kicking around the margins of every scene. (In a since-deleted post, Martin referred to some of these changes as "larger and more toxic butterflies to come," which, credit where it's due, is a pretty kick-ass mental image.)

Back on his ostensible topic, Martin also reflected on getting to show Waldrop, who he'd known since they were both kids, an early cut of The Ugly Chickens before the author's death in January of 2024. He also expressed his reasons for pouring his own money into the short film projects even though, horror of horrors, it would make him one of the adapters himself: "I hope these films will get him a lot more readers, because he has a lot of books and he has a lot of short stories. If these little 30-minute shorts do well enough, if they can earn at least some of their money, then we’ll do more of them. Howard has 100 stories at least, but they’re all wonderful and unique in their own way.” (For what it's worth, Waldrop's "Ugly Chickens" is available to read online; it's a brisk, charming read.)