Kiran

April 12, 1999

Master P,

Imagine my delight in finding this extensive monument to your work. I hope you’ll be proud to know that I’ve diligently shirked responsibility for the last couple of days in my exploration of it. What’s a credit rating good for, anyway?

Although I’ve long since abandoned my efforts to duplicate your impressive physical stature (foiled by some nonsense about “metabolism”), I continue to draw creative inspiration from your writing. In a word (or 2), you rock!

Since I so enjoy your writing, I’m interested in your general opinion of the book-to-movie conversion which has become so prevalent lately. I, for one, was pretty soured on the idea until I saw some of what’s come out in the last few years. Of course, just like anything else, a lot is bad, but some is good. I read your comments on the TV movie of “The Hoboken Chicken Emergency”, but didn’t find them falling on one side or the other. Have you ever been approached about turning a book of yours into a feature film? If so, how do you feel about it?

Kiran

P.S.: I’ve yet to find a cooler fictional (or non-fictional for that matter) character than Clarence Yojimbo. But then, it’s pretty hard to compete with the whole Venusian thing.

When THE HOBOKEN CHICKEN EMERGENCY first aired on TV, the only part I liked was the credits which were shown over drawings I had done for the book. I was watching on the set in my office, and Jill was downstairs, watching on the set in hers. At the midpoint, (there must have been an intermission, or station identification break), Jill came up to watch with me, and found that I had switched channels, and was looking at a Dragnet re-run. Bored, you see, with the adaptation of my book. I received a total of $2,700 ever from the publisher for that movie deal, and I got about 7 letters from kids, all of whom said the same thing: ""I bet you had nothing to do with that TV show."" Adults tend to get excited about it, and pretend they like it. 
At any given time there are options taken on certain books of mine. The possiblity that a Hollywood company will actually make something, and that it will be any good, is remote. However, I will take your money, if you're in that line of work, and want to try.