Lombardo talks up Thrones in Vanity Fair
HBO co-president Michael Lombardo was interviewed recently for an article over at Vanity Fair discussing HBO’s ability to garner so many Emmy nominations and wins. While he touches on many aspects of HBO’s formula for success, above all, Lombardo credits the great writing. It is in this context that he brings up Game of Thrones.
Lombardo, for example, mentioned the upcoming adaptation of the fantasy-novel series Game of Thrones, a genre in which he’d candidly mentioned not being the world’s leading expert: “The fact that it was genre, i.e. a little bit of magic, in a world that is not in fact real was irrelevant to the storytelling. The human drama that I read in the page, the characters as scripted by David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss]—I was hooked on the pilot after reading it, and I’ve done this enough now to know that doesn’t happen all the time and when it happens you need to pay attention to it. Because to have a great show, I got to tell you, what you have to start with is a great script. It was a great script.”
Winter Is Coming: More of the same from HBO. Not that I’m getting tired of hearing it, mind you. It is great to hear that this story has resonated with the HBO execs in much the same way it has with thousands millions of readers across the globe. And kudos to David and Dan for being able to boil down GRRM’s sprawling narrative into a successful screenplay.
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