A Research Disaster!

Well, I can hardly believe it, but my project has blown up in my face, thanks to the filmmakers, of all people. The DVD has a short piece on how they were faithful to the Conan Doyle stories when they made Sherlock Holmes into a modern action hero. I was crushed. I didn't know how to deal with this kind of problem, so I e-mailed Dr. Toffee. She said we would talk about it at my conference (where we were supposed to be talking about my draft). I met with her yesterday, and it's not as bad as I thought it was. She offered a couple of solutions. First (and I thought this one was pretty generous of her), she said we could just pretend this never happened, since I already did most of the work and had the draft finished. I got the feeling that she thought this would be the wrong choice, but that could have been my imagination.  Second, I could change the thesis (I went with the original one, which is exactly what that stupid featurette was arguing.  Doh!).  I decided on the spot to shift the thesis to that Watson-point-of-view idea I had.  We looked at the draft for the rest of the meeting, and she showed me how a lot of the stuff I had would still work.
I knew before this that she was going to insist on some kind of major revision (that was part of the assignment), so I'm not upset over that.  I'm just so pissed off at them!  And yeah, I know it's stupid to take it personally, but still . . .

Anyway, there's some news about SH (the character).  The BBC has a new series coming (hope we can see it here) of Sherlock Holmes in a modern setting (see below), and the article says that "a comedy [version of Sherlock Holmes] tipped to star Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell – has also been announced, which will be produced by Judd Apatow, famed for Anchorman and Knocked Up."  How about that?  I'm guessing that Ferrell will be Watson and Cohen will be Holmes, but it could work the other way, too, I think.



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• Sherlock Holmes to police modern London in new series (telegraph.co.uk)