At TCA in 2019, showrunner Damon Lindelof fielded a lot of questions about his upcoming Watchmen series for HBO. Specifically, he was asked about how the small screen project may or may not connect to the classic comic series of the same name, which ran over 12 issues run from 1986-87.
“We are not going to mess with it, it’s canon,” he declared.
However, Lindelof did admit his relationship with the comic’s notoriously prickly and private co-creator, Alan Moore, was predictably rocky. He did not elaborate at length about his interactions with Moore, who long-ago-announced his intention to have nothing to do with adaptations of his work. In keeping with that, Moore was not mentioned in any of HBO’s press materials for the series, with only Dave Gibbons noted as co-creator.
Today in an interview with GQ, however, Moore described his interactions with Lindelof. Per the Watchmen co-creator, Lindelof sent him a self-deprecating letter that attempted to recognize Moore’s gripes while establishing a connection. “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen,” Moore said the letter began.
“That wasn’t the best opener,” noted Moore. “It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. ‘Can you at least tell us how to pronounce “Ozymandias?” ‘ I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Bros. were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason.”
Moore continued, “I explained that I had disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, ‘Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.’ “
Unsurprisingly, Moore has still never seen Watchmen or any Hollywood project based on his oeuvre.
“I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work,” he said. “From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason.”