Clive Cussler is suing the producers of Sahara. They're suing back, of course.

The movie cost 160 million smackers and took in 68 mill domestic. Because it was a bad, boring, slow, flat movie. I looked forward to it coming out, because it looked like a fun adventure story. It wasn't.

Cussler disowned the movie (though he made 12 million dollars off of it). He corrected several scripts, approved four of them, and then the producers commissioned someone to write a completely different movie. The director, meanwhile, couldn't decide if it should be an adventure movie, a shoot-em-up action movie (which is darker than an adventure movie), or a mystery. So he took the worst aspects of all of them and threw them in a blender.

Did I mention it was a sad, terrible movie? Good actors, mind you, but everything else was awful.

This is the danger of selling your story to Hollywood. Normally, I'd happily laugh my way to the bank over such a disaster, if I were the writer, but Dirk Pitt is a franchise movie. Now, personally, I'd be happy with 12 mill, but Cussler has written dozens of DP novels, all of which can be made into movies. Sahara was a franchise killer, and lost him several hundred millions in future earnings. He says it's about the story, which I can understand, and probably it is. You have to love a character to write that many books about him. Cussler has so much money that the future earnings aren't that big a deal, but not getting his stories to the screen? That could be a big deal. It's just when you're talking so much money, it gets surreal quickly...