Chapter one
A Dream of Dragons
Before the Starks and the Lannisters, the Dothraki and the direwolves, before the continent of Westeros had formed and the first dragon had been born, there was a boy whose imagination could not easily be contained.
George Raymond Richard Martin grew up in a federal housing project in 1950s New Jersey. His father was a longshoreman, and his mother worked as a factory manager. He wasn't allowed to have pets but was permitted to own tiny dime-store turtles, along with a toy fortress to put them in. His first fantasy story-the first he can remember, at least-was titled "Turtle Castle." He imagined his tiny reptiles were competing for power and vying for a little plastic throne.
One day, Martin made a shocking discovery: His turtles were dying. Despite his best efforts to keep his pets alive, his heroes still perished. It was a twist he hadn't seen coming. So Martin began to weave their fates into his fantasy. Perhaps his turtles were killing each other off in sinister plots?
As the years passed, Martin put his fantasies to paper. He wrote monster stories and sold them to other kids for a dime apiece. He fell in love with comic books. He later sold short stories to pulp magazines, and then penned sci-fi and horror novels.
In 1984, Martin moved to Hollywood and landed a job writing on CBS's reboot of The Twilight Zone. Martin's first aired episode was, as fate would have it, a fantasy tale about medieval knights and magic. "The Last Defender of Camelot" was an adaptation of Roger Zelazny's short story about Sir Lancelot living in modern times. The climax is set in an otherworldly version of Stonehenge, where Lancelot fights an enchanted suit of armor-a silent mountain of a warrior called the Hollow Knight.
In Martin's original script, Lancelot and the knight fought on armored horses, but that idea was deemed unworkable by the show's line producers. Recalled Martin: "'You can have Stonehenge or you can have horses,' they told me. 'But you cannot have Stonehenge and horses.' I called my friend Roger Zelazny to pose the question to him. He sucked on his pipe a minute and said, 'Stonehenge,' and so it was. They fought on foot."
Undeterred, Martin moved on to another CBS fantasy show, 1987's Beauty and the Beast, where his scripts continued to bump up against the network's creative limitations. "Counting how many times we could say 'damn' or 'hell,' telling us a corpse's makeup could be 'too horrific,' eliminating a news report on a TV in the background because it might be 'too controversial,'" Martin said. "Bullshit changes, sheer cowardice, afraid of anything that was too strong, anything that anyone might be 'offended' by-those I hated and railed against."
Martin grew frustrated, disillusioned. He returned to writing novels full-time in 1991 and a couple of years later he had an idea for a fantasy story-a "reaction," as he once dubbed it, to his years spent writing for television. It was a sprawling epic like J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a saga that Martin adored, except Martin's tale was inspired by actual European historical events such as the Wars of the Roses and reflected the true brutality of the Dark Ages. The first book, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996. Sales were, as Martin later wrote on his blog, "nothing spectacular."
In rapid succession, Martin followed up with two more books in the saga. Their popularity spread by word of mouth, enthralling an ever-growing fandom with a complex story that shattered the fantasy genre's long-held rules. Beloved heroes died horribly, loathsome villains became strangely sympathetic, the wise and cunning were toppled by the slightest procedural error, and the power of magic was considered unreliable at best.
Along the way, Martin threw in all the horses and castles and sex and violence he wanted. This wasn't the story of one fantasy kingdom but seven! Each was a distinct realm with its own history, leadership, and culture (plus there was a whole other continent of diverse cities across the Narrow Sea). There were more than two thousand named characters, a figure that doubled the count from Tolkien's saga. Plus there were massive battles-one involved four armies, tens of thousands of soldiers, and hundreds of ships. Even meals in Westeros could be extravagant, such as a banquet that included seventy-seven distinct courses, many of which were lavishly described ("elk roundels with blue cheese, grilled snake with fiery mustard sauce, river pike poached in almond milk . . ."). The books' adult content was equally voluminous, with shocking acts of torture, rape, and incest. Martin penned paragraphs that single-handedly would have consumed an entire season of a network TV show's budget, gotten a show kicked off the air, or both. And his fans loved it.
He called this epic A Song of Ice and Fire.
Hollywood took notice. By the early 2000s, Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy were blowing up the box office. Then Martin's fourth installment in his saga, A Feast for Crows, had debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list in 2005 ("A fantasy realm too vile for hobbits," declared the Times). Martin's novels made the rounds among agents and producers. His phone rang with offers of easy money and silver-screen glory.
Martin, then fifty-seven and enjoying a quiet life in Santa Fe, was wary. . . .
George R. R. Martin (author, co-executive producer): The Peter Jackson movies were big. Everybody was looking for a feature fantasy series for films. Everything was being optioned. I started [A Song of Ice and Fire] thinking it couldn't be filmed. I was like: "How are you going to make a feature out of this that's two and a half hours? You can't get it all in." Jackson took three movies to do Tolkien's books, but all three of Tolkien's books were as long as just one of mine. How are you going to do this?
The answers I got back were not ones I wanted to hear, like: "[Fan-favorite Stark bastard] Jon Snow is the central character, we'll focus on him and cut the rest away." Or they pitched, "We're not going to cut anything, we'll keep it all, but we'll just make the first film and then make more if it's a big hit." Well, what if it's not a big hit? You're saying it's going to be The Lord of the Rings, but what if it's more like Philip Pullman's [failed 2007 His Dark Materials adaptation The Golden Compass]? You make one movie, it bombs, and then you have a broken thing. No. I wasn't interested in anything like that.
Martin's literary agent sent copies of the Song of Ice and Fire novels to David Benioff, a thirty-six-year-old novelist and screenwriter, and suggested he might consider trying to adapt them for a feature film. Benioff was an up-and-comer in the industry, having penned the acclaimed 2002 crime thriller 25th Hour, along with the screenplays for the films Troy and The Kite Runner.
Eight chapters into reading A Game of Thrones, Benioff was stunned when seven-year-old Bran Stark-who had just witnessed an act of incest between the queen of Westeros and her brother-was mercilessly shoved out a tower window. A few hundred pages later, when Martin killed off the book's main character, the honorable and heroic Ned Stark, Benioff phoned his friend and writing partner Dan Weiss.
Weiss, thirty-five, had met Benioff a decade earlier while the two were studying literature at Trinity College Dublin. They'd bonded over things like Irish literature and "trying to find a functional gym in Dublin in 1995," as Weiss told Vanity Fair. Weiss was an author as well, having published his debut novel, Lucky Wander Boy, in 2003. Benioff asked Weiss to read Martin's books "to make sure [he] wasn't crazy."
"We'd been reading fantasy books since childhood and never encountered anything as good as what George had written," Benioff said.
Benioff and Weiss, like others before them, wanted to adapt A Song of Ice and Fire. But they quickly ruled out making the books into a movie, deciding instead that only a TV series could capture the scope of Martin's narrative. At least, the duo hoped it could-neither had ever worked on a TV show before.
Martin agreed to meet Benioff and Weiss for lunch at the Palm Restaurant in Los Angeles to hear their pitch. The meeting lasted four hours and would ultimately produce the biggest global pop culture phenomenon of the twenty-first century, yet it all might have been derailed by Martin asking a single unexpected question.
Dan Weiss (showrunner): We were nervous. When you start working in Hollywood, every meeting is nerve-wracking because you feel if you don't do it right it's the last meeting you're ever going to have. I had gotten long past that. You get used to meetings, and most never amount to anything. But this felt like the first meeting I'd ever taken all over again because we knew this was a one-of-a-kind opportunity and if we didn't get this job we'd never have a chance to work on something like this again, because nobody had ever seen anything like this before. There was one keeper of the keys, and that was George. If George didn't say yes, all of our dreams were dead in the crib. So we were under pressure to get it right.
David Benioff (showrunner): Part of the meeting was talking about where George came from and the science fiction writers he knew. Part of it was talking about his books and our passion for them, for him to see that we had really read them. Having worked in Hollywood before, George knew about people who read [a synopsis of a book] and then say, "Oh, this could work as a Lord of the Rings knock-off." The fact we read the books and could speak to them with some degree of knowledge I think meant something to him.
Dan Weiss: When converting to Judaism, the rabbi's job is not to convince you to convert but to talk you out of it. There was an element of that with George explaining to us that the reason he left television to do full-time writing was to write things you couldn't produce. George told us about the horses and Stonehenge. He said: "My imagination is bigger than 'the horses and Stonehenge'; I want Stonehenge and the horses and another twenty Stonehenges and another million horses." He wrote the books to use the entirety of his imaginative capacity and wrote it almost intentionally to be unfilmable.
David Benioff: George created a world so rich that you're coming into the story 95 percent of the way into it. So much happened in the past-like the Targaryen invasion of Westeros-and you need to understand that stuff in order for the current story to make sense. Books have a more elegant way of putting backstory in. On television, you either do a flashback or boring exposition. So one of George's questions was: "How are you going to let the audience know all this stuff that's so crucial?" I don't remember what our answer was. We probably came up with some bullshit.
Dan Weiss: In the course of making the show, you develop your approach to those things. But looking back on it, the history he built, even if you take out 90 percent, it's like the scaffolding on a building. You don't see the scaffolding after you take it away, but the fact it was there is what makes the building look right. You feel that 90 percent of history through the 10 percent that's on-screen. There's this overarching sense of backstory and connection and logic to why characters feel the way they feel about each other. It's never just people fighting because it's dramatic.
George R. R. Martin: They were very persuasive. They loved the books and wanted to adapt the books to a different medium, not change them or "make it their own." I hate that in Hollywood, when I go in pitching a book and meet with writers and they're like, "Here's my take on it." I don't want your take on it! Don't reimagine it, don't make it your own, just adapt it.
I told them, "I want a faithful adaptation. I don't want it to be one of those things where you take a title and write a whole new story." And I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to be a producer on it and write some scripts. "And it can't be for a [traditional broadcast network]. I don't want the sex and violence cut out. A season for each book." So we were on the same accord.
The meeting was going well. The lunch crowd had long since departed, and the restaurant staff was preparing for dinner. Then Martin asked Benioff and Weiss a question that might have ended their tentative partnership right there. One of the biggest mysteries in Martin's novels is the secret of Jon Snow's parentage. The Stark bastard is described as the son of Ned Stark and an unnamed mistress he met during Robert Baratheon's rebellion against Aerys II Targaryen, "the Mad King." Martin had scattered clues along the way hinting at Jon Snow's true identity, and fans had several theories.
George R. R. Martin: I did famously ask them the question: "Who is Jon Snow's mother?" They said they read the books. I wanted to see if they had really read the books and how much they had paid attention.
David Benioff: We were weirdly prepared for that question. We had discussed that the day before. We had just started to talk about it and came up with our theory, which just happened to be right.
George R. R. Martin: They knew the answer, which was good.
David Benioff: After we got the Jon Snow-mother question right, he gave us the backing to try and go out there and sell it.
George R. R. Martin: It was a strange situation. It's hard to remember now, but when we sat down, I had way more television experience than David and Dan. I spent ten years in television. I had gone through the ranks from staff writer to a supervising producer. If fate had been a little different I might have ended up a showrunner myself. And here were these two guys who were very talented writers but had never done anything in TV before. So a part of me wanted to do it myself, but I hadn't finished writing the books. I still haven't finished the books. I didn't see that happening.
Pitching Game of Thrones as a television series was the first of many uphill battles the producers would fight to get the show on the air. While the Lord of the Rings films were hits and other parties had approached Martin about making a possible movie, fantasy on television was associated with low-budget, all-ages syndicated fare like Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Martin's books were very R-rated, and fantasy for grown-ups was a largely untested market. "You talked dragons, you got smirks," as Harry Lloyd, who played Viserys Targaryen, it. And even a scaled-down version of A Song of Ice and Fire would be prohibitively expensive. There were only a few networks at the time that allowed adult content and might be able to afford the show.
