Mini-Series Remake Would Have Been Great Idea

THE CARPETBAGGERS was much too big a novel to be fit into a movie, so, like James A. Michener's HAWAII, they actually made it into two movies. The perfect medium for this novel, of course, would have been the TV Mini-Series, which brought several Robbins novels, including 79 PARK AVENUE and THE DREAM MERCHANTS, to the small screen in the late 1970s and early 1980s. THE CARPETBAGGERS, with its many larger-than-life characters and multiple story-lines, would have been a terrific 6- or 8-hour series.

No, Robbins wasn't the greatest writer in the world, but for most of his career he was a damned good storyteller, and he his narrative powers were at their zenith with THE CARPETBAGGERS (it helped that, when the novel came out in 1961, the inspirations for its characters were still well-known [Howard Hughes] or well-remembered [Jean Harlow/Jane Russell] by the public) - Robbins had no qualm about ripping his plots and characters right out of the headlines.

"I don't use a pen: I write with a goose quill dipped in venom!"---W. Lydecker