Considering what a cult phenomenon the original Andrews books were at their peak, it amazes me that they only ever had one major media tie-in. Oh, the idea gets shuffled around now and then--there was a plan to film the Landry Saga as a television series, and the Rain thing happened--but nothing ever seemed to come of it until recently, when, out of nowhere, Lifetime announced the forthcoming remake.
There's a lot of potential factors for this long delay. Andrews was notoriously reclusive. Marketing might have forced her to deal more with the public than she cared to. She also seems to have been as protective of her intellectual properties as she was of her privacy; it's known she demanded script approval and that she went through five scripts before selecting the one that eventually got produced She did not, however, reject the treatment by Wes Craven; that was someone else's bad decision. You can read the Craven script here, where it is available courtesy of the amazingly vast Complete V.C. Andrews site. It has incest!*
Finally, the immediate aftermath of Andrews' death was fraught with so much red tape that perhaps no one wanted to touch the mess.
In the end, someone did film an Andrews novel. Just one. And it was panned so solidly that no one dared mention its name again.
Warning: this review is very long and very gif-heavy, because give me an avi of FITA and a copy of Photoshop and I just can't stop.
