Earlier this week, in New York, filmmaker Zack Snyder presented the first lengthy sneak preview of Watchmen, his adaptation of Alan Moore’s landmark graphic novel. The preview was organized for a select group of media and internet geeks, and Guardian blogger Ben Walters was one of them.  Here’s part of his lengthy account:

After the screening, Snyder and Gibbons took questions. The first was from a large, balding man in the fourth row. “On behalf of the obese, obsessive geek community,” he began, “does the ending puss out?” The story’s conclusion is both cataclysmic and morally muddy. “The ending does not puss out,” Snyder replied, “To me that’s the point of the graphic novel.” Gibbons noted that the movie’s production is “very timely. It stands in relation to the [recent cycle of] superhero movies as the graphic novel did to comic books at the time.” And Snyder reported that he’d suggested the studio use a line of dialogue about Dr Manhattan “ “God exists, and he’s American” “ as the movie’s tagline. “They weren’t into that, by the way.”

When asked to describe the specific benefits of turning the story into a movie, however, Snyder offered a Sarah Palin-esque free association ramble. He concluded, defensively, that “there’s a rabid and vocal fan base for the graphic novel that support the graphic novel and are maybe against the movie. No Country for Old Men changed [its source material, the novel by Cormac McCarthy] three times as much as we have but I guarantee you there’s no rabid fan base who are going to kill the Coens!”