A few things from my brief look through this thread:
1) As mentioned back on the first page, this project should be helmed by someone with experience in a visual field. With that in mind I'd say every fiction writer, including Cursebearer, would be a poor choice. You can say it'll be an adaptation, but the adaptation isn't really a creation of whoever wrote the original piece; it's based on the knowledge and experience of the adaptor.
My second objection to this might be more along the lines of personal taste, but if this project does have any dialogue I think the general TF community would be a poor choice to write it. Too much dialogue in TF stories reads like porn writing; it looks odd on paper, and I can only imagine it will sound odder in person.
2) I've yet to see anyone do an actual cost analysis of this. People throw out dollar amounts, but no one has offered reference points for what this kind of shoot would actually cost.
For a comparison AWiL cost $10m to make, and it's 97 minutes long. The transformation scene is just shy of 3 minutes long. I don't know if the film's marketing factors into that $10m factor, but even if it does that transformation shot probably cost at least $200k. I don't know if prosthetics are cheaper now than they were in the 80s, but I don't see why they would be.
There needs to be an itemized list of costs including:
- Actress
- set
- each prosthetic
- Director
- additional crew
- camera and lighting
- film
- number of shooting days
And some additional money for going over budget (because it is going to go over budget)
3) porn vs non-porn. There are people, some who have already spoken in this thread, who will only pay for this if it is pornographic. There are others, myself among them, who will only pay for it if it is not. There's probably no reason to bring distribution into this issue, as a distributable product, porn or otherwise, would probably be something very different. There needs to be a consensus among the investors as to what the erotic content of the shoot is going to be.