Have I Mentioned "Argo" Before?

No, but I HAVE mentioned my favorite science fiction novel of all time, Lord of Light. And as it happens, the team that rescued the six diplomats in the "Canadian Caper" that is the basis of Argo used a screenplay based on Zelazny's revisionist Hindu-Buddhist technofable.

Bizarre coincidence-

Until you read some of Harlan Ellison's essays in Watching. Then you realize that many of the 20th Century's massive classics of science fiction - Dune, The Stars My Destination, Lord of Light - spent decades in the tortured Hollywood half-life known as "turnaround" - optioned over and over, adapted and re-adapted, and almost never put on-screen. Yeah, Lynch did Dune - but various Dune adaptations had been floating around the industry for more than a decade before it was produced. Stars My Destination had come even closer to production than Dune, and it's never been made.

Foundation, Stranger in a Strange Land, et al had all made the migration from SF classics to mere literary "properties," each one accumulating a development biography along the way. In their own way, they had a "legend" in the same way that CIA cover identities do...no wonder they were attractive to the fake producers.