re: #281 Timothy Watson

The director or one of the producers admitted that he couldn’t get through the first chapter of the book.

It was the director, Paul Verhoeven. From Wikipedia:

The movie started life as a script called Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine.[3] When similarities, especially the “bugs,” were pointed out between this and the novel Starship Troopers, plans were made to license the rights to the book and tweak character names and circumstances to match. Verhoeven had never read the book, and attempted to read it for the film, but it made him “bored and depressed”, so he read only a few chapters:

I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring,…It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn’t read the thing. It’s a very right-wing book.[6]

en.wikipedia.org