The recent parade of big-budget CanLit film adaptations that began with Emotional Arithmetic and Fugitive Pieces continues this week with the release of The Stone Angel, starring American actress Ellen Burstyn. Not surprisingly, critics are greeting it with the same level of enthusiasm they showed the others.

The Toronto Star’s Philip Marchand (who just can’t seem to escape the CanLit content) begins his review as follows:

Does every Canadian movie based on a Canadian novel have to be scored with mournful violins and weeping cellos?

Meanwhile, The Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey has this to say:

Neither a revelation nor a travesty, the movie version of The Stone Angel is essentially what you might expect: There is a reverence for the idea of Laurence’s book but ultimately, in spite of its spiced-up sex scenes, it’s much tamer and more conventional.

And Now’s Glenn Sumi has the last word with this backhanded compliment:

If you wait long enough, it’ll show up as a CBC Sunday night movie (where it’ll look just fine).

Former Toronto Star book critic Philip Marchand was transferred to the paper’s film beat almost five months ago, and based on the preponderance of negative reviews he’s written since then, one might assume he’s eager to have his old job back. But his latest review, of the film Emotional Arithmetic, calls that assumption into question. Here’s the opening lines:

A piece of advice for Canadian filmmakers – don’t make movies out of dreary CanLit novels. They’re easy enough to spot.

The late Matt Cohen’s 1990 novel, Emotional Arithmetic, was full of people haunted by memories of the Holocaust, and in Canadian fiction that’s a sure tip-off we’re in for plenty of wintry blasts from the intellectual fog machine.

And here’s the last line:

As for the movie’s own recipe, it consists of pungent slices of tragic European history, reflected in the troubled faces of the characters who drift around the professor’s farmhouse, marinated and then simmered in a sauce of sombre piano chords and yearning violins. Eat it if you have the taste for it.

Poor guy. Caught between two worlds, both of them filled with disappointments.

It looks as if Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s planned series of Tintin films is one step closer to reaching fruition. According to the Guardian, a young man named Thomas Sangster has been selected to play the lead.

For those who remember, he was the young boy who gets the girl in the film Love Actually. For those who don’t, Thomas Sangster may yet become a household name. The sixth-former from south London, the Guardian can reveal, has been chosen by Steven Spielberg to be his Tintin for a three-movie adaptation of the boy reporter’s adventures. The trilogy is likely to give the 17-year-old the same profile as Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, or Elijah Wood, who shot to international stardom as Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings series.

[…]

Sangster’s agent originally sent a tape to Spielberg as part of an audition for a mini-series of Stephen King’s The Talisman, which never got off the ground. Spielberg saw the tape and realised he had found his Tintin.

A quick roundup of newly announced book-to-film adaptations:

• A new adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is set to hit the screen after a long struggle with Huxley’s estate. Leonardo DiCaprio will star and Ridley Scott will direct. New editions of the book will be released in 33 countries, including a new Canadian edition with an introduction by Margaret Atwood.
• Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is being adapted (again) by BBC One. This time, though, there’ll be a Bond girl in the lead role.
• Frank Darabont, director of Stephen King adaptions such as The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, is trying to find funding to remake Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Farenheit 451. (Apparently the cheques autoignite as they approach the screenplay).
• Brampton, Ontario’s Michael Cera (Superbad) will play the lead role in an adaption of Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. The books are set in Toronto, featuring local landmarks like Honest Ed’s, Wychwood library, and Casa Loma. Maybe this time Toronto can be more than New York’s stunt double.

From The Los Angeles Times:

Warner Bros. Pictures and the producers behind the $4.5-billion film franchise featuring the beloved boy wizard will split the seventh and final novel in the J.K. Rowling series into two films.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I” will hit theaters in November 2010, followed by “Part II” in May 2011, a decision that is being met around the world with fans’ cheers but also plenty of cynical smirks.

“Cynical smirks”? I can’t imagine why, when everyone involved says the split “would be to serve the story, not the bottom line.” Why would Hollywood producers lie to us?

Though won’t those kids be in their forties by the time this thing is finally over?

Fans of Alexander McCall Smith’s bestseller The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency are either rejoicing or wailing – it’s being made into a television series.

The good news is that it’s being co-produced by the BBC and HBO, two bastions of quality TV. The 90-minute pilot was directed by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient), and he also co-wrote it with Richard Curtis (Funny English Romantic Comedy ft. Hugh Grant, volumes I-XII). Actress and singer Jill Scott will play the lead character, Precious Ramotswe, and Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls) will play her secretary.

The pilot will air on BBC One this Easter, with 13 episodes to follow. HBO has the North American rights, and plans to put it to air in early 2009.

In today’s National Post, columnist Robert Fulford declares his praise for an “excellent” CBC miniseries based on an “excellent” Canadian novel, The Englishman’s Boy. The novel earned author Guy Vanderhaeghe the 1996 Governor General’s Award.

The award-winning book, and now the miniseries, reveal a gruesome period in Canadian history that includes a massacre committed by wolfers (i.e., hunters of wolves) in 1873, known as the Cypress Hills Massacre.

The four-hour miniseries will air on CBC this Sunday and on the following Sunday, March 9, at 8 p.m.

Film, TV, and publishing companies in India are hoping to cash in on the media-saturated youth culture of the nation, according to NDTVMovies.com.

It seems the books that inspire blockbuster hits in India see an immediate boost in sales, so entertainment giant STAR India has teamed up with Prakash Books to publish almost 300 titles based on TV serials this year.

In the article, Indian poet and filmmaker Gulzar puts it bluntly:

At a time, when youngsters are glued to Internet and television channels, you cannot feed them forcefully. We must provide what youngsters want to read.

Possibly encouraged by Sarah Polley’s Academy Award-nominated Alice Munro adaptation Away from Her, fellow starlet Natalie Portman has decided to helm her own classy literary adaptation, in this case of a work by Israeli author Amos Oz.

According to The Jerusalem Post:

Natalie Portman reveals in the March issue of W magazine that she’ll make her directorial debut with A Tale of Love and Darkness, bringing to the big screen Amos Oz’s memoir about growing up in 1940s and Fifties Jerusalem. Portman told the fashion magazine that she plans to preserve the language of the memoir by directing the film in Hebrew. “I’ve been reading Oz since high school, and when I read his biography I just sort of saw it,” the actress said.

[…]

In addition to being fluent in Hebrew, Portman is described in the W profile as “proficient in French” and able to speak “some Arabic, thanks to several graduate-level courses at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.” The 26-year-old Harvard graduate studied at the Israeli university in the fall of 2004 before filming Free Zone, a prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival shot in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.

Just to clarify that last statement, Portman only starred in Free Zone – the movie was directed by Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. (And it was boring as dirt, but that’s neither here nor there.)

According to Entertainment Weekly, Charlie’s Angels director McG has created three teaser spots for a kinda trashy-looking book called Celebutante.

[…] it’s a Hollywood satire […] by Amanda Goldberg (daughter of film producer Leonard Goldberg) and Ruthanna Khaligi Hopper (daughter of Easy Rider Dennis Hopper). The clips dramatize various scenes from the novel and star Autumn Reeser (The O.C.) as Lola Santisi, the daughter of a famed director who agrees to help her gay designer friend by persuading a famous actress to wear one of his gowns to the Oscars; other somewhat familiar performers in the shorts include Mike Vogel (Cloverfield) and Wilson Cruz (Rent).

No word yet on where these spots are supposed to air, but they’re clearly not kosher for network television. We’re thinking it’s probably going to be a web-only, “viral” sort of campaign. In any case, if the book turns out to be a hit, the TV series certainly won’t be long in coming.

Canadian talent fared well in this year’s Oscar nominations, announced this morning. And in case you needed an excuse to catch the February 24 ceremony – if it happens – there’s a publishing tie-in, too.

Besides the best actress nod for Halifax’s Ellen Page for Juno, which is dominating Canadian headlines, Toronto director/actor/activist Sarah Polley is up for best adapted screenplay for her directorial debut Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Julie Christie also got a best actress nomination for her role in the film.

The news dovetails with a mini-debate on GalleyCat about how Polley’s film has accomplished the seemingly unthinkable by sexing up Alice Munro for a mass audience. Yesterday, a mildly scandalized reader complained about the new Vintage paperback edition for The View From Castle Rock (pictured above), first published in 2004.

“I saw the cover for the paperback of Alice Munro’s latest collection, The View from Castle Rock, in an ad in the NY Times Book Review,” a GalleyCat reader emails, “and Vintage has given the book a Sessalee Hensley makeover.” … [I]t’s not too hard to see what he’s talking about, although my reference point upon first glance wasn’t so much Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, as it was all those chick lit covers with women’s legs and no faces. (Not to mention the hot pink lettering; nice touch, that!) “While I understand the effort to sell more copies, it seems like a desperate approach for such a great writer,” our source continues, addressing the “chick lit” question directly: “Is that Vintage’s marketing strategy? I guess, if it gets Munro into more people’s hands it’s a good thing, but for me there’s a real disconnect in tone between the cover and the contents.”

Today, another reader rebuts by asking if Munro’s (or Munro’s publisher’s) concession to the marketplace is really such a big deal. After all, in CanLit, as in Canadian film, opportunities to sell out are few and far between.

Ian McEwan is the subject of a Q&A in The New Republic that ranges from the perils of movie adaptations, the worth of literary realism, and McEwan’s rarely concealed view on religion.

McEwan also offers his thoughts on book blogs:

I don’t read the blogs much. I don’t like the tone – the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don’t like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can’t be held accountable, when they don’t have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge that I think slightly doesn’t belong in the world of book reviewing.

Thanks for that, you weedy, four-eyed, knee-jerk atheistic, Booker Prize recidivist.

It’s an interesting read, but we have to note – from way up on our high blog-horses – the fact that the occasion for the interview was not the recent publication of McEwan’s latest novel On Chesil Beach, but rather the fact that the film adaptation of Atonement was up for a bunch of Golden Globe awards.

The Hollywood Reporter has announced the 13 projects chosen for the Sundance Film Festival’s highly competitive January Screenwriters Lab, and among the lucky winners is Vancouver author Ryan Knighton. Knighton has fashioned his 2006 memoir Cockeyed – about his gradual descent into blindness during his teen years – into a screenplay, and now he’ll be spending Jan. 11 to 16 at the Sundance Resort in Utah, being tutored by big-name Hollywood screenwriters like Scott Frank (Get Shorty, The Lookout), Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), Paul Attanasio (Donnie Brasco, The Good German), and Doug Wright (Quills).

Many scripts that get put through the Screenwriters Lab go on to be made into actual films, so here’s hoping that Knighton’s turns out to be one of them.

A day after posting a list of the worst book-to-film adaptations, the A.V. Club has come up with a much more interesting and imaginative feature: 21 good books that need to be great films, like now.

The list consists of several recent literary hits – Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife – but there are also a lot of surprising, left-field choices, too, such as Don Rosa’s graphic novel The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck – which would indeed make an excellent kids flick – and David Rains Wallace’s based-on-a-true-story The Bonehunter’s Revenge, about two duelling 19th century paleontologists.

There’s also a bit of CanCon on the list, with Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart being nominated as potential material for Terry Gilliam, and Barbara Gowdy’s Mister Sandman as material for Tim Burton (!).

New York magazine’s culture blog points out how Phillip Pullman is distancing himself from his image as a God-despising, atheism-peddling iconoclast in the run-up to the release of Hollywood’s mega-budget adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first title in Pullman’s His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy.

On the Today show on Friday, Pullman denied to Al Roker that his books are anti-religious. “As for the atheism,” he adds, “it doesn’t matter to me whether people believe in God or not, so I’m not promoting anything of that sort,” he wrote…. But what did the author have to say on the issue six years ago, when asked by the Washington Post what famously Christian author C.S. Lewis would think of his books?

“I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,” says Pullman. “Mr. Lewis would think I was doing the Devil’s work.”

And what did he tell the Sydney Morning Herald in 2003?

“I’m a great fan of J.K. Rowling, but the people – mainly from America’s Bible Belt – who complain that Harry Potter promotes Satanism or witchcraft obviously haven’t got enough in their lives. Meanwhile, I’ve been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God.”

Yes, well clearly a movie about God-killing (particularly, Christian God-killing) is not going to appeal to Bible Belt America. But what New York fails to point out is that the maverick author’s hell-raising generated plenty of positive press before Hollywood came a-knocking – for example, see this New Yorker profile that casts Pullman as the real deal in children’s lit (his “ideal reader is a precocious fifteen-year-old who long ago came to find the Harry Potter books intellectually thin,” writes Laura Miller) or Michael Chabon’s omnibus review of the His Dark Materials trilogy in The New York Review of Books – in which it was precisely Pulllman’s “secularism” that endeared him to literary critics.

The question, then, is when did Pullman strike a deal with the devil?: During the creative genesis of His Dark Materials, which some critics have dubbed “atheism for kids”?; Or when a promised Hollwood payoff led Pullman to temper his tongue?

Movie and television writers in Hollywood have been threatening to strike for some time now, but suddenly the threats have become a reality. According to The New York Times, the writers union broke off talks with the studios last night and will soon be tromping up and down the streets with picket signs aloft.

The walk-out threatens an instant jolt to television talk shows like Late Night With David Letterman and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, which rely on guild writers to churn out monologues and skits. And if the strike drags on, audiences could see the eventual shutdown of soap operas, TV series and movie productions, as they exhaust their bank of ready scripts.

Okay, so this doesn’t have much to do with the publishing industry, but writers gotta show solidarity with other writers, right? On the other hand, Hollywood scribes make about a trillion times more money than any novelist you could name, so maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to sympathize with the greedy bastards.

Cormac McCarthy is that rare thing in American letters: a writer who manages to balance literary acclaim with a large popular readership. (All of his books since 1992’s All the Pretty Horses, for which he won the National Book Award, have been bestsellers.) He’s also still consistently described as a recluse, despite a recent Oprah appearance and open collaboration with Hollywood. In a conversation with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, whose adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, he lets slip his admiration of director Terrence Mallick, his distaste for magic realism, and his unlikely friendship with Richard Gere. Here’s McCarthy on appreciating the Bard:

Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I’d seen movies of Hamlet, I’d seen kind of amateurish productions, and I’d read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, “Holy s—.”

Holy s—, indeed.

One of the more highly anticipated movie releases this fall is an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s enormously popular bestseller The Kite Runner, but it looks as if most of us will have to wait until after Christmas to see it. According to The Washington Post, the planned early November release has been pushed back so that the film’s two child stars – Afghan natives Zekeria Ebrahim and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada – can be evacuated from the country.

The move follows warnings that the two boys could face reprisal attacks over a scene in which Hassan, played by Ahmad Khan, is raped by an ethnic Pashtun thug.

[…]

Abdul Latif Ahmadi, president of Afghan Film, the state-run film company, said he and many others repeatedly warned The Kite Runner filmmakers, including producer E. Bennett Walsh and director Marc Forster, that that scene could provoke dangerous problems among religiously conservative Afghans, who might find it insulting.

[…]

“This is the mentality of the people in Afghanistan,” which has a 28 percent literacy rate, Ahmadi explained. “People don’t realize that it’s not true. When they watch a film, they accept it — it’s real, why did they do it?”

The film will be given a limited U.S. release on Dec. 14, in order to qualify for Oscar consideration, but it won’t open widely until sometime in January. The film won’t be released in Afghanistan at all, but, as The Washington Post points out, Afghanis will likely have many opportunities to see it on bootleg DVDs.

The Guardian’s weekend edition features an opinion piece by writer and filmmaker Martin Wagner, who is obviously still stinging from the rejection letters he received from agents as a young novelist. The crux of the piece is his argument that in the relationship between writers, agents, and publishers, it is the writer – the “lifeblood”of the industry – who most consistently gets screwed.

The piece also serves as a platform for Wagner to promote his play The Agent, which satirizes the industry and is currently being adapted into a feature film. However, given his evident distaste for agents – whom he describes as “vultures” – his suggestion for improving the situation is a little surprising.

Maybe one of the problems is that agents simply don’t get paid enough? While a 15 per cent commission is plenty if you’re representing a J.K. Rowling, what about 15 per cent of an author who could reasonably call himself a success if he got an advance of £2,000 for his first novel – a mere £300 for his agent?

Which raises the question of what a “reasonably” successful author is supposed to do with a (less than) £1,700 advance per novel – but we’ll put that aside for now. In the meantime, Quillblog welcomes any other suggestions to improve author-agent relations.

If you’ve been reading Variety lately, you’re probably aware that there’s a massive strike looming in Hollywood, and that everybody there is panicking about it. It sounds like a doomsday scenario: three different unions – the Writer’s Guild of America, the Director’s Guild of America, and the Screen Actor’s Guild – may band together next June, co-ordinate walk-outs, and effectively cripple the entire movie industry.

Fearing the worst, the movie companies are now fast-tracking as many films as possible, in the hopes of completing them before the strike. The industry website Cinematical has posted a list of all the priority projects, and one that caught our eye was the 20th Century Fox adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Last we heard, the film was to be directed by current Hollywood pariah M. Night Shyamalan, but now, it seems, the reins have been handed over to French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of Amelie fame. According to the IMDB movie page, the film is currently in “pre-production,” which means either that it’s almost ready to begin shooting, or that Jeunet simply made a promise over drinks to read the book. We’ll keep you posted.

We all know that fashion is both cyclical and cannibalistic, so it’s only a matter of time before the nineties became the hot “retro” decade. While hipsters are still semi-ironically digging the clothes and music of the eighties, at least one grunge-era fad has resurfaced: Austenmania.

Remember when Pride and Prejudice was a book club champion? Remember when every other hit movie was a tart-yet-frothy romantic comedy? It’s all back.

Witness:

National Post:

Jane Austen lived and wrote 200 years ago, but readers continue to delight in her six novels — and creative types keep basing movies, TV productions and spinoff novels on her books to feed an audience hungry for more.

The Sydney Morning Herald:

Girls, lace up your bodices and brush up on your swooning techniques because a glut of Jane Austen movies and TV productions is coming as Regency mania sweeps the state.

Austen fans are flocking to Pride And Prejudice-themed balls and 18th-century dance classes as interest in the author and her era soars.

Eight versions of Austen’s life and works have been released or are hitting big and small screens in Australia, including Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway as the young writer. There is also a version of Mansfield Park, starring former Dr Who sidekick Billie Piper.

BBC News:

The number of people visiting a stately home in Berkshire has increased since the property was used for the filming of Pride and Prejudice, figures show.

A report by film and tourism bodies found coach tours at Basildon Park went up by 76% after it featured in the 2005 adaptation of the Jane Austen novel.

The New York Times has an article about the posthumous career of Robert Ludlum, the spy novelist who died six years ago but whose name keeps turning up on new books. Back when he was still with us, Ludlum wrote The Bourne Identity, which has since inspired a hit action movie franchise starring Matt Damon. Now Eric Van Lustbader – a name novelist in his own right – has been writing new Bourne books, co-branded as Ludlum titles. Less prominent authors have also ghostwritten Ludlum-identified titles in recent years, for money but not always for credit. Which kind of lends a double meaning to “ghostwritten.” As the Times notes, the main exemplar for this kind of thing is V.C. Andrews, who died in 1986 but mysteriously keeps churning out books under her own name. And some authors are getting in on the action while they’re still alive: Tom Clancy, James Patterson, and Clive Cussler are all lending their names to books written by others (though in those cases, the co-writers are at least credited).

The CBC has officially announced that it is turning Douglas Coupland’s novel JPod into a 13-part TV series. Written by Coupland and directed by Mike Clattenburg of Trailer Park Boys fame, the show is slated to air on CBC in January 2008. The series, like the book, will follow the wackily postmodern lives of a group of video-game designers. Its pilot was shot back in November 2006, and most of its stars are Canadian, including some young starlets and the erstwhile Growing Pains Seaver patriarch, Alan Thicke.

The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle wrote last week about his visit to the pilot’s Vancouver set, where he claimed to be befuddled by the kooky goings-on.

I ask Thicke what kind of comedy he’s involved with here. How would he describe it? “This comedy is avant-garde,” he says emphatically. “It’s like Weeds or Arrested Development. It’s family fun gone bad.”

Next I ask J.B. Sugar, who is an executive producer (along with his father, Larry Sugar) and a co-writer of the series with Coupland. “I’d call it smart comedy,” Sugar says. “Dark comedy, maybe, but ‘dramedy’ is the best word.”

I’m still at a bit of a loss, but some of what’s happening around me is definitely weird. In Coupland’s book, mind you, a lot of the fun is in the text – wacky e-mails and slogans or gibberish printed in wildly different typefaces. How will that be translated to a TV series, I ask Sugar. “Very abstract cutaways will be used. Some visual, some just text.”

With the release of the final Harry Potter novel mere days away, the media frenzy is in full force. In The Globe and Mail on the weekend, publishing reporter James Adams looks at Canadian Potter publisher Raincoast Books and its life before, during, and after Harry. (The CBC Arts website had a similar piece a couple months back.) And The Boston Globe looks at some problems American booksellers are facing as they try to plan Potter parties. It seems film studio Warner Bros., “which controls the movies, merchandise, and all nonbook aspects of the Harry Potter brand,” and U.S. publisher Scholastic are telling booksellers what kind of events they’re allowed to have.

Most of the points are uncontroversial — parties must be decent and safe, nonpolitical, held no earlier or later than 24 hours from the release hour. Other conditions have taken some booksellers by surprise: “No fees are charged for admission or any activities at the event . . . no third parties are associated with the event in any way . . . the event is small-scale, local, non commercial, not-for-profit.”

(Thanks to Ed Champion for the lattermost link.)

Lloyd Alexander, the author of the cult favorite U.S. children’s series The Chronicles of Prydain, has passed away. According to the obituary that The Guardian posted today, Alexander actually died several weeks ago, on May 17, but the news appears to be getting out only now.

His first novels were for adults but, in the 1960s, despairing at the state of adult fiction, he switched to writing for children, an activity he described as “the most creative and liberating experience of my life.” It was certainly a hugely successful transition. He went on to write more than 35 books for children, attracting a passionately committed following and winning numerous awards. These included, in the U.S., the 1969 Newbery medal for The High King (1968), the penultimate title in his Chronicles of Prydain series, the 1971 National Book award for The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian (1970), the story of a poor fiddler who saves a princess from an unhappy marriage, and the 1982 American Book award for Westmark (1981), the first title in a series of the same name.

This Quillblogger happily recalls reading Alexander’s The Black Cauldron as a child, immediately after having seen the Disney movie adaptation; it was then that I discovered, probably for the first time, that the book is almost always better than the movie.

A jury has decided that author Laura Albert’s use of the alter ego/pseudonym JT LeRoy constitutes fraud, The New York Times reports.

Albert published her novel Sarah in 2000 under the assumed name of JT LeRoy, who was purported to be the son of a truck-stop prostitute; Albert even paid a friend to appear as LeRoy. Antidote International Films bought the rights for the book in 2003, but after discovering that LeRoy did not exist, sued to get back its option money plus damages. Last week, the court ordered Albert to pay the company $116,500 (U.S.).

The trial did, however, bring up some interesting questions of art and commerce that a separate article in The Times pointed out were “perhaps better suited to The Paris Review than the federal courts.”

Antidote’s chief lawyer, Gregory Curtner, argued in court: “We bought the identity of the book’s author.” And the Times article says that Curtner “meant JT LeRoy’s identity, which, with its alluring elements of poverty and prostitution, was perhaps more valuable than the book itself.”

Defence lawyers have countered that for Albert, who has a history of psychopathology and sexual abuse, “JT LeRoy was not an ordinary nom de plume in the Mark Twain-Samuel Clemens mold but a fictional necessity, a sort of imaginary survival apparatus that allowed her both to write and to breathe.”

But there may be hope for a happy ending yet:

It is within reason to assume that the commercial value of “Sarah” will rise on the force of the publicity the book has received at trial. There is, however, another situation that might inflate its value even more.

Steven Shainberg, the proposed director of the film, testified that when he learned who had truly written “Sarah” an inspiration came to him to make a “meta-film,” a triple-layered movie that would blend the novel with the lives of its real and purported authors in a project he took to calling “Sarah Plus.”

If the meta-film works, it could be a win-win situation. Author and filmmakers will at get their film, and viewers get to see something Charlie Kaufmanesque instead of a movie of the week. In the meanwhile, Albert has a hefty fine to pay.

The Guardian reports that Rome’s legendary Protestant Cemetery, which houses the graves of Keats and Shelley, is crumbling. Thanks to a lack of funding and maintenance, tree branches fell to the ground last Friday and cracked open a grave, barely missing Shelley’s tomb. Overgrown weeds and effects of pollution have also compromised some of the other stately gravestones of the non-Catholics buried in the shadow of the Aventine Hill.

The cemetery’s official website says that the family most affected has been informed of the damage, and that the 200-year-old site of many authors’ pilgrimages will be closed until further notice for repairs.

Although the secluded, beauteous area was added last year to a list of the World Monetary Fund’s 100 most endangered historical sites, monetary help has yet to arrive. In the meantime, the cemetery has no relief for the 1 million euros’ worth of debt it somehow racked up between 1999 and 2005. A sign on its gate reads, “Visitors are kindly requested to offer a contribution of at least two euros. We badly need it.”

In other news, J.K. Rowling has given the go-ahead to Warner Brothers Entertainment to open an entire Harry Potter theme park at the Universal Orlando Resort, since the book-based movies have earned the studio $3.5 billion U.S. so far.

The Independent posted an excerpt of an article originally published in the UK-based Mslexia magazine, in which Danuta Kean discusses the process of bringing great books to the big screen.

The article references recent films such as Notes on a Scandal, based on Zoë Heller’s 2003 novel of the same name, and the fifth Harry Potter film, which is due out this July, and explains the box office expectations of adapted works.

According to Nick Marston, the managing director of Curtis Brown’s media division, there are two types of film: bullseye films, which rely on word-of-mouth and have to hit their upmarket audiences spot on if they are to be hits, and shotgun films: mass appeal movies which can hit far more targets.

“Blockbuster films thrive off mass appeal,” he says. “If you have a literary novel, translating it into an adult movie is harder because it appeals to a smaller audience.” Films like Notes on a Scandal break out of the art house circuit because they have hit the bullseye, getting everything right from fine acting to a great script, critical approval and audience-enticing awards.

Kean also discusses the author’s lowly position in the filming process. One writer, Celia Brayfield, who sold film rights to her novel Heartswap, was told she could attend the movie’s premiere but only at her own expense. And that’s only if the film actually gets made at all. “Less than two per cent of optioned films make it to the screen, and those that do usually have long gestation processes….” (Brayfield’s Heartswap got dropped after the buyers, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, divorced.)

Kean includes a list of the best and worst adaptations. The English Patient is number five on the best list with high praise for its screenwriter. “Anthony Minghella turned Michael Ondaatje’s Booker winner upside down to form a romantic epic that improved on the original.”

According to an article in the L.A. Times, Steve Rogers, the war-hero-turned-crime-fighter better known as Captain America, is dead as a door nail. It seems that his longtime publisher, Marvel Comics, has decided to let him die an agonizing death by gunfire in the latest issue of his eponymously titled series, and it’s not a hoax, an imaginary tale, or a special “What If?” issue.

The issue hit stands on Wednesday and shows the iconic hero gunned down on the steps of a federal courthouse; he was arriving there as a fugitive, a resistance leader to a federal Superhero Registration Act that has been a key Marvel story line for the last year.

That’s a pretty big bummer for comic fans, but as the Times points out, there are currently plans underway for a Captain America movie, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see how truly, deeply dead he is.

The Globe and Mail has a story about the movie version of All Hat, Dunnville, Ontario, author Brad Smith’s 2003 novel, a shitkicking tale about horseracing that was published by Penguin Canada. (Read Q&Q’s review of All Hat here.) Smith wrote the screenplay for the film and was on-set for much of the shooting. The film’s producers are hoping that the combination of Smith’s story, a reasonably recognizable American star (Keith Carradine, last seen as Wild Bill Hickok on the series Deadwood), and a reasonably recognizable musician (guitarist Bill Frisell) doing the soundtrack will mean success for the film. Indeed, director Leonard Farlinger goes to great lengths to make clear that All Hat is “not an art film.” On the contrary, he says, “It’s a film you can like, a film you can really enjoy.”

(Brad Smith’s newest novel, Big Man Coming Down the Road, is reviewed in the current issue of Q&Q. Read the review here.)

Slate’s Peter Hyman looks at more than two decades’ worth of attempts to bring John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces to the silver screen. The legendary comic novel was published in 1980, 11 years after Toole’s suicide. As Hyman writes, the book

explores the misadventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a 300-pound antihero who resides with his mother and is given to leisurely strolls around his native New Orleans, during which he levies his incisive judgments on everything he encounters. As described by [Walker] Percy in the book’s foreword, Ignatius is a “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.” And for all of the novel’s literary qualities—the sensory-specific perfection of Toole’s descriptions of New Orleans, the loopy gracefulness of his prose, and his gift for black comedy—it is the creation of Ignatius that stands as its signature achievement.

Ever since the book’s publication, studio exec Scott Kramer has been trying to get a film made, so far with no luck. Reportedly there’s now a deal in place with a script by Kramer and Steven Soderbergh, David Gordon Green as director, and Will Ferrell set to star as Reilly. But for reasons touched on only vaguely in the Slate piece, the project doesn’t appear to be advancing.

Hyman looks at some of the other stalled adaptations over the years, though he probably over-reaches with talk of a “curse,” beginning with John Belushi’s death in 1982:

… a day or so before Belushi was supposed to meet with executives at Universal to finalize his involvement, he died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont…. Other deaths tangentially linked to the project include those of actors John Candy and Chris Farley, both of whom were considered for the lead role before they died. And, for those so predisposed, the recent devastation that Hurricane Katrina wrought on New Orleans provides further amplification.

Yes, Farley and Candy were surely “considered,” as every comic actor of girth in Hollywood undoubtedly has been at one point or another. And linking Katrina to Dunces is just plain silly – especially since everybody knows that the hurricane was caused by an explosion in an undersea U.S. military base housing a captured alien warship.

Anyway, maybe it’s time for Hollywood to think outside the box. Quillblog loves Will Ferrell and all, but there’s already somebody else out there who’s absolutely perfect for the Ignatius Reilly role – he just happens to exist only in two dimensions. To see who it is, click on the second link below. An animated Confederacy of Dunces, anyone?

Related links:
Click here for the Slate piece
Click here to see the perfect Ignatius J. Reilly

This week, there’s something even weirder than usual appearing on daytime TV. Marvel Comics has teamed up with long-running soap opera Guiding Light to produce a superhero-themed episode and an eight-page comic book.

According to The New York Times, “the episode is a mix of slapstick (a thief is shocked by the heroine, and his hair stands on end) and drama (are the powers worth possibly losing her husband?). Transitions between scenes feature comic book panels by Alex Chung,” the artist of “A New Light,” the eight-page comic that will commemorate the partnership.

As bizarre as this collaboration sounds, the Times does make the pretty good point that comic books and soaps do share “never-ending stories, characters with complex histories, and a preponderance of long-lost relatives (evil twins or otherwise).”

Still, Quillblog can’t help but chuckle at the still from the soap, with the hero, Guiding Light, clothed in an over-the-top silver lamé outfit and navy cape, straining to push a car.

Related links:
Read the Times story here

Apparently, the war in Iraq has a lot in common with a recently adapted-for-film fantasy trilogy. As Salon.com reports, Rick Santorum, “embattled Pennsylvania senator, […] has equated the war in Iraq with J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.”

“‘As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,’ Santorum said. ‘It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.’”

Related links:
Read the full story at Salon (you’ll have to watch a brief movie trailer to get there)

Dr. Seuss is sacred. Who doesn’t remember the unmistakable illustrations and wonderfully offbeat plots of childhood classics such as The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and so many more?

In recent years, Hollywood has been seizing on the enduring popularity of the books and reinterpreting Seuss for film. First came How the Grinch Stole Christmas — in live action with Jim Carrey in the title role and lots of prosthetic make-up. Then, a live-action Cat in the Hat starring Mike Myers.

So what title from the Seuss canon will Hollywood disfigure next? Why, Horton Hears a Who, of course. As the Book Standard reports, Horton will star Jim Carrey and Steve Carell as the voices of the CGI-animated Horton and the mayor of Whoville, respectively.

Quillblog does not deny that Steve Carell has his moments of comedic brilliance, but still.

The problem is determining how to reconcile an adult appreciation for the fine talents of Steve Carell with nostalgia for the faded Seuss-illustrated pages of childhood. Any suggestions?

Related links:
More details on Horton at the Book Standard

It’s reality TV, but it’s fiction. Many would argue that all reality television is fiction, but in this case, the digital channel BookTelevision plans to film and broadcast the writing of fiction. The typical writer working on a novel over the course of a year, with hours at a computer broken only by fidgeting, eating, coffee-making, trips to the refrigerator, and the occasional neurotic breakdown might not make for dramatic television viewing, but the frantic activity of the 3-Day Novel Contest sounds more like reality TV fodder.

According to The Tyee’s embedded reporter and contestant, Ron Yamauchi, the “72-hour marathon is a furious disgorgement of words and used caffeine that has taken place annually since 1977,” reportedly having been created when “a number of competitive, ambitious, drink-sodden Vancouver writers developed the format as a form of dare.”

Yamauchi says BookTelevision is producing and presenting the contest updates every couple of hours via the Internet over the Labour Day weekend and plans to televise a documentary in October. “Twelve selected competitors are being ensconced in aquarium-like conditions in a Chapters store in Edmonton, hooked into word processors and occasionally pitted in mini-games, all of it hosted by Kim Clarke Champniss.” Kind of makes the long years of writing a regular novel in solitude sound better.

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The Tyee

After the Starbucks-financed Akeelah and the Bee fizzled in movie theatres last spring, you’d think that other non-Hollywood companies would now be more hesitant to throw their hats into the moviemaking arena. But the L.A. Times is reporting today that Amazon.com has just optioned author Keith Donohue’s fantasy novel The Stolen Child, about a young boy who is spirited away by fairies and replaced by a changeling.

According to the L.A. Times article, Amazon doesn’t plan to actually finance the movie themselves, or even co-finance it. The internet retailer is simply hoping to be — in the words of Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener — “an extremely valuable partner in the development, marketing and distribution of this film.” Translation: Amazon won’t take on any of the financial risk themselves, but they’ll provide a crazy amount of marketing for the film’s theatrical and DVD releases on its website.

Related links:
Click here for the L.A. Times article

In this week’s edition, The Onion A.V. Club laid down 15 book-to-film adaptations that live up to their source material. Some of them are even better than the source material, such as The Godfather, Jaws, and The Silence of the Lambs.

But they also bust out some great surprise guests like Charlotte’s Web, the Orson Welles-propelled 1944 version of Jane Eyre, and Mary Harron’s pared-down American Psycho.

We’d like to say that the Steven King adaptations Stand By Me,

Movies that don’t make the cut, in our humble opinion? Spectacularly failed adaptations include Simon Birch (based on John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany), The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Related links:
Check out the Onion A.V. Club’s list below

The east London borough of Tower Hamlets is up in arms again against Booker-nominated author Monica Ali and her novel Brick Lane. Now that a movie’s in the making, they’re really pissed.

According to a Guardian story, “a community action group in Tower Hamlets has launched a campaign to stop production” of the movie. “In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing ‘pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes’ and of containing ‘a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community.’”

Three years ago, community advocates came down hard on the book, saying that it “portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a ‘despicable insult.’”

Brick Lane Traders’ Association chair and sweetshop proprietor Abdus Salique is leading the charge, and has circulated a petition “to put pressure on the council to halt Ruby Films’ adaptation, already in production in a London studio, and calling on ‘all right-thinking people to join in preventing this attack on good social, ethical standard and idea [sic].’”

He says, “Nobody can come with a camera make a film about that book here. She [Ali] has imagined ideas about us in her head. She is not one of us, she has not lived with us, she knows nothing about us, but she has insulted us.” The fact that the book is a work of fiction makes no difference to Salique; he feels that the book isn’t, in fact, fiction and that Ali’s claims that it is are “lies.” Says Salique: “She wanted to be famous at the cost of a community.”

He then goes on to claim that community groups prevented Ali from snagging the Booker and that, if filming should go ahead in their neck of the woods, there could be trouble. “The community feels strongly about this. We are not going to let it happen … Young people are getting very involved with this campaign. They will blockade the area and guard our streets. Of course, they will not do anything unless we tell them to, but I warn you they are not as peaceful as me.”

Claudia Kalindjian, a spokesperson for Ruby Films, the company producing the film, says that they wouldn’t have gone ahead with the movie if they had thought the source material racist.

Related links:
Read the Guardian story here