Emily Schultz’s Heaven is Small scores film deal

Emily Schultz’s second novel, Heaven is Small (House of Anansi Press, has been optioned by the Gemini award-winning Markham Street Films. Although MSF is best-known for producing documentaries, the company has also worked on several dramas, including Canadian author David Bezmozgis’s debut feature, Victoria Day. From the Anansi e-newsletter:

“I’m starting to feel like my character, Gordon Small,” responds Schultz, “a copy-editor who somehow manages to get his opus out into the living world through unlikely means.” She continues, “Markham Street Films is a stellar company, and I trust Judy Holm [producer] and Michael McNamara [director] will bring out the comedy and the tender moments of Heaven is Small.”

This is the second movie deal for Anansi in just over a month: in July, Gil Adamson’s The Outlander was optioned for the big screen.

Gil Adamson’s The Outlander lands film deal

Gil Adamson’s first novel, The Outlander (published by House of Anansi Press in 2007), has been optioned for the big screen by a trio of production companies from Canada and the U.K.

The production companies involved are London’s Xingu Films, the company behind the sci-fi movie Moon, as well as the Canadian firms Strada Films and Triptych Media. The latter is no stranger to CanLit, having produced adaptations of work by Barbara Gowdy (Falling Angels), David Adams Richards (The Bay of Love and Sorrows), and Matt Cohen (Emotional Arithmetic). The company recently produced a documentary about poet Ryan Knighton’s loss of sight, As Slow As Possible.

While the production is still in the early stages, Triptych’s Robin Cass confirmed that the co-producers will meet with potential screenwriters and directors over the coming months. While Adamson will not be the screenwriter on the project, Cass said she will be involved as a consultant. As for the film’s budget and cast, Cass said “we are planning on making this at a significant international level budget-wise and in terms of cast attachments and above-the-line talent.”

The gospel according to Dan Brown

New York Times columnist Ross Douhat (who does not look at all like David Brent … well, maybe just a little) believes that Dan Brown’s novels are successful not just because the books are cheesy page-turners, or because the notion that the Vatican conceals nasty little secrets is inherently interesting (especially to many Catholics), or even because, well, corny thrillers often sell huge, but because The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons (the film of which just opened to big numbers) present an alternative vision of faith, one more attuned to modern life:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

[...]

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

Jesus and Dan Brown, then, are kind of like cake and cookies – you can only pick one.

Watchmen and Canadian zombies at the box office

To no one’s surprise, Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s noisy, bloated, and obnoxious adaptation of the graphic novel co-written by Dave Gibbons (according to the film’s credits; writer Alan Moore’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in relation to the film as a result of his, erm, continuing dissatisfaction with Hollywood adaptations of his work) topped the North American box office this past weekend, raking in an estimated $55.7-million (U.S.) according to the website Box Office Mojo. This was somewhat less than Snyder’s last opening weekend, which saw his adaptation of another graphic novel, 300, pull in $70 mil.

Lost in all the hubub was the release of another film adaptation last Friday: Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool, based on Tony Burgess’s 1998 novel Pontypool Changes Everything. McDonald’s film, which takes place in a radio station during an apparent epidemic of zombie attacks, shares a commonality with the box office champ. Canadian actor Stephen McHattie, who plays the grizzled radio announcer in Pontypool, has a cameo as a grizzled writer in Watchmen.

Movies made from books suck: Salman Rushdie

“Adaptation, the process by which one thing develops into another thing, by which one shape or form changes into a different form, is a commonplace artistic activity.” That helpful declarative statement opens Salman Rushdie’s recent meditation on film adaptations of works of literature, which he finds generally poor. (He does admit to admiring John Huston’s adaptations of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Joyce’s “The Dead,” along with certain works by the Polish director Wojciech Has and the Indian director Satyajit Ray.)

Rushdie’s piece was apparently prompted by last week’s Oscar gala, where, you might remember, literary adaptations cleaned up. Rushdie claims that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is “not really an adaptation” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, but rather an original creation of screenwriter Eric Roth (the same man who was responsible for what in this Quillblogger’s estimation is an execrable adaptation of an execrable novel called Forrest Gump, which also did quite well at the Oscars).

Rushdie saves his greatest vitriol – and his best rhetoric – for a precision takedown of the overrated Slumdog Millionaire and Q&A, the uninspiring novel on which it is based:

The problems begin with the work being adapted. Swarup’s novel is a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief: a boy from the slums somehow manages to get on to the hit Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers all his questions correctly because the random accidents of his life have, in a series of outrageous coincidences, given him the information he needs, and are conveniently asked in the order that allows his flashbacks to occur in chronological sequence. This is a patently ridiculous conceit, the kind of fantasy writing that gives fantasy writing a bad name. It is a plot device faithfully preserved by the film-makers, and lies at the heart of the weirdly renamed Slumdog Millionaire. As a result the film, too, beggars belief.

Rushdie deserves applause for publicly saying what this Quillblogger has been hearing muttered in private for some time about a film that no one seems willing to admit isn’t very good. Herd instinct can be a terrible thing; thankfully Rushdie has never been one to go in for it.

Here’s hoping that the upcoming adaptation of Rushdie’s own Midnight’s Children doesn’t have him eating crow.

CTV adapts Spalding’s Who Named the Knife?

On Jan. 7, CTV will air Of Murder and Memory, a fictionalized adaptation of Linda Spalding’s 2006 true crime memoir Who Named the Knife? Spalding’s book centres on the trial of Maryann Acker, who was arrested with her husband in California in connection with a robbery and murder spree. Acker was convicted of first-degree murder in 1982 — largely due to her husband’s testimony — and is serving two life sentences. Who Named the Knife? chronicles Spalding’s personal involvement in the murder case — first, as a juror for the trial, and then some 20 years later as she re-examines both the case and Acker’s life, after finding the diary Spalding kept during the trial.

The cast includes Annabel Gish as Sally Linden, Chandra West as Theresa Nichol, and Hugh Dillon as Vincent Nichol.

Canadian director tackles Midnight’s Children

The Indian-born Canadian film director Deepa Mehta is set to adapt Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece Midnight’s Children, which was twice selected as the best-ever Booker Prize winner.

The Guardian reports:

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s panoramic 1981 allegory of the birth of modern India, is heading for the big screen. Deepa Mehta is to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author, and the film is expected to start production in 2010, it was announced in New York yesterday.

Apparently, the two have been friends since meeting at the New York premiere of Water, the final movie in Mehta’s Elements trilogy, for which she is best known. The plan for the collaboration was hatched over dinner at Mehta’s Toronto home, when Rushdie was in town for a recent round of publicity.

As of yet, no studio has signed on to finance the famously unfilmable novel. But Mehta seems unfazed when it comes to tackling 650 pages of magic realist-steeped allegory.

“War and Peace has 1,000 pages and they made a movie of that,” she said, adding, “The great thing about film is that it can compress in a few images what takes 40 pages in a book to describe.”

Watching Watchmen

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!”

Teacher suspended over Freedom Writers

A teacher in Indiana has been suspended without pay for 18 months for using The Freedom Writers Diary, a widely lauded collection of biographical stories written by inner-city teenagers, as part of her curriculum. For some reason, the two most detailed reports on this story are from U.K. newspapers, The Guardian and The Telegraph. According to The Guardian:

Connie Heermann, a teacher for 27 years, sought permission to introduce the book to her students last autumn after attending a training workshop held by the Freedom Writers Foundation. [...] Her head agreed and Heermann got written permission from nearly 150 parents, but the Perry Meridian high school board urged her to wait for its decision. Teachers’ union officials say that a single board member objected to swearing in the book. The school board member allegedly persuaded the other six officials to ban Heermann from teaching the book.

Having got wind of the story, Hollywood screenwriter Richard Lagravenese – who wrote and directed an adaptation of the book starring Hilary Swank – has written a piece for The Huffington Post defending Heermann. It’s a good defense, and in it, he relates this particularly damning anecdote, which sheds light on the school board’s real concerns:

When CNN reporter Gary Tuchman remarked to School Board President Barbara Thompson how he couldn’t believe that the students would be worse off for reading the book – and questioned, is it possible the book could actually make them better for reading it, Thompson responded: “What worries me is that Connie Heermann [...] sent a poor message to our children. If you’re told no, do it [...] it if feels good, do it anyway.” She gave no response to the question of the book’s value to a student’s education.

Down to the Dirt at Cannes

The 61st annual Cannes Film Festival kicked off this week, and there is going to be a little bit of CanLit content in the mix. Director Justin Simms is making his feature debut there with an adaptation of St. John’s author Joel Hynes’ Down to the Dirt. You can see a short clip from the film here. (That’s actually Hynes himself in the clip, playing one of the lead roles. )

We should probably point out, though, that the film wasn’t actually invited to screen at Cannes, and it’s not in competition for the Palme d’Or or anything. It’s simply part of the Telefilm Canada-organized Perspective Canada screening series, which is a marketplace for potential buyers.