"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" isn't the only big-time literary adaptation due out before the Oscars. The 1961 Richard Yates novel "Revolutionary Road" has also got book people excited -- it, with "Catch-22," lost the 1962 National Book Award to Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer." "Revolutionary Road" will reunite Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who last performed together in a little film called "Titantic." This coupling inspired Robert Birnbaum to post a (long) list of favorite author/star pairings on the Morning News.
One author who appears twice on his list is Graham Greene, with actors Alec Guinness and Michael Caine. But others have portrayed his Englishmen too -- Greene's highly adaptable work has been brought to the screen (big and TV) 56 times.
Even more adaptable is W. Somerset Maugham (pictured), whose book "The Razor's Edge" was made into the 1984 movie starring Bill Murray (there was also a 1946 version). Birnbaum calls it a "pretty good film," which I think is overly generous, but he's right in that Murray's performance was good, better than people said at the time. In addition to Murray, stars who've done Maugham include Laurence Olivier, Bette Davis, Sean Penn, Peter Cushing, Rita Hayworth, Tyrone Power, Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Fred MacMurray, Edward Norton, Veronica Lake and even Ethel Barrymore. There have been a whopping 108 filmic representations of Maugham's work, in German and Russian as well as English. The very first Maugham adaptation was written in 1915; the most recent was the 2006's "The Painted Veil." Chances are it won't be the last.
The debate about what makes a good literary adaptation is probably endless, but having a star who can embody the spirit of the work sure helps. Me, I think of Colin Firth as Darcy, and Sean Connery as Ian Fleming's Bond.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," about a man who is born old and ages backward, is coming to theaters in December, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.
The film has recently been shown to a test audience on the Paramount lot (note to self: stop for those people with clipboards asking whether you'd like to go to a free screening). Two capsule reviews have hit the Internet: One viewer loved the film; the other thought it was a little long.
The movie departs from the original storyline in a couple of significant ways. The time frame has been moved up: Benjamin Button is born a few decades later than 1860. The setting seems to have been transplanted to the South rather than its original Baltimore. And it appears that instead of being born a fully grown old man, Benjamin Button is a tiny baby with an aged face (a little creepy, but somehow more believable that the issuance of a fully-grown adult from a pregnant mother).
Most important, the film seems to have a tragic love story at its center, as Pitt's Button gets younger while Blanchett, as his wife, grows older. Fitzgerald's original wasn't nearly so nice.
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"Watchmen," the comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that debuted in 1985 and was first reissued as a graphic novel in 1987, is now climbing the bestseller charts — it's currently at No. 15 in USA Today and No. 9 on Amazon.
The renewed attention is due to the upcoming film, of course, which made a splash at Comic-Con last month. The trailer, which debuted in July, has gritty, gleaming CGI and is set to a pulsating song by Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins.
But the movie won't be out until March of next year. Could the graphic novel remain on the charts until then?
If it's a superhero "Moby-Dick," as Alan Moore hoped, it just might. More after the jump.
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The new "Hellboy" movie is out, and our reviewer Kenneth Turan thinks that unlike "Iron Man" or "The Incredible Hulk," "The Golden Army" is an exhilarating story that translates well to the big screen.
I'll bet, though, that Stan Lee's Marvel Movies Machine didn't experience any of the obstacles that director Guillermo del Toro and "Hellboy" creator Mike Mignola faced in making "The Golden Army." If you have a chance to read "Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie" (Dark Horse Books: 224 pp., $24.95 paper), the introduction by Del Toro shows what an ordeal it was to make this movie — even though the fantasy genre seems to be one of those surefire profit centers that studios can’t seem to make enough of.
"The scale of the sequel was huge — in fact, almost impossibly big. Especially if one considered that the first movie had grossed a modest theatrical return and that most everyone was in favor of a scaled-down sequel," he writes. "Scaled down" is hardly what Del Toro says he had in mind. He describes their effort to shop the script around town.
If you’ve ever read the "Hellboy" series, you may have noticed that Mignola’s pantheon of deities is extremely ecumenical. Several years ago, when Mignola and I did a one-on-one at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, he explained why so many familiar figures like Baba Yaga, Hecate, Rasputin, Norse gods and others appear in his stories. They’re fascinating, they have universal appeal and, he joked (though he was also quite serious), they save him an enormous amount of time trying to come up with villains from scratch.
The same seems true for the movie. Del Toro writes that he and Mignola "argued back and forth about magic beans, golden clockwork soldiers, a seemingly jarring musical duet between Abe and Hellboy." They also made an effort, he said, to avoid "the Anglo-Saxon/Celtic magical universe that is common in mainstream films" — which may be why our reviewer says the movie's fresh approach to myth is part of what makes it so enjoyable.
By the way, "Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie" includes the final shooting script for "The Golden Army," so you can memorize all of Red's best one-liners. For instance: "Memory gets pretty sketchy when you burn to death," or, as he looks over at Liz, his love interest, "I would give my life for her, but she also wants me to do the dishes!!"
Nick Owchar
(Photo credit: Egon Endrenyi / Universal Pictures)
Iconic detective Sherlock Holmes and his trusty aide John Watson are returning to the silver screen, to be played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell.
The fact that both comedians are better known for their clueless on-screen personas -- Borat, Ron Burgundy -- than for their clue-solving abilities is part of the joke. "Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh," Columbia Co-President Matt Tolmach told Variety. "Sacha and Will are two of the funniest and most talented guys on the planet, and having them take on these two iconic characters is frankly hilarious."
Sherlock Holmes first appeared in "A Study in Scarlet," a novel published in 1887; author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote three more Holmes novels and more than four dozen short stories over the next 40 years. The character has endured in ways that few others do. Today there are thousands of Sherlock Societies, and in London, you can visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum, located at 221b Baker Street, where Holmes, the fictional character, "lived."
Holmes has been living on-screen since the earliest days of silent movies, when Doyle was still writing the stories. According to the IMDB website, the first Sherlock Holmes film was a 1908 Danish short; Essanay (the company that made Charlie Chaplin's films) made its first Holmes picture in 1916. In 1922, John Barrymore, one of the screen's most esteemed actors, appeared in the title role. And on and on, with the Baron Cohen-Ferrell picture scheduled for 2009.
Holmes also plays on smaller screens: You can get the Holmes story, "A Case of Identity," delivered to your cellphone for about $10. And Daily Lit, which will send books by e-mail in installments, offers all of the Sherlock Holmes novels and several of the stories free.
Carolyn Kellogg
Photo credits: Sacha Baron Cohen - Robert Caplin / For The Times; Will Ferrell - Frank Masi / Associated Press; Sherlock Holmes statue - BBC News
Actor Sean Connery will launch his autobiography "Being A Scot" in August at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Festival director Catherine Lockerbie told Canada's CBC that "this book has gone through more permutations than James Bond has had shaken-not-stirred martinis: different co-writers, different publishers." The memoir, she continued, will include Connery's thoughts on "many aspects of Scottish culture and life, including sport, architecture and, of course, the gothic tendency in Scots literature."
While Connery is best remembered for his turn as the high-living super-spy James Bond, he's also been bookish on film. Notably, in "The Name of the Rose," the adaptation of Umberto Eco's novel, Connery played William of Baskerville, a literate monk who tries to save a precious library from burning.
But Connery has had a penchant for literary adaptations for his entire career. In 1961, he was in TV versions of both "Macbeth" and "Anna Karenina." Later Connery literary projects "The Hunt for Red October," "The Longest Day," "Marnie," "Murder on the Orient Express," "A Bridge Too Far," "A Fine Madness," "Shalako," "The Russia House," "The Molly Maguires," "The Anderson Tapes," "The First Great Train Robbery," "A Good Man in Africa," "Wrong is Right," "Family Business," "Just Cause," and "Rising Sun" were all adapted from books; "The Hill" and "The Offence," from plays; "The Man Who Would Be King" from a Rudyard Kipling story; and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" from a comic book. That's around 80% of his body of work, a hyper-literary run.
And James Bond, despite his filmic success, started out the hero of the novels by Ian Fleming.
Carolyn Kellogg
I'm a fan of Kessinger Publishing. The company is one of the keepers of all those esoteric titles on Egyptian magic and Rosicrucianism that you'd never expect to find unless you happened to be browsing the shelves at Dan Brown's house. When you order a book from this company, you get a reproduction of the text as it originally appeared--not a new version cleaned up and reformatted in a modern typeface. Sometimes there are smudges and even missing pages, but I prefer this the way friends of mine like to read well-thumbed thrift store copies of their favorite authors instead of brand-new copies. It doesn't matter if you order "A Primer of Natal Astrology" or Wilkie Collins' "Alicia Warlock" — all of Kessinger's books arrive at your door in that same awful, mustard-yellow packaging.
OK, so you get the idea that this publisher is about 100 miles away from the mainstream, right? And yet, the Associated Press reports that the publisher has enjoyed an unexpected surge in sales thanks to ... yes, you are reading this correctly ... the movie "Sex and the City." The character of Carrie Bradshaw is seen reading the book "Love Letters From Great Men," and, quicker than you can say "product placement," audience-goers scoured the Internet for this book, which is fictional, and found instead a 1920s book published by Kessinger: "Love Letters From Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day." As of this afternoon, that 80-year-old book ranks at No. 129 on Amazon.com.
Nick Owchar
The man (with Hefner) back in 2004. (photo: Carol Kaelson ABC)
It was a crush of crepey cleavage and vintage Hollywood royalty Thursday night at George Hamilton’s book party at Il Cielo in Beverly Hills. We nibbled on porcini ravioli and tiny lambchops from hand-grown, organically fed micro sheep. We swilled house Chianti and watched as vintage 1980s television superstars paraded, air-kissed and lined up for photo ops.
There was leonine Loni Anderson, newly remarried and glowing behind her majestic cheekbones. She spooned chicly shagged and laid-back Stephanie Powers, who cocked a knee beside Linda Gray, still radiant nearly 20 years post-“Dallas.” Plumped lips curled into super-pro camera smiles all around. New York publishing lackeys watched in awe; this is why it’s good to hold Book Expo America in L.A.: star power, baby.
Suddenly the crowd parted and there was Hamilton himself, radiant in a bespoke suit and his signature 500-watt smile. His hair was shellacked to perfection, his teeth adazzle, skin burnished to the sheen of a fine, old wallet. The man, on the brink of 70, is still a total chick magnet. Women of all ages flocked to him, pulling wee cameras from tiny evening bags and jockeying for a photo, letting their hands linger in his as he smiled down at them.
It was an anticipatory party for his October book, “Don’t Mind If I Do,” an intimate look at behind-the-scenes Hollywood, and if his ghostwriter (William Stadiem) did his job right, it should be a pip. Hamilton was at the "Cleopatra" wrap party where Richard Burton declared his love for Elizabeth Taylor in front of Eddie Fisher; he witnessed one of Judy Garland’s suicide attempts and, apparently, skinny-dipped with JFK (giving new meaning to the phrase “I knew John F. Kennedy and you’re no John F. Kennedy").
“I came on the scene in the '50s, and I didn’t want to be stuck in that plastic era,” Hamilton told me as I tried to stay focused on his words and not be hypnotized by his animal magnetism. “I wanted to write about what really happened.” He was inspired by David Niven’s books “The Moon’s a Balloon” and “Bring on the Empty Horses,” which brought the insider Hollywood memoir to a giddy new level in the 1970s.
There’s hope for similar fun from "Don't Mind If I Do" because Hamilton clearly knows everyone -- and is in on the joke about himself. The promotional goody bag was an assemblage of personalized M&Ms, sunglasses and exotic tanning products. The book's cover photo has him posed in a leopard-skin chair, in ascot, nonchalantly gesturing toward the camera. He has a reality show in the works, also called “Don’t Mind if I Do,” in which he freeloads his way around the world on his charm and good looks without ever having to touch money.
In this new age of the stubbled, rude and tattooed, Hamilton is old guard Hollywood. Back in the 1950s, Hamilton told me, his idols were Rudolph Valentino and the Duke of Windsor. “I was 30 years out of date back then!”
Erika Schickel
On Monday evening, my daughter Sophie and I went to a screening of Prince Caspian, the new Chronicles of Narnia movie that opens tomorrow. Sophie is nine, and she had just read the book a couple of weeks ago; no sooner had the film started than she turned to me and whispered, "They left a lot of stuff out."
I was willing to take her word for it because, if truth be told, I don't remember many of the details; I read the Narnia books a long time ago, when I was Sophie's age. But the film was pretty good, I thought -- fast-paced, nicely constructed ... until, that is, the last 20 minutes when Aslan saves the day.
This has always been my problem with the Chronicles of Narnia, the way Aslan is so often absent, until, after 1,000 years or so of suffering, he decides to step in and make everything right. I understand the metaphor, understand C. S. Lewis' notion of faith and Christian humility, but (without getting into theology), I think it's a poor narrative device. What kind of beneficent force is Aslan, when he's so often negligent? And what does it do to the human agency of the characters that they get bailed out by this external power, rather than having to work things out (or not) themselves?
Sophie had a different issue. Although she liked the movie, she found its at-times-relentless violence off-putting; it's more fun to read, she told me, because you imagine what's going on in the story for yourself.
Yes, I thought, that's it exactly. No external agency.
David L. Ulin
Photo credit: Disney/Walden
It's possible you haven't heard that Iron Man is opening this weekend -- maybe.
The first superhero movie of the season has been advertised and promoted everywhere. Although based on a comic book character, the film aspires to a certain level of seriousness: All four leads -- Robert Downey Jr, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow -- have been nominated for Academy Awards. (Paltrow, of course, has one.)
Yet it is also a superhero movie -- a CGI-filled extravaganza in which a louche but brilliant billionaire, when held in miserable circumstances, builds a really cool suit, blows stuff up and then battles bad guys. Spectacularly.
The comic book character was created by the master, Stan Lee, and first appeared in 1963. One of the Marvel Avengers crew, Iron Man has gone through many trials and tribulations in the last 35 years. But will a reworking of his history -- updating it from Vietnam to Afghanistan, for starters -- be accepted by comic fans? How would a Hollywood version of Iron Man play with people who've been following him faithfully for years?
At the comic website Newsarama, it seems Iron Man really does fly. It's run not one but three glowing reviews (1 - 2 - 3). There's a behind the scenes look and a poll in which 43% of readers predict the movie will make $50 million to $100 million this weekend and 31% think it'll take even more, $100-$125 million. Readers are logging in with such comments as "pure awesome," "effing awesome," "best superhero movie ever."
I haven't read the Iron Man comics, but I found the movie to be pretty awesome, too.
Carolyn Kellogg
Joe Hill and his dad: It was nice to find Joe Hill completely at ease talking about his father, Stephen King, during the science fiction/fantasy/horror panel Sunday morning. "He's my first reader," he said. "I've learned a lot from him." But, as he told the audience, he decided not to approach publishers as Joseph Hillstrom King (his given name) because "it would have been beneficial for me only in the short run."
 "If I had done that, I'm sure they would have been willing to publish work that wasn't ready, just for the advantage of having a tie to my family," he said.
But because "Heart-Shaped Box" received favorable reviews, Hill feels comfortable enough now when the question is raised about his father. When an older audience member approached the mike and even complained -- "There's a lot that's wrong with horror today, all that slasher stuff, and much of it has to do with Stephen King" -- Hill responded that his father's work "in large part explores the experiences of the middle class, what they're feeling. I think he prides himself on being a reporter of what's going on. But if you want Lovecraft and all that, go ahead, man. It's a wide field. You can always find something else to read."
Other bits: Kevin Anderson, who completed Frank Herbert's "Dune" saga with Herbert's son, Brian, told the audience that a new motion picture of "Dune" may be in the works. "Let's keep our fingers crossed," he said. The special effects technology that's available today, he said, might lead to an even richer  realization of that book than what one sees in David Lynch's 1984 film.
James Howard Kunstler wasn't on this panel (he was on a fiction panel later in the day), but he easily could have been for his novel "World Made By Hand." His novel looks at life in a future world where energy resources have run out and people revert to an existence resembling 19th century life.
I'm mentioning it here because Kunstler explained that he wanted his book to respond to the post-apocalyptic picture of the world that readers get in Cormac McCarthy's harrowing novel "The Road." "I want people to feel some hope about the future," he said. "I just want them to realize that there are alternatives to what that novel presents."
-- Nick Owchar
Joe Hill photo: Beth Gwinn
Well, it seems that C.S. Lewis doesn't hold the patent on inventing the magical wardrobe that transports children to other worlds. Edith Nesbit deserves more of the credit for her 1909 story, "The Aunt and Amabel," in which a young girl, banished by her aunt to a bedroom for committing some vague act of mischief, escapes her loneliness thus:
She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.
"I expect it's only shelves and people's best hats," she said. But she only said it. People often say what they don't mean, so that if things turn out as they don't expect, they can say "I told you so," but this is most dishonest to one's self, and being dishonest to one's self is almost worse than being dishonest to other people. Amabel would never have done it if she had been herself. But she was out of herself with anger and unhappiness.
Of course it wasn't hats. It was, most amazingly, a crystal cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station. It seemed to be lighted by stars, which is, of course, unusual in a booking office, and over the station clock was a full moon. The clock had no figures, only 'Now' in shining letters all round it, twelve times. ...
A train station too, huh? Shades of Mr. Potter. This delightful short story is among a rich selection that Douglas A. Anderson includes in "Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction." Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen: A Tale in Seven Stories" gives us not only a
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Jhumpa Lahiri's new story collection, "Unaccustomed Earth," was reviewed Sunday in our pages. Reviewer Lisa Fugard calls the book "a howl from the heart of a writer working at the height of her powers."
Lahiri, 40, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her debut collection, "Interpreter of Maladies," and followed it up with the bestselling book-turned-movie, "The Namesake." Her new collection includes the story "Hell-Heaven," which ran in the New Yorker in 2004. That same year she appeared at the New Yorker Festival; in this film clip, she reads from her story and answers audience questions.
Carolyn Kellogg
The University of Iowa caused a bit of a dust-up recently by changing the terms for graduate theses -- to make them “open access,” available online, for free, to anyone. Students in the writing program, one of the country’s most prestigious, balked.
Seth Abramson, an Iowa MFA student in poetry, blogged that he didn’t intend to turn over "first North American serial rights to any creative work I should produce … [toward] the completion of an MFA thesis." (Yep, he used to be a lawyer.)
Author James Hynes, who has attended the Iowa writer’s workshop and taught there, also protested, noting: "The copy of my thesis in the Iowa Graduate Library … is the final draft of my first published novel, 'The Wild Colonial Boy.' "
Eventually, the issue was resolved: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (sorry, registration is required for the article) that the university will not publish theses from students in the writing programs as open-access documents.
Not all college students are so lucky. Many top film schools -- including USC's -- hold the rights to their students’ final projects. George Lucas is rumored to have resorted to stealing the negative to his short film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB” from the school. That worked out OK for him -– it became the basis for his first feature, “THX 1138,” starring Robert Duvall. But the university now makes sure to keep closer tabs on its students' work.
Carolyn Kellogg
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Yup, amid a steady drumbeat of news about Southland bookstores closing their doors due to rising rents and declining sales comes word that a Los Feliz landmark will nearly double in size.
Come May — give or take a few weeks — Skylight Books will open a second space right next door in the 1934 building at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, promises general manager and co-owner Kerry Slattery.
"It's all so exciting," Slattery writes in a March newsletter to Skylight's faithful. "It will be at least a few months before all is ready, but we plan to move our art, film, music, theater and a few other sections to the new space, which will allow us to also expand a few sections."
Why now, as Dutton's Brentwood Books prepares to close its doors at the end of the month and Book Soup shutters its Costa Mesa satellite store?
Two reasons, Slattery tells Jacket Copy:
Unlike the development pressures facing Doug Dutton's store and the high-end retail rent at South Coast Plaza, Skylight has "a supportive landlord who is offering us the space for a fair rent," she says. "He could have rented this space for a lot more money to some chain operation. He thinks that the bookstore is an important thing."
The second reason: location, location.
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Warning: This posting discusses the ending of both the "Spiderwick" book series and the movie. If you’re planning on seeing the movie, read this post and don’t bother. If you’re planning on reading the series with your kids, read this post anyways and don’t worry—there are many more surprises to this series than the one discussed here.
(For an excellent review of the movie, see the piece by Times staff writer Carina Chocano.)
“Based upon” is a nebulous term. So nebulous that I can imagine Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, creators of “The Spiderwick Chronicles” series for young readers, must be troubled — at least a little — by what moviemakers have done to their 5-book series.
I’m talking mainly about the ending, which isn’t allowed to unfold as it does in the books. Somebody must have decided that Black and DiTerlizzi’s original climax wasn’t good enough for celluloid. So a dark, violent twist has been added that, while it may impress the adults and high schoolers in the audience, is a cruel swipe at the 9-12 age group for whom the series was meant.
“Spiderwick” gives young readers a wonderful introduction into a corner of lore and mythology. The books follow the wanderings of Mallory Grace and her twin brothers Jared and Simon around their great-great uncle’s abandoned estate. Children need to dream, they need to be nudged to turn off the video games and hunt for treasures outside in the tall grass. The series does this. It possesses imaginatively rich material: There’s a magical book about the fairy world, a mystery surrounding the uncle’s strange disappearance long ago, and stones with holes that — when worn like eyeglasses — allow you to see creatures in the woods, including an ogre who wants the magical book so that he can rule over all the creatures. All of this is conveyed in a narrative that moves nimbly, is at times funny and is handsomely complemented by DiTerlizzi’s lovely black and white etchings.
Now, to the ending.
In both cases — books and movie — the villainous ogre, named Mulgarath, is confronted by the children. And in both cases, the wily shapechanger tries to fool the children by taking the form of their father. It doesn’t work. In the books, Jared suspects that "Dad" is a phony and tells him so, causing the ogre to give up his ruse and resume his monstrous shape, tree-limbs and all. A showdown ensues in the ogre's shabby palace.
In the movie? Quite a different climax.
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Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Deputy Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Lead blogger, Jacket Copy
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Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times
Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times