Mad for 'Hunger Games' merch: nail polish, socks, crossbows

Danielle Pepers is such a fan of “The Hunger Games” that she had the book’s unofficial mascot -- a mockingjay -- tattooed on her right arm earlier this month. But her intrigue with the books, and upcoming movie, didn’t stop there. On a recent Wednesday, Pepers, 27, was shopping for T-shirts and jewelry at Hot Topic, a teen-oriented chain store at the Glendale Galleria that sells pop-culture ephemera. A mound of movie tie-in merchandise greeted her at the door.

There were knee socks, pillow cases and nail polish. Mini figures, sweat bands, even a watch. Still, that wasn’t all. Stepping over to the digital kiosk, there were dozens of other “The Hunger Games” items – 60 in total -- that could be special ordered into the store, including an $80 crossbow and ear buds for $19.50.

With “The Hunger Games” set to hit movie theaters next week, the publisher of the books it’s based upon is releasing four movie tie-in titles, including an illustrated movie companion, a tribute guide and, on March 23, the day of the film’s release, “The World of the Hunger Games,” a visual dictionary featuring pictures from the film. Other publishers are also hoping to cash in, with unofficial guidebooks, cookbooks and parodies, including Harvard Lampoon’s “The Hunger Pains.” It’s Lionsgate, however, that has unloosed the floodgates on a tidal wave of licensed merchandise –- most of it sold at Hot Topic and made by the National Entertainment Collectibles Assn. in New Jersey, one of the country’s largest providers of wholesale licensed movie merchandise.

Earlier this month the Los Angeles nail polish company, China Glaze, began selling Electrify (in orange glitter), Stone Cold (in metallic flake) and 10 other colors inspired by “The Hunger Games” 12 districts, where the action of the book unfolds.  Licensed through Lionsgate and available at Hot Topic and Sally Beauty, sales “have already exceeded our normal collection standards,” said China Glaze brand manager Rachel Schafer.

Huge as “The Hunger Games” is even before the film’s release, nothing says success like a Barbie. Mattel recently announced plans to introduce a collectible Katniss Everdeen doll to its Barbie Collector series before the end of the year.

'On the Road' trailer: dances, typewriters, and guns [video]

Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is finally coming to the big screen -- soon, apparently, since we now have the trailer above. Although an American release date hasn't yet been announced, a few international ones have been trickling out; there are rumors that it may have its world premiere at Cannes.

The film is directed by Walter Salles, whose success with "The Motorcycle Diaries" -- another period road film featuring a now-iconic figure -- would seem to make him the perfect guy for the job. He was handed the task by Francis Ford Copolla, who optioned the rights to Kerouac's book back in 1968.

"On the Road" stars Sam Riley as Sal Paradise (the Kerouac-ish character) and Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty (the stand-in for Neal Cassidy). But in the trailer, they may be somewhat outshone by Kristin Stewart, who, in addition to being the biggest box office star of the three, dances with wild abandon.

The trailer hits its pace with that dancing, after it stops telling us what the story is and starts inhabiting it. And for me, it's because that's when we get a real taste of Kerouac's words in voiceover.

I worry that it isn't the story of "On the Road" that makes it so compelling, but the way Kerouac bent language loose, the way his prose broke free. Can that be fully translated to film? Should it have to be?

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

The Dude abides: Jeff Bridges to co-write book of Zen teachings

Evoking his character in 1998's "The Big Lebowski," Jeff Bridges will co-write a book of Zen teachings, to be published later this year. "The Dude and the Zen Master," co-written by Bridges (the Dude) and Bernie Glassman (the Zen Master), promises to be a set of casual exchanges on life, film and trying to do good.

The book is coming in November from Blue Rider Press, an imprint at Penguin. Bridges and Glassman, who are friends, are quoted in a release from the publisher:

“Making movies and life have a lot in common.  When you’re making a movie you’ve got a finite amount of time to do what you’re going to do.  It’s a communal art form, collaborative. You work together with other artists to come up with something groovy, something beautiful. Life’s like that, too.” He added: “On a movie set I do my best to keep my head and heart open. My favorite part of the whole deal is jamming with the other artists, getting to know them, sharing the excitement of what we’re up to, and inspiring each other. That means intimacy.  I look for that in life as well.  That’s why I hooked up with Bernie, to make the most of this wonderful experience called Life.”

Bernie Glassman said of the book: “I always like finding new ways of expressing the essence of Zen, which for me is all about the oneness and interdependence of life. The Dude’s life is different from mine, and not so different. And our life is different from other people’s lives, and not so different. So Jeff and I have hung out over the years and examined together how we live our one life in the best, freest, and most joyful way possible.”

While the book will focus on Zen, some fans of the Dude have already found religion: Dudeism. From a website dedicated to the ideas and teachings of the character created by the Coen brothers: "Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others -- that is to say, abide." The site claims 100,000 ordained Dudeist priests worldwide.

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Photo: Jeff Bridges, right, with John Goodman in "The Big Lebowski." Credit: Gramercy Pictures.

Writer Nick Flynn on 'Being Flynn'

Nick Flynn has lived an odd life. Meeting his estranged father for the first time in his twenties, Flynn found himself face-to-face with a man who believed he was one of the greatest writers who ever lived. He wasn’t -- Jonathan Flynn was mainly a drifter with delusions of grandeur. But he clearly carried something in his genes. The younger Flynn would evolve into a poet, and would also draw on his experiences with his father to write an acclaimed memoir, “Another ... Night in Suck City,” that bore out some of his father’s bold claims.

Flynn doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects such as homelessness and alcoholism in describing his tentative steps toward reconciliation with his father. Heavy on both poetic language and fragmented rumination, the book wasn’t an easy read. But it became a cult hit with the book-buying public when it was published in 2004, also winning the PEN/Martha Albrand Award.

A different audience will get to live Flynn’s story starting this weekend, when a movie based on “City” -- titled “Being Flynn” and starring Robert De Niro as Jonathan and Paul Dano as Nick -- opens in theaters.

Flynn spent every day of the New York shoot on set, guiding its director. Before the shoot began, he said, he imagined that the experience of watching an actor reenact his life could get surreal.

“I was trying to get a frame of reference,” he said. "So I called my friend Tony Swofford [the “Jarhead’ author who also saw a movie made of his book] and he told me that even writing the memoir is turning yourself into the character -- it’s not my life but the memory of my life.” Flynn said. “So really this was all something I had done before.”

Cycle with the stars in Steven Rea's 'Hollywood Rides a Bike'

It would be hard to imagine the Oscar-winning film "E.T." without Henry Thomas and his hooded extraterrestrial's bike-riding silhouette against the moon or Paul Newman's classic two-wheeled courtship of Katharine Ross missing from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

Hollywood's friendly affair with bicycles can be traced back nearly a century. It could be an integral part of the main story line, such as in "Breaking Away," or used as a pivotal prop in memorable scenes (the "Do-Re-Mi" sequence in "The Sound of Music") or just objects of pleasure and recreation on studio lots.

Film critic and bike fanatic Steven Rea has pulled together a collection of seldom-seen photos of actors and their bikes in "Hollywood Rides a Bike" (Angel City Press, $20), which is a part of the coverage featured in this Sunday's Arts & Books section.

"It's a convergence of two of my biggest passions in life: movies and bikes," said Rea, who rides his early 1970s, Raleigh DL-1, British postman's bike nearly every day to work at the Philadelphia Inquirer and to screenings.

Long before "eco-friendly" became part of our vernacular, studios stocked their lots with fleets of bikes for stars to zip quickly from stage to dressing room. Drawn from Rea's 2010 Tumblr blog "Rides a Bike," the 125 selected images in this book are a mix of candid back-lot shots, actors at their leisure, posed studio portraits and production stills such as B-movie actress Louise Allbritton's cheesecake shot of her tumble in the 1944 comedy "San Diego I Love You." Other notable crashes featured are Doris Day in "The Tunnel of Love" and Jane Fonda in her first film, "Tall Story."

Images span from the onset of talkies (Fred Allen in 1929's "The Installment Collector") to late 1980s (Tom Hanks on a Silver BMX in "Big"), with the majority of images taken during Hollywood's golden age.

More after the jump

Paramount sues to stop new 'Godfather' prequel's publication

A prequel to Mario Puzo's "The Godfather," to be published by Grand Central, may not see shelves if Paramount has its way. The movie studio has sued to block publication of "The Family Corleone," slated for June. The book, written by Ed Falco, was sanctioned by Puzo's estate.

In a suit filed Feb. 17 in Manhattan, Paramount Pictures claims it is trying to "protect the integrity and reputation of The Godfather trilogy," the Wrap reports. When Puzo signed his contract with Paramount in 1969, it included broad rights to "The Godfather" and the characters in the novel. The studio made three Godfather pictures, all of which have been Academy Award winners or nominees.

There have been a number of other Godfather spinoffs, including a video game. And then there are the books.

The Puzo family authorized two sequels to "The Godfather" -- 2004's "The Godfather Returns" and, two years later, "The Godfather's Revenge." Both novels were written by Mark Winegardner, an author who teaches at Florida State University.

In the new suit, Paramount says it authorized the first sequel but not the second. It claims that "The Godfather's Revenge" "tarnished" the legacy of "The Godfather," and the studio is now seeking damages in addition to trying to block publication of "The Family Corleone."

The studio has long known about the book, which was announced by publisher Grand Central in May 2011. That was when it was made public that Falco, an uncle of "Sopranos" actress Edie Falco, would be penning a prequel; it's based on an unproduced screenplay written by Puzo, who died in 1999.

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Photo: Marlon Brando in the 1972 film "The Godfather." Credit: Paramount Pictures.

2011 Nebula Award nominees announced

The nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards for science fiction and fantasy writing were announced Monday. The winners will be chosen by active members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; voting will run from March 1 to March 30.

The Nebula Awards pay particular attention to short fiction, with categories for novella, novelette and short story. The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Screen Presentation mixes film and television, so Martin Scorcese's 3-D "Hugo" (no relation to the Hugo science fiction awards) is going up against an episode of "Dr. Who" written by Neil Gaiman. In the running for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book is Franny Billingsley's "Chime," which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

The full list of nominees:

Novel
"Among Others," Jo Walton (Tor)
"Embassytown," China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)
"Firebird," Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)
"God’s War," Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
"Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti," Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)
"The Kingdom of Gods," N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella
“Kiss Me Twice,” Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2011)
“Silently and Very Fast,” Catherynne M. Valente (WFSA Press; Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2011)
“The Ice Owl,” Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November/December 2011)
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2011)
“The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” Ken Liu (Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing)
“With Unclean Hands,” Adam-Troy Castro (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2011)

Monday books: Franzen on e-books, the end of books and more

"The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. You don’t need it to be refreshed, do you?" That was Jonathan Franzen speaking at a book festival in Cartagena, Colombia. “Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing -- that’s reassuring," he said, the Telegraph reports.

"I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that."

Scottish author Ewan Morrison is equally skeptical. In the Guardian, he describes a self-published e-book bubble, putting author Amanda Hocking -- who is said to have made $2.5 million writing and selling e-books on her own -- in what he calls Stage Five: Market Reversal/Insider Profit-Taking. "For the hundreds of thousands of newcomers to self-epublishing to believe that they can become as successful as these role models is a dangerous delusion," he writes, "one capitalised on by companies who have an interest in maximizing internet traffic and selling e-readers and internet advertising." Morrison's saddest conclusion? "I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things."

But not everyone is bashing e-books. On Monday, Open Road media announced an e-books partnership with ProPublica, the first online news organization to have won a Pulitzer Prize."Ebooks are a very promising platform for publishing journalism with high impact, and therefore a critical venue for ProPublica," Paul Steiger, editor-in-chief and CEO of ProPublica, said in a statement. Open Road's ProPublica e-books will include multimedia such as video, maps, photos and additional documentary material.

At the core of books, e-books and print, is story. And one story that won big at Sunday night's Screen Actors Guild Awards was "The Help." Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, a long-lived bestseller, has proved successful on screen, taking three of the major SAG Awards: best actress for Viola Davis, best supporting actress for Octavia Spencer and best ensemble cast, the actors union's highest honor.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jonathan Franzen reads in Los Angeles in 2010. Credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

 

Book news: 'Albert Nobbs,' lady friends, and fiction and place

Are you going to see "Albert Nobbs"? The film, which has been nominated for three Oscars (cross-dressing Glenn Close is thought to give Meryl Streep some competition) may be among the award season's most literary. It was adapted from a short story by Irish writer George Moore, the screenplay was co-written by Booker prize-winner John Banville, and it was directed by Rodrigo Garcia, son of Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Speaking of literary people and the screen, writer A-J Aronstein writes in The Millions about HBO coming to the suburban neighborhood he grew up in to film "The Corrections." Aronstein's childhood home was up to be the Lamberts', right at the center of the book; Aronstein wrote his undergraduate thesis on Franzen's 2001 novel. What are the odds? Too great, apparently. They picked another house. Which was probably for the best; John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about the mixed experience of his North Carolina home being used in "One Tree Hill." That essay, which appeared in GQ, is in "Pulphead: Essays:," a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award.

Susan Straight's 2001 novel "highwire Moon" was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Southern California writer has made her hometown, Riverside, the setting and center of much of her work. Now she's writing at KCET about the Inland Empire; she has explored a sheep farm, looked at metal sun shades and visited her grandmother's old trailer park. Her fantastic essays are accompanied by photographs that make the place look like a mid-century heaven that time forgot.

A fantastic new essay by Emily Rapp appears in The Rumpus, where she writes of the power of female friendship. "Here’s the truth: friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, 'bonus' relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children." If that last bit sounds alarming, wait until you reach the end of her piece.

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Book news: Apple, Oscars, e-readers, and a new literary offering

 

Oscar nominations were announced this morning; 6 out of 10 best picture nominees were adapted from  books. "The Descendants" comes from the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings; "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer; "The Help" from the debut novel by Kathryn Stockett;  "Hugo" from the middle grade book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" by Brian Selznik; "Moneyball" from the nonfiction book by Michael Lewis; and "War Horse" from the middle grade book by Michael Morpurgo. While it didn't get a best picture nod, the bestseller "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" wasn't totally overlooked: It is up for cinematography, editing, sound editing, sound mixing, and Rooney Mara is nominated for best actress.

Jay-Z was among the winners at the Publishing Innovation Awards on Monday night in New York. Announced at the opening night of the Digital Book World conference, the Publishing Innovation Awards honor excellence in e-books and beyond. Jay-Z himself was not on hand to accept the prize.

Last week, when Apple announced its sort-of-garage-band-for-e-textbooks, your faithful scribe was on a plane -- without wifi! -- and unable to get to the story. Over at Wired, Tim Carmody has done the heavy lifting; he followed the announcement, then explained why e-textbooks are the kind of big business Apple would want to get into.

Over the holidays, e-readers were popular to give -- so much so that I wonder if some purchasers used the one-for-you, one-for-me method. According to a new study, 19% of American adults now own an e-reader or tablet. Among college grads, the number is very high: 31%.

Today the Chicago Tribune announced a 24-page weekly literary supplement, Printers Row. For an annual subscription of $149 ($99 for Chicago Tribune subscribers), readers will get news, reviews, interviews, and Chicago-focused literary content. They'll also get VIP access to some Chicago-area book events -- Printers Row takes its name from the Tribune's annual book festival. Single electronic editions of Printers Row will be available from Amazon for $2.99.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: George Clooney, left, in "The Descendants," and Brad Pitt in "Moneyball."  Credits: Fox Searchlight and Columbia TriStar