HBO Gets HOT
The premium cable network, HBO has discovered the temperature at which paper burns, moving forward with a film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 (S&S; Tantor; OverDrive Sample).
The novel, first published in 1953, depicts a future world where books are outlawed and, if found, burned by firemen. Written during the McCarthy era it has found a new readership following the 2016 election.
The movie will star Michael B. Jordan (Creed) and Michael Shannon (Nocturnal Animals) reports Deadline. Adds Tor, Jordan will play “Montag, the young fireman who has a crisis of conscience when he begins to believe that burning books is wrong, and Michael Shannon as Beatty, Montag’s captain and mentor.”
Assessing the novel in 2008, over 50 years after it was first published, a writer for The Guardian attested to the novel’s continuing appeal, saying it is “often startling and poetic … almost as memorable for its imagery as its ideas … As far as ideas go, the effect was just as powerful when I read the book anew.”
It won a Retrospective Hugo in 2004 and was adapted by François Truffaut in a 1966 film starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie and was adapted as a graphic novel in 2009: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation by Tim Hamilton (Macmillan/Hill and Wang).