One aspect of  Lois Lowry’s book The Giver could be problematic for film adaptation. It takes place in a world that lacks color. As the recently-released teaser of the film indicates, that is handled by incorporating both black and white photography and color (UPDATE: this trailer, released on 4/22, was removed for some reason. The first trailer, an all-color version released in March, is here. The official Web site is here: TheGiverFilm.com).

In a “featurette,” about the movie, author Lois Lowry comments on the inspiration for the book and appears, appropriately, in black and white.

Directed by Philip Noyce (he also adapted Jeffrey Deaver’s The Bone Collector into a 1998 film), the movie arrives in theaters on Aug. 15. It stars Brenton Thwaites as Jonas, Jeff Bridges as The Giver, Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes and Taylor Swift.

Tie-ins (covers have not yet been revealed):

The Giver Movie Tie-In Edition
Lois Lowry
HMH; July 1, 2014
Hardback, $17.99
9780544430785, 0544430786
Trade paperback, $9.99
9780544340688, 054434068X

Audio tie-in
The Giver Movie Tie-In Edition
Lois Lowry, Ron Rifkin
Listening Library, July 8, 2014
CD-Audio; $29.95
9780553397109, 0553397109

Sounds like Gillan Flynn wants to have things both ways. First, she said that the ending of the film version of Gone Girl will be different from the book. David Fincher made it sound very different, telling Entertainment Weekly that star Ben Affleck was so “shocked” by the changes that he said, ‘This is a whole new third act! She literally threw that third act out and started from scratch.’

But in an answer to a question during a Reddit discussion yesterday, she stepped back from that quite a bit. Below is her response:

Tell your girlfriend not to worry—those reports have been greatly exaggerated! Of course, the script has to be different from the book in some ways—you have to find a way to externalize all those internal thoughts and you have to do more with less room and you just don’t have room for everything. But the mood, tone and spirit of the book are very much intact. I’ve been very involved in the film and loved it. Working with David Fincher is pretty much the best place to start for a screenwriter. Screenwriting definitely works different parts of your brain than writing a novel. I do love that with novels, you can really sprawl out–it feels quite decadent. With screenwriting, you have to justify every choice. It’s a nice discipline, but definitely not decadent.

So, take your pick. If you want a different ending, quote the Flynn of EW. If you don’t, quote the Flynn of Reddit.

Production has begun on the long-gestating Nick Nolte/Robert Redford adaptation of Bill Bryson’s memoir, A Walk in the Woods, (RH/Broadway; RH Audio, 1998) near Georgia’s Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, according to the local press.

Bryson’s memoir recounts his misadventures as he attempts to hike the Appalachian Trail, despite “years of waddlesome sloth” with his old pal Katz, a man even more ill-prepared for the effort than he is. Redford will play Bryson and Nolte, Katz (in a role originally planned for Redford’s late friend Paul Newman).

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert get their book grooves back this week, as each of them features authors on 3 of their 4 shows.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Elizabeth Warren appears on The Daily Show tonight for A Fighting Chance, (Macmillan/Metropolitan Books; Macmillan Audio), as we noted earlier. We’re betting Stewart will ask about her about an incident she recounts in the book, throwing up the first time she was on the show. Published today, it is already at #24 on Amazon’s sales rankings as the result of previous media attention.

The next day, Wednesday, Stewart features another high-profile author, Good Morning America host, Robin Roberts whose new memoir is titled Everybody’s Got Something, (Hachette/ Grand Central; Hachette Audio).

On Thursday, he turns to a book that hasn’t received as much media attention, Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India, (RH/Knopf).

The Colbert Report

Tonight, Colbert interviews George Will about his new book, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred, (RH/Crown Archetype). He sticks with the sports theme on Wednesday with basketball coach, John Calipari and his new book, Players First.

Revealing his more literary side, Colbert declared himself a fan of George Saunders back in 2007 (while claiming he’d never read anything by him), long before the NYT Magazine made him a best seller.

He brings the author back to the show on Thursday for his newest book, Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, (RH/Knopf), an extended version of his 2013 Syracuse University graduation speech.

Recovered from the remake of Flowers in the Attic? Prepare for another blast from the past. Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby is coming to NBC as a two-part series, which begins Sunday, May 11.

The book was famously adapted in 1968 by director Roman Polanski, with Mia Farrow as Rosemary and John Cassavetes as her husband. This time, however, the story is set in Paris, rather than in New York’s Dakota Building.

Rosemary’s Baby
Ira Levin, Intro by Otto Penzler
Pegasus (dist by W.W. Norton)
May 5, 2014
9781605981109, 1605981109
Paperback $14.95
 

Below is the trailer for the original (it seems trailers were longer in those days):

As movie audiences will discover this summer, there is much more to YA adaptations than kids fighting kids in dystopian battles.

Following the release in June of The Fault in Our Stars, based on the John Green novel, comes the film adaptation of Gayle Forman’s If I Stay, (Penguin) on August 22. The first trailer, below, was just released.

Actress Chole Moretz stars as Mia, a 17 year-old cellist, who is given the choice whether to live or die, while in a coma after a car accident that killed her family. Jamie Blackley (Snow White And The Huntsman, The Fifth Estate) plays her boyfriend Adam, Mirella Enos and Denny Hall,  her parents and Stacy Keach, Gramps. It is directed by R. J Cutler, known for his documentaries, including the Emmy-award-winning American High.

Last year’s National Book Award winner, The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (Penguin/Riverhead; Dreamscape Audio; Thorndike) may be heading to the big screen. Liev Schreiber and Jaden Smith (The Karate Kid, After Earth) have signed to star, with author McBride taking on a role as producer. Smith will play Henry “Onion” Shackleford with  Schreiber in the role of abolitionist John Brown.

McBride’s’ Miracle At St. Anna (Penguin/Riverhead, 2002) was adapted by Spike Lee in 2008. An FX series based on the author’s book Song Yet Sung, (Penguin/Riverhead, 2008), about Harriet Tubman, was announced last fall.

No more teases, below is the full Gone Girl trailer which debuted on yesterday’s Entertainment Tonight.

Fans of the book should prepare for a new ending. Author Gillian Flynn and director David Fincher have said that they worked out a completely new one  for the movie. About the experience, Flynn said, “There was something thrilling about taking this piece of work that I’d spent about two years painstakingly putting together with all its eight million LEGO pieces and take a hammer to it and bash it apart and reassemble it into a movie.”

Fincher who directed the English-language adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, expressed regrets about it, saying, “we may have been too beholden to the source material.”

This may bring a rush of people who want to read the book before the movie (yes, amazingly, it seems that there are a few who haven’t read it yet), so you may want to hold off on weeding copies. For those who need to replace worn out copies, the trade paperback and mass market paperback (both from RH/Broadway) arrive next week. The movie tie-in (RH/Broadway) is scheduled for August 26.

The movie hits theaters Oct. 3,

Note: You can also view the trailer on the Apple site.

The film of Divergent is an official success, so much so that, like other popular teen franchises (Twilight, Hunger Games), the final book in the series will be split into two movies.

The stars revealed on yesterday’s MTV Movie Awards red carpet that they knew that was a possibility from the beginning:

No, we don’t have the first trailer, but what we do have is the teaser for the first trailer (calling M.C. Escher).

The actual trailer will debut on Entertainment Tonight on Monday, April 14.

It’s difficult to imagine a film based on Emma Donoghue’s claustrophobic best seller, Room  (Hachette/Little,Brown), but the project, announced in September, appears to be moving along.

Director Lenny Abrahamson has hired Brie Larson for the lead role of Ma, a woman who was kidnapped as a teenager and lives in a tiny room with her 5-year-old son. The story is told through the boy’s eyes, as his mother works to maintain the illusion that their life is normal.

Donaghue’s latest novel, Frog Music, (Hachette/Little, Brown), was released last week.

The movie Life of Crime, based on the late Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch, (HarperCollins/Morrow), has been set for release on August 29.

In The Rolling Stone last year, director Daniel Schechter described his efforts to buy the rights to the novel and expressed hopes that Leonard would have appreciated the outcome.  With the exceptions of Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, and the FX series, Justified, Leonard wasn’t a fan of the majority of the many adaptations of his work.

The film, featured at the Toronto Film Festival was called by Variety‘s critic, a “fitting memorial” to the author.

Starring Jennifer Aniston, it was renamed Life of Crime, presumably to separate it from a very different movie starring Aniston, The Switch, based on a Jeffrey Eugenides’ short story The Baster.

Life of Crime also stars John Hawkes, Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), Isla Fisher and Tim Robbins.

The novel is one of a series of trade paperback rereleases of Leonard’s classic backlist published by HarperCollins/Morrow. It is  also in the Library of America collection, Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1970s, coming in September (Penguin/Library of America).

A feature movie based on the classic WWI memoir, Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, began filming last week at the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway in West Yorkshire, England, according to local news stories.

Just last year, 80 years after publication, the book was called “one of the most powerful and widely read war memoirs of all time,” by The Guardian. When it was published in 1933, it was “an instant hit,” and Virginia Woolf wrote in her diaries that she had to stay up all night to finish it. It’s pacifist message fell out of favor during WWII, but in 1978 the feminist Virago Press brought it back into print to great success. Today, notes The Guardian, “the book seems to strike a chord with contemporary readers who have themselves lived through an era of renewed conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The title role is being played by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander (whose breakout was in the supporting role of Kitty in Anna Karenina; she also starred in the Oscar-nomated Danish movie, A Royal Affair), replacing Saoirse Ronan, who was originally cast for the role.

The book is currently available in the U.S. in trade paperback from Penguin Books:

Testament of Youth
Vera Brittain
Penguin Classics, 2005
9780143039235, 0143039237
Trade paperback $20.00 USD

Librarian favorite and Printz honor award winner, Rainbow Rowell has her first movie deal. Entertainment Weekly reports (“exclusively,” followed by MTV News interviewing the author) that DreamWorks has bought the rights to her popular YA romance, Eleanor & Park. (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin; Listening Library; Thorndike Press)

DreamWorks president of production, Holly Bario, tells Entertainment Weekly what librarians already know, “Every girl who has read it says, ‘That was me in high school, or that was me in 7th grade.’” She also says they are trying to figure out how to handle the book’s structure of alternating chapters from each of the main character’s perspectives, “There are all storts of groovy stylistic things you could do with voice over, or words on the screen, but we want something that’s real Rainbow.”

To aid in that process, Rowell has  been hired to write the screenplay. DreamWorks hopes to begin shooting in 2015.

Given the star power of the Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper combo, as evidenced in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, it’s been surprising that a third film starring the duo, Serena, adapted from Ron Rash’s 2008 novel, has not yet seen the light of day.

It seems Danish director Susanne Bier, whose movie, In A Better World, won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, wanted to take her time in the editing room. New images from the film have just been released and are being featured on various web sites (The Playlist offers the largest selection; MTV praises Lawrence’s “retro glam”), indicate that it may soon have a release date.

Rash’s next novel, Above the Waterfall, (HarperCollins/Ecco) is scheduled for publication in 2015.