Author E.L, James announced via Twitter yesterday, the names of the stars for the adaptation of her book, Fifty Shades of Grey.

Dakota Johnson comes from an acting family. She is the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren. She starred as Kate in the TV comedy series Ben and Kate (more about her in USA Today‘s story, “Who Is Dakota Johnson?“). British actor Hunnam stars in the FX series Sons of Anarchy.and in Guillermo Del Toro’s  Pacific Rim (more about him in USA Today’s companion story “Who Is Charlie Hunnam?“)

The film is being directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, considered a surprising choice since she has directed only one other feature film (Forbes points out it’s really only surprising because she is female; male directors with light resumes are often handed big-ticket projects).

The movie is currently scheduled for release on Aug. 1, 2014.

Filming began in Shreveport, Louisiana, this week for the adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s second novel, Dark Places (RH/Crown). Photos of Charlize Theron on set were published in the U.K.’s Mail Online. Theron plays the lead role, Libby Day, a character that, says the publication, “shares a chilling similarity [with] her own childhood,” since both witnessed the murders of family members when they were children.

Christina Hendricks recently joined the cast and will play a stripper [UPDATE: Hendricks has been given a larger role, as the murdered mother of the main character, played by Charlize Theron]. The film is currently scheduled for release on Sept. 1 of next year.

Work is also beginning on Gillian Flynn’s more famous third novel, Gone Girl (RH/Crown). Rumors that sites are being scouted in the southeast Missouri town of Cape Girardeau created local excitement this week. David Fincher directs the movie which stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.

The second trailer for the new adaptation of Stephen King’s classic horror story, Carrie, debuted online this week. Directed by Kimberly Peirce, it stars Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role and Julianne Moore as her fanatically religious mother. The movie arrives in theaters on Oct. 18.

Brian De Palma directed the original adaptation in 1976, with Sissy Spacek as Carrie and Piper Laurie as her mother.

Tie-ins to Carrie from RH/Vintage will be released on Sept. 24 in mass market, audio (Sissy Spacek narrates) and Spanish-language editions.

Director Kimberley Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) has said on her Facebook page that her Carrie will not be a remake of De Palma’s version:

… I have gone back to the wonderful STEPHEN KING Book CARRIE; I am also modernizing the story as one has to in order to bring any great piece of work written in one era into the next and especially given how very relevant this material is right now.

That explains the presence of cell phones in the trailer (for more insight on Peirce’s approach to the novel, see MovieWeb‘s on-set interview with the director).

Official Movie Site: Carrie-Movie.com

Below is the trailer:

The first trailer for the film adaptation of Veronica Roth’s YA novel Divergent debuted at MYV’s Video Music Awards last night.

Unfortunately, it arrives just as another YA adaptation is being called a flop. City of Bones, which opened this weekend, was called a “disappointment” by  many sources, including the Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, filmmakers say a sequel is still in the works.

This is viewed as a trend, since the adaptation of Beautiful Creatues, released in the spring, was also considered a box office failure.

Bloomberg Business Week quotes YA marketing consultant MaryLeigh Bliss of YPulse, who says that these movies didn’t connect because they are based on books that don’t have “an organized and impassioned fandom that could match something like Harry Potter or Twilight” or a large crossover audience. She expects the second Hunger Games film, opening in November, to do well, but doesn’t hold out much hope for Divergent, coming in March, or The Maze Runner which arrives in February.

The trailer is below:

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2013 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music

The trailer for the movie based on Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, (RH/Knopf) starring Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson and Sophie Nélisse in the lead, arrived online yesterday and already the book is rising on Amazon.

For those who are concerned that the novel’s narrator, Death, is missing from the trailer, the author himself assures readers on his blog that Death will be featured in the movie.

The movie debuts on Nov. 15.

Official Movie Site: TheBookThief.com

In The Rolling Stone Daniel Schechter describes the lengths he went to in his effort to get the rights to Elmore Leonard’s book, The Switch (HarperCollins/Morrow, part of a series of recent rereleases in trade paperback of Leonard’s classic backlist) and how hopeful he was that the author would like the resulting movie, titled Life of Crime.

He had reason to be nervous. 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. With the author’s death on Tuesday, first-time director Schecter will never know which category his film would have fallen into.

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

Life of Crime, which also stars John Hawkes, Isla Fisher and Tim Robbins, will premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival’s closing gala, which, notes The Rolling Stone is “an unprecedented honor for a relatively new filmmaker” and will be dedicated to Leonard’s memory.

Jeremy Irvine, who played the lead in 2011’s War Horse, is set to star in an adaptation of the first book in Lauren Kate’s best selling YA novels featuring fallen angels, Fallen, (RH/Delacorte, 2009) reports Deadline. Starring opposite him will be Addison Timlin, who appeared in the decidedly non-YA Showtime series, Californication

Kirkus praised the book’s Southern Gothic atmosphere, as “so well crafted that readers can easily picture Luce walking among the marshes and crumbling buildings.”

No news yet on who is going to play the book’s “evil school librarian.”

Fallen, was followed by Torment (2010), Passion (2011) and the final title in the series, Rapture (2012). Kate begins a new supernatural YA trilogy this fall with Teardrop (RH/Delacorte, 10/22/13; Listening Library).

In other supernatural-YA-romance-to-movie news, the first trailer for Vampire Academy has just appeared online. Based on the first book in Richelle Mead’s series (Penguin/Razorbill), it is expected to be the beginning of a franchise (there’s plenty more material; the series consists of six books with more in the on-going spinoff series Bloodlines). Directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls), it stars Zoey Deutch and Lucy Fry and opens Feb. 14, 2014.

Life After Life, British author Kate Atkinson’s eighth title was published to critical acclaim in the spring and became the author’s biggest seller, debuting at #3 on the  NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Seller. It remained on the main list for 8 weeks.

Lionsgate has just acquired the film rights according to Deadline.

The book’s involved plot about woman who is reborn multiple times will represent an interesting challenge for screenwriters Semi Chellas, who has written for Mad Men, and Esta Spalding, (The Bridge).

The new issue of USA Today offers a first look at the adaptation of Vampire Academy: Blood Sisters, the first in the series by Richelle Mead (Penguin/Razorbill). The director, Mark Waters, describes Zoey Deutch, who plays the lead, as having “a lot of personality, and that fun, brassy energy is what makes Rose interesting,”

Deutch has experience with YA adaptations. She appeared in a supporting role in this year’s Beautiful Creatures, based on the book by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl.

Vampire Academy arrives in theaters on Valentine’s Day, 2014.

A new trailer for Catching Fire has been released online (if you’re trying to keep track, this is the third, the “Official international Trailer.” It follows the first, shown at the MTV Movie Awards in April and the second, shown at Comic-Con last month, which is not much different from this one). The last two trailers both emphasize the SF elements of the story, while the first focused on the politics of the Hunger Games. The film debuts on Nov. 22.

Meanwhile, the trailer for another dystopian teen movie, one that is more frightening because it is set in the near future and seems all too plausible, How I Live Now, has also been released.

It is based on a Meg Rosoff’s debut novel (RH/Wendy Lamb), a Printz Award winner, published in 2004, before the term “YA dystopian novel” was common. The film is directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King Of Scotland) and stars Soairse Ronan as Daisy, an American teenager who’s sent to stay with relatives in the English countryside just before World War III breaks out.

The film will be released in the UK on October 4; the US release date has yet been set, but it is expected in the fall.

The trailer for the movie Philomena, based on The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, by UK journalist Martin Sixsmith (Macmillan U.K., 2009), was  just  released online and it is already engendering Oscar buzz for its star, Judi Dench.

The book recounts Sixsmith’s efforts to help a woman find her son, whom she had been forced to give up for adoption fifty years earlier.

The movie is directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen). Dench plays the mother, Philomena Lee and Steve Coogan plays Sixsmith. It is scheduled for release on Nov. 1 in the UK; no US release date has been announced. To qualify for the Oscars, it has to be released by the end of the year.

The book will be published here in September as a trade paperback tie-in, titled Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search  (Penguin), with a foreword by Dench.

Juliette Lewis is set to co-star with Matt Dillon in a Fox series, Wayward Pines, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, to debut in the fall of 2014. Also in the cast are Melissa Leo, Toby Jones and Carla Guigino.

It is based on  Pines, by Blake Crouch, published under the Amazon mystery imprint, Thomas & Mercer (also in audio by Brilliance). It was a finalist for 2013 Thriller Awards‘ Best Paperback Original Novel. While described in news reports as a “best seller,” it did not appear on any lists we can identify; it may have appeared on Amazon sales rankings. It is not owned by libraries, according to WorldCat [Update: We stand corrected — see comment below].

Crouch published several titles with imprints of Macmillan, before turning to self-publishing and then signing with Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer.

When you want to pull out the big guns for a newsstand cover, you can’t do much better than Princess Diana (according to “Stolley’s Laws” about which covers sell best, by the legendary founding editor of People Magazine, Dick Stolley, “Nothing is better than the celebrity dead.”)

Vanity Fair plays that card for their big September issue, featuring a cover story poignantly titled in the online edition, “The Grandmother Prince George Never Knew” but with the more sensational “Diana’s True Love” on the print cover.

It’s not about Dodi Fayed, the lover with whom she died, but about Diana’s relationship with Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, which ended just before she began seeing Fayed (in a bid to make Khan jealous, according to the story).

As the story notes, a movie titled simply Diana, starring Naomi Watts, also covers the relationship and is based on Diana; Her Lost Love, by Kate Snell, originally published in the UK in 2000 and being released here as a tie-in edition on Dec. 1, (IPG/Andre Deutsch). Below is the UK trailer. The film premieres in London on Sept 5; it is not clear  when it will be released in the U.S.; some sources say it will have an “Oscar season” release, others list the date as Dec. 6. [UPDATE: US release is now set for Nov. 1, 2013]

When George Clooney calls, they come running. Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett all join him in his adaptation of the nonfiction title, The Monuments Men, by Robert Edsel (Hachette/Center Street) about the effort to rescue art from the hands of the Nazis. It debuts in theaters on Dec. 18.

In addition to The Monuments Men, Edsel published another book in May on the subject (Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, Norton). Several other books and a documentary have also been released about the story (see our earlier post).

Monuments Men Official Site: MonumentsMen.com

Tie-ins:
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
Robert M. Edsel, Bret Witter
On Sale Date: October 22, 2013
Trade Pbk: 9780316240055, 0316240052

Mass Mkt: 9780316240079

Audio: 9781427235404 (Macmillan Audio)

The second trailer for Tom Hanks’ next movie, based on Captain Richard Phillips’ memoir, A Captain’s Duty, (Hyperion; Tantor Audio; Thorndike) has debuted online. Phillips became a national hero in 2009 when Somali pirates hijacked his unarmed merchant marine ship and he courageously allowed himself to be taken hostage to save his crew.

Titled Captain Phillips, the movie is directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Supremecy), and is coming to theaters on Oct 11.

For some reason, the tie-in is now showing as “cancelled.”

Official Site: CaptainPhillipsMovie.com