The first trailer  for Killing Them Softly, is based on Cogan’s Trade by George V. Higgins (RH/Knopf, 1974), has just been released. Brad Pitt plays Jackie Cogan, a professional “enforcer” who prefers to kill his victims from a distance, so the they are unaware of what is happening. Pitt is joined by Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini, Sam Shepard and Richard Jenkins. This will be Pitt’s second film with director Andrew Dominik, who also directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

It was also announced that the release date has been changed to Oct 19. The movie tie-in is coming Sept. 25 (RH/Vintage Crime/Black Lizard).

The trailer doesn’t hint at the rich dialogue that Higgins is known for. As we noted earlier, Higgins has influenced many of today’s writers, among them Elmore Leonard who has said he often re-reads a portion of Higgins’ debut, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, before beginning his work day; “The book set me free. I saw, this was how you do it. I learned so much about dialogue and cadence from this book.’’

Official Facebook Page: Facebook.com/KillingThemSoftly.twc

Killing Them Softly – Trailer No. 1

Cover of the first edition

Kristen Stewart, star of the Twilight series, is rumored to have landed the lead in an adaptation of  William Styron’s 1951 classic, Lie Down in Darkness, to be directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart). New York magazine’s “Vulture blog,” broke the story. There is some dispute about whether it is true, causing ‘Vulture” to add a defense of their reporting. “Vulture” also notes that Jennifer Lawrence was hoping to nab the role.

Lie Down in Darkness was Styron’s first novel, about a Virginia family coming together for the funeral of their young daughter, Peyton Loftis, who has committed suicide.

An eBook version of the book, along with Styron’s other works, was published by Open Road Itegratd Media in 2010 and is available on OverDrive and B&T’s Axis360. The movie is being produced by Jeffrey Sharp, founder, along with Jane Friedman, of Open Raod.

Called a “long-gestating” project by The Guardian, the film of  William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer seems to be making its way to the screen. News leaked recently that Mark Wahlberg and Liam Neeson have been approached to star.

Two such big names would give the movie the boost it needs, the Guardian warns it is “a long way from getting the green light” and that, even if it does, “it is surely likely to be at least 2014 before Neuromancer finds its way into cinemas.”

The Guardian says director Vincenzo Natali specializes “in intelligent genre fare that has not always performed spectacularly [Cube, Splice] at the box office,” and that “The Wachowski siblings would have been the obvious choice to bring Neuromancer to the big screen, having purloined so many of its ideas for their earlier trilogy [The Matrix], but they’re currently busy with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.”

The book is credited with launching the cyberpunk genre. A twentieth-anniversary edition was released on 2004 (Penguin/Ace).

Warner Bros announced yesterday that William Hurt has been cast in the final major role for the movie Winter’s Tale based on Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel. Production is set to begin in October. Hurt will play the father of a young girl, played by Downton Abbey‘s Jessica Brown Findlay, who is dying of consumption in late 19th C Manhattan. Colin Farrell is set to play a thief who breaks into her mansion.

At the time it was published, Winter’s Tale received extraordinary praise in the the NYT BR. After several paragraphs about the plot, the reviewer finally despaired, saying, “We’re now scarcely more than a tenth of our way through Winter’s Tale, and my plot summary is a tissue of (to me) painful omissions.” He also despaired of doing the writing justice, saying he found himself “nervous, to a degree I don’t recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance . . . Not for some time have I read a work as funny, thoughtful, passionate or large-souled. Rightly used, it could inspire as well as comfort us. Winter’s Tale is a great gift at an hour of great need.”

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that the film’s director Akiva Goldsman has been working for seven years to get the project off the ground.

It happens that Helprin’s next book, In Sunlight and Shadow (HMH; Blackstone Audio), will be published in October, the same month that filming is set to begin on Winter’s Tale.

The Paperboy, based on Pete Dexter’s novel (Random House, 1995), now has a trailer (below). To be released on Oct.5, it stars Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey and John Cusack and is directed by Lee Daniels (Precious).

After its premiere at the Cannes film Festival, the critics either loved it or hated it in wildly disperate reviews, from the Telegraph, “It feels like clips from around 20 other films, none of them good, sandwiched back to back, and the talented cast can only grit their teeth,” to the Atlantic, “one of those rare movies that feels spontaneous and unhindered, sampling from genre conventions, creating its own tone, winking at the audience (with repeated shots of Efron’s impeccable torso and Kidman’s killer figure), and occasionally urging us to take things a bit more seriously.”

Those reviews may help, if you find the trailer a bit opaque.

Tie-in:

Is someone nervous about the potential success of Joe Wright’s take on Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightly? Following the first trailer, we were treated to a six-minute clip, introduced by the director. Just one week later we have a behind-the-scenes “feaurette,” aimed at making us understand that this is not just another costume drama. Keira Knightly claims in a voice over, “The rules of a period film have been completely broken,” adding, “What is the point in doing a safe adaptation?”

The movie doesn’t open until Nov. 9th. Plenty of time for more trailers, featurettes and clips.

See our earlier post for information on the tie-in and links to stories about the various translations of Tolstoy’s classic.

Official Site: FocusFeatures.com/Anna_Karenina

Nobody knows how well Fifty Shades of Grey will do as a movie. It’s still a long way from arriving in theaters; it doesn’t even have a director, let alone a cast yet. Nevertheless, Hollywood is hot on the trail of the NEXT Fifty Shades.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, a bidding war is on for Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Disaster. The book began as a self-published title, from Amazon’s CreateSpace. After appearing on the NYT E-Book Fiction best seller list, where it reached high of #9, it was picked up for publication by the Atria division of Simon and Schuster and is coming out in August. Atria also signed Walking Disaster, which, according to the publisher, “will continue this story from a different and surprising point of view.”

The Hollywood Reporter says, “The book is seen as being similar in tone to Fifty Shades but in a YA vein and without all the kinky sex. That makes it very attractive to Hollywood studios, which are concerned that audiences might shy away from a Fifty Shades movie due to the graphic scenes.”

It has a 4.13 rating on GoodReads, from nearly 26,000 readers.

Beautiful Disaster Jamie McGuire Retail Price: #15 Paperback: 446 pages Publisher: Atria Books – (2012-07-12) ISBN / EAN: 1476712042/9781476712048

S&S Audio

The trailer for the movie of the book that many experts considered unfilmable, David Mitchell’s 2004 Booker Prize finalist, Cloud Atlas, has just been released. The filmmakers, the Wachowski’s, best known for The Matrix trilogy , and  Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) faced the challenge of adapting a book that connects six stories set in different time periods and locations.

The film will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and open in U.S. theaters on Oct. 26. The cast, many of whom play multiple roles, include Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Keith David, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant

The trailer is six minutes long; according to the intro from the creators, “Unfortunately, in one way the experts were right: The movie is hard to sell, because it’s hard to describe, it’s hard to reduce. So we decided to make a really, really, really long trailer and just put it out there.”

Official Web Site: CloudAtlasMovie.com

The movie tie-in will be released Sept. 11 (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 9780812984415, $15). Both the print and ebook edition will include an essay by David Mitchell. In addition to the regular ebook, there will also be an enhanced ebook with footage from the film and interviews with the author and the filmmakers.

The Swedish director, Lars Hallstrom (Chocolat, Dear John, Salmon Fishing In The Yemen) has made his first Swedish-language movie in 24 years, based on  The Hypnotist by the Swedish husband-and-wife team writing under the name Lars Kepler (some of you may have seen their charming talk at PLA this year). The trilogy is the second most popular crime series in Sweden, after Stieg Larsson’s Millennium  titles.

The film opens in Sweden in September. At this point, there is no US release date, but it is sure to find an American distributor, given the success of the Swedish-language versions of the Stieg Larsson trilogy.

The second book in the trilogy, The Nightmare (Macmillan.FSG/Sarah Crichton) was released in the US earlier this month. Hallstrom has said he doesn’t plan to film the entire trilogy, but if this one is successful, another director is likely to step in.

The Hypnotist stars Mikael Persbrandt (In A Better World, The Hobbit) and Lena Olin (The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Chocolat).

Below is the Swedish-language trailer. There are no subtitles, but it gives a sense of the movie’s tone and atmosphere, which is quite different from the movies Hallstrom has made to date:

Talk about a long road to reality. Rights were optioned for the 2002 Booker winner, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel in 2003. The project went through several possible directors (including M. Night Shyamalan), before Ang Lee finally took over the helm. The film is now complete and the trailer has just been released. It opens on Nov. 21.

As visually arresting as the trailer is, the 3-D film will undoubtedly be even more so.

Official Web site: LifeOfPiMovie.com

Life of Pi (Movie Tie-In) Yann Martel Retail Price: $15.95 Paperback: 352 pages Publisher: Mariner Books – (2012-10-02) ISBN / EAN: 0547848412 / 9780547848419

Below, director Joe Wright introduces a new, six-minute clip of his film of Anna Karenina (try to get past the surprisingly stilted into). Opening in theaters on November 9th, it stars Keira Knightly and Jude Law with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard.

Get those Russian-themed book displays ready.

Official Site: FocusFeatures.com/Anna_Karenina

Vintage is releasing a tie-in edition in October. The translation is by Tolstoy’s close American friends Louise and Aylmer Maude, originally published in 1918.

A 2004 Oprah book club pick, it is still available in that edition. Two of the beneficiaries of that pick were the husband-and-wife translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who, according to a story in the New York Times, had never heard of Oprah or her club when they got the news that their translation was getting a new print run of 800,000 copies.

In reviewing this translation in the New Yorker, James Wood said the couple are “at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English, and their superb rendering allows us, as perhaps never before, to grasp the palpability of Tolstoy’s ‘characters, acts, situations.'”

New Yorker editor David Remnick explored translations of Russian classics in depth in “The Translation Wars: How the race to translate Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky continues to spark feuds, end friendships, and create small fortunes.”

Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy Retail Price: $17.00 Paperback: 862 pages Publisher: Penguin Classics – (2004-05) ISBN / EAN: 0143035002 / 9780143035008

You would have thought that Gwyneth Paltrow, the face of Australian company Spar Veggie, would have run screaming at the very mention of the words “Blood, Bones and Butter,” but it’s being reported that she is in negotiatons to star in a film based on the best-selling memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton (Blood, Bones and Butter, Random House, 2011).

Like Hamilton, Paltrow wrote a book about food that was published last year, My Father’s Daughter (Hachette/Grand Central, 2011).

When Joseph Finder’s thriller, Paranoia (Macmillan/St. Martin’s), was released in 2004, it had already been sold to Hollywood. Nearly ten years later, filming has just begun, on location in Philadelphia, moving on to New York, with a planned release date of September 27, 2013.

Described as a “high-tech corporate espionage thriller,” the movie features an impressive cast, lead by Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games), Gary Oldman, Harrison Ford, Amber Heard (The Rum Diary), and Richard Dreyfuss.

The plot concerns an ambitious young technologist, Adam (Hemsworth), who, after making a major misstep is blackmailed by his ruthless CEO (Gary Oldman) into spying on the company’s top rival, run by a character played by Harrison Ford. Adam finds himself living the life of his dreams, as a rich, successful young Manhattan bachelor but eventually has to find a way out from under his boss, “who will stop at nothing, even murder, to gain a multi-billion dollar advantage.”

After four spy thrillers, (including High Crimes, which was made into a movie in 2002, starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman), Joseph Finder began specializing in corporate espionage with the release of Paranoia, which was his breakout book. His most recent novels are the first two in a series, featuring Nick Heller; Vanished (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2009) and Buried Secrets (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2011).

The author notes on his blog that he doesn’t plan to write a sequel to Paranoia, but tells readers (take note, Hollywood) that if they like that book’s main character, they will like his new series character.

Seen a shoe-in to win several Oscars and a strong contender for Best Picture, Stenen Spielberg’s Lincoln biopic has finally been scheduled for a Nov. 9 limited release, expanding to more theaters on Nov. 16. The timing puts it after the Presidential election; Spielberg earlier voiced concerns that, if it was released earlier, it would “become political fodder,” presumably because Obama often compares himself to Lincoln. The film, which focuses on the last four months of Lincoln’s life, is based on portions of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (S&S, 2005), a book that experienced renewed popularity after the last election, when Obama repeatedly referred to it as the blueprint for selecting his cabinet.

So far, the only images from the film are some set photos. It stars and Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln and Sally Field as his wife, Mary and David Strathairn as Secretary of State William H. Seward, who, of his three former rivals for the presidency, became Lincoln’s closest friend.

Below, Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about why there can never be too many books about Lincoln.

Simon and Scuster is publishing tie-ins editions of both the book and the audio.

Spielberg’s next movie is also based on a book, Robopocalypse by Daniel Wilson  (RH/Doubleday, 2011). Deadline reports that Chris Hemsworth is in talks to star. It is scheduled for release on April 25, 2014.

Two of the stars of Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful, Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis (who play the good and the bad witches respectively) were trotted out at Comic-Con, where the trailer was also introduced and, according to some reports, enjoyed the best buzz of the show. The studio just released several high-res images from the film, to emphasize that, if nothing else, it is visually arresting. In addition to Williams and Kunis, the film stars James Franco and Rachel Weisz. It’s scheduled to arrive in theaters on March 8, 2013.

Disney Book Group, of course, will be publishing several tie-ins, including a junior novelization, an early reader, a storybook and a behind-the-scenes book. They are also republishing the first two titles in L. Frank Baum’s series, The Wonderful World of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz.

More Oz magic is on it’s way. The long-awaited film adaptation of the musical Wicked, based on the book by Gregory Maguire, may finally come to fruition; Deadline reports that Universal is courting Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) to direct. Also on the drawing board is an animated film, Dorothy of Oz. In April, it was reported that Bernadette Peters joined the cast as the voice of Glinda.

The conclusion to Gregory Maguire’s Oz series, which began with Wicked, was published last October (NOTE; We mistakenly said it was coming out this year; that’s the date the paperback edition will be released).

Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years Gregory Maguire Retail Price: $15.99 Paperback: 608 pages Publisher: HarperCollins/Morrow – (2012-10-02) ISBN / EAN: 0060859733 / 9780060859732