A GalleyChat favorite, The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 8/2011), is being optioned by Nicole Kidman’s production company, with plans for her to star, according to the movie news site, Deadline.

For those unfamiliar with the book, it has nothing to do with vampires, but with a quirky family of performance artists. On NPR’s Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan was glad that it was published during the heat of summer because,

…it’s such a minty fresh delight to open up Kevin Wilson’s debut novel, The Family Fang, and feel the revitalizing blast of original thought, robust invention, screwball giddiness. Every copy of The Family Fang sold in August should have a sticker on it imprinted with the life-giving invitation that used to be issued on movie marquees in summertime during the dawn of the air-conditioning age: ‘Come on in! It’s cooool inside!’

Kidman recently wrapped filming on the film adaptation of Pete Dexter’s novel, The Paperboy. Directed by Lee Daniels (Precious), it also stars Zac Efron, John Cusack, Matthew McConaughey and Scott Glenn.

The Family Fang: A Novel Kevin Wilson Retail Price: $18.99 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2011-08-09) ISBN / EAN: /780061579035/ 006157903

The current issue of Glamour magazine features an interview with Breaking Dawn star Kristen Stewart. The interviewer is Stephenie Meyer, who, in addition to writing the Twilight Saga book series, is a producer on the film.

Meyer has formed her own production company, Fickle Fish Films, which wrapped filming last month on its debut effort, Austenland, a romantic comedy based on the first adult title by Newbery Honor Medalist (Princess Academy) Shannon Hale. About a woman who gets to live out her obsession with the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice by going to a Jane Austen fantasy camp, it stars Keri Russell, JJ Feild and Bret McKenzie, along with Jennifer Coolidge and Jane Seymour. Filming has wrapped in England, but no release date has been set.

A follow-up to the book, Midnight in Austenland, is coming Jan. 31. Also in the works is Hale’s untitled sequel to the Princess Academy, coming in August, 2012.

Midnight in Austenland: A Novel Shannon Hale Retail Price: $24.00 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Bloomsbury USA – (2012-01-31) ISBN / EAN: 1608196259 / 9781608196258

Dr. Seuss’s still-timely 1971 environmental fable The Lorax, has been adapted into a 3-D full-length feature film, which arrives in theaters on March 2nd next year. The first trailer debuted on the Web today.

Tie-ins:

The Lorax Pop-Up! Dr. Seuss Retail Price: $29.99 Hardcover: 18 pages Publisher: Robin Corey Books – (2012-01-10) ISBN / EAN: 0375860355 / 9780375860355

Step into Reading Titles:

Look for the Lorax (Step into Reading) Tish Rabe Trade Pbk 9780375869990; $3.99 Hdbk. Library Bindg 978-0-375-96999-7; $12.99 Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers – (2012-01-10) Age Range 4 to 6 yrs

..

How to Help the Earth-By The Lorax (Step into Reading) Tish Rabe Trade Pbk 978-0-375-86977-8; $3.99 Hdbk. Library Binding: 978-0-375-96977-5; $12.99 Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers – (2012-01-10) Age Range: 5 to 8 years

The first official trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, based on Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2008) has made its appearance.  The film arrives in theaters the day before Thanksgiving.

Tie-in:

The Hugo Movie Companion:A Behind the Scenes Look at How a Beloved Book Became a Major Motion Picture Brian Selznick Retail Price: $19.99 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Scholastic Press – (2011-10-01) ISBN / EAN: 0545331552 / 9780545331555

Daniel Radcliffe’s post-Harry-Potter career has been busy. He has been starring in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway. He also stars in the upcoming film adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 ghost tale, The Woman in Black, now scheduled to open in theaters on February 3. Below the most recent trailer, which was broadcast during the Scream Awards last week.

Radcliffe plays a young lawyer, who, while sorting through the papers of a dead client in an appropriately creepy British village, encounters terror and a mysterious woman dressed in black. British author Susan Hill’s book has also been adapted as a play that has been running in London’s West End since 1989.

Radcliffe is also attached to star in a new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, planned for 2012.

The Woman in Black is currently available in an illustrated edition from Godine. Vintage/Knopf is releasing a movie tie-in in January (an audio version was released by Blackstone in Sept).

Hill is also known for her Simon Serrailler mystery series, published in the U.S. by Overlook Press.

The heavy advertising for the movie The Big Year, opening on Friday, doesn’t mention that it’s about a real-life marathon bird-watching competition, or that it’s based on a journalist’s account of the actual event.

The movie stars Owen Wilson, Rashida Jones, Jack Black and Steve Martin.

Most libraries own the book, published in 2005 to strong reviews.

The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession Mark Obmascik Retail Price: $15.00 Paperback: 268 pages Publisher: Free Press – (2005-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 0743245466 / 9780743245463

For a week, the New York Film Festival has been promoting last night’s showing of a work-in-progress by an unnamed “major director.” Turns out it was Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, based on Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2008). It’s the director’s first family movie and his first use of 3-D.

The Reuters’s reviewer said it is so good that Martin Scorsese may have just “saved 3D” (The Lion King seems to have already done that. Disney may kill it again, however, with their planned re-release of four more titles in that format). He also regards it as “less of a children’s film than Scorsese’s cinematic history lesson, and his valentine to the early days of cinema.”

On the other hand, influential critic Ann Thompson (former Deputy Film Editor at The Hollywood Reporter, she now runs her own movie news site, Thompson on Hollywood) found both the lead actor and the first half of the movie “awkward and stiff.”  There is a lot riding on it. Thompson notes, “It’s a $120-million borderline art film aimed at families who may or may not buy into this elaborately 30s period Brit movie set in Paris with two tweens (Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz) on an adventure.”

The movie opens Nov. 23.

Below is a behind-the-scenes video, featuring Scorsese, released on the Web yesterday.

Tie-in:

The Hugo Movie Companion:A Behind the Scenes Look at How a Beloved Book Became a Major Motion Picture Brian Selznick Retail Price: $19.99 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Scholastic Press – (2011-10-01) ISBN / EAN: 0545331552 / 9780545331555

A trailer for The Raven, a film featuring John Cusack as a fictional Edgar Allan Poe, was released on Oct. 7th, the 162nd anniversary of the writer’s death. Also on that day, the film’s director, James McTeigue as well as one of the lead actors, laid a wreath on Poe’s grave in Baltimore. The AP story about the event also notes the sad story that funding was withdrawn from Baltimore’s Poe House and it now faces closure.

It would probably cost less than the film’s catering budget to keep the museum open.

The premise of the movie is that a serial killer is mimicking Poe’s stories. At first Poe is a suspect, but soon becomes one of the investigators. It opens March 9, 2012.

The trailer includes a reference to The Pit and the Pendulum. Poe fans — can you spot other references?

(Caution: be sure to swallow your coffee before watching)

Two major feature films based on the Grimm fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, debut next year, prompting CinemaBlend.com to do a faceoff (they pick Charlize Theron, above left, over Julia Roberts, right, as the better Evil Queen; Disney’s earlier version separates the two. Nice collars, ladies).

How will the movies differ? According to Entertainment Weekly, Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman is ” more of a dark action-adventure” and Relativity’s as yet untitled movie is “more fanciful, family-friendly fairy tale.”

Is there really a rivalry, or is it just in the minds of the media? At least one of the people involved is feeling competitive. Entertainment Weekly quotes Tarsem Singh, director of The Hunstman, “They’re so far behind us, there’s no point in watching [what’s going on with that production]. It’s a different type of film.”

Untitled Snow White [UPDATE: Title is Mirror, Mirror]

Release Date — March 16, 2012

Director — Tarsem Singh

Snow White — Lily Collins

The Evil Queen — Julia Roberts

Description —  According to IMDB, “In a twist to the fairy tale, the Huntsman ordered to take Snow White into the woods to be killed winds up becoming her protector and mentor in a quest to vanquish the Evil Queen.” Entertainment Weekly says that, of the two movies, it’s the “more fanciful, family-friendly fairy tale.”

Tie-in: Snow White: Movie Reader, Jenne Simon, Scholastic, 2/2012

Snow White and the Huntsman

Release Date — June 1, 2012

Director — Rupert Sanders

Snow White — Kristen Stewart

The Evil Queen —  Charlize Theron

Description: According to IMDB, this is “A dark twist on the classic fairy tale, in which Snow White and the seven dwarfs look to reclaim their destroyed kingdom.” Entertainment Weekly‘s calls it “more of a dark action-adventure.”

Blake Lively is the latest in a string of actresses to turn down the chance to play Elizabeth Bennett in the film version of the grandmother of all mashups, Pride And Prejudice And Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books, 2009).

The move caused TotalFilm.com to ask “Who wants to be in this thing?”

Meanwhile, another of Grahame-Smith’s mashups, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, is in post-production and scheduled for release on June 22, 2012. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays Mary Todd Lincoln in the movie, recently told The Playlist that the fimmakers worked hard to get the period details and the historical elements correct.

Last year’s announcement that Michelle William would star as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, based on the book of the same title, set off a round of “who could do it better,” including MTV’s review of actresses who have portrayed the icon in various magazine photo shoots, from Lindsay Lohan to Nicole Kidman.

With the release of the movie trailer, debates are beginning again. So far, reactions are good, with the Huffington Post declaring that, even if Williams doesn’t completely embody the look or the voice, she portrays “the desperation, fear and playfulness that made Monroe perhaps the most famous woman on the 20th century.”

The book, which was published in the UK in 2000, is being released for the first time in the U.S. as a tie-in (also on audio from Dreamscape and on OverDrive).

My Week with Marilyn Colin Clark Retail Price: $16.00 Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Weinstein Books – (2011-10-04) ISBN / EAN: 1602861498 / 9781602861497

Two other adaptations of books about Monroe were announced last year. Angelina Jolie was slated for an adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s The Life And Opinions Of Maf The Dog, And Of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (HMH, 2010) with George Clooney as Frank Sinatra.  Naomi Watts was set to play her in Blonde, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates (HarperCollins, 2000; now in trade pbk). No news since; both projects seem to be on the back burner.

The Oliver Stone film of Don Winslow’s thriller, Savages has finished shooting and is set for release on 9/28/12. It features a remarkably high-profile cast, including Benecio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, Emile Hirsch, John Travolta, and Uma Thurman.

Buzz must be good. Warner Bros. just purchased the rights to another title by Winslow, Satori (Grand Central, 3/7/11), with the intent of starring Leonardo DiCaprio in a multi-film series, similar to the successful Bourne franchise the studio developed for Matt Damon, based on the books by Robert Ludlum.

Following his best-selling book, Savages, Winslow was commissioned to write Satori as a prequel to the 1979 best-seller, Shibumi, by Trevanian (the pseudonym for film scholar, Rodney William Whitaker, who died in 2005). Both books feature the handsome mystic and renowned lover, Nicholai Hel, who also happens to be the world’s most accomplished assassin. When Satori was published earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal called Hel “one of the singular figures of 20th-century espionage fiction.”

The prequel shows Hel at the age of 26, years before we see him in Shibumi, which begins with the character in his late fifties. DiCaprio is in his mid thirties, giving him several years to catch up the Trevanian version of Hel. If Satori is a successful film, expect to hear that Winslow has been tapped to write more prequels.

DiCaprio is currently in Australia, where Baz Luhrmann has just begun filming The Great Gatsby. The movie is already having an effect on fashion.

The first full-length trailer for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, based on the book by Michael Morpurgo (Scholastic, 2007), has just hit the interwebs.

A teaser trailer was released in June. This new, longer version has considerably more emotional impact (warning: tears my be jerked).

The book was also adapted as a play that has been a hit both here and in the U.K., where it’s been running for four years. The Guardian published a piece yesterday on why it has been so successful and whether it will be hurt by the competing film version. The writer thinks not, because theater has its own special magic. We think not because both the play and the book will gain from the publicity.

The tie-in is coming next month:

War Horse: (Movie Cover) Michael Morpurgo Retail Price: $8.99 Paperback: 192 pages Publisher: Scholastic Press – (2011-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0545403359 / 9780545403351

Official Movie Site: WarHorseMovie.com

Spielberg has two family films competing for attention during the Christmas holiday. The animated, 3-D adaptation of The Adventures of Tintin opens on 12/21. War Horse follows on Christmas Day.

The director’s next two films are also based on books. This month, he begins filming Lincoln, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (S&S, 2005). It stars Daniel Day Lewis in the title role and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln.

In an interview in the current issue of the UK film magazine, Empire, Spielberg says that Teams of Rivals is,

…much too big a book to be a movie, so the Lincoln story only takes place in the last few months of his Presidency and life. I was interested in how… he passed the 13th Amendment into constitutional law. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war powers act and could have been struck down by any court after the war ended…But what permanently ended slavery was the very close vote in the House of Representatives over the 13th Amendment – that story I’m excited to tell.

Following Lincoln, he turns to quite different subject matter with Robopocalypse, based on the novel by Daniel H. Wilson (Doubleday, June, 2011), a debut thriller set in the near future, about technology uniting and turning against us. Heavily promoted at BEA this year, it landed on the NYT best seller list at #13 for one week and is still on hold in some libraries. Spielberg signed it before it was published, based on a 100-page sample. He tells Empire that it reminded him of Michael Chrichton (Spielberg’s hit Jurassic Park was based on his 1990 novel) and he hopes to begin shooting some time next year, with a release date some time in the summer of 2013.

On the Pittsburgh set of the movie version of Lee Child’s book, One Shot, (Delacorte, 2005), Tom Cruise practiced some extreme driving. Celebrity news sites are noting that he’s also cut his hair for the role as Jack Reacher.

Reacher fans have been unhappy about the choice of Cruise, complaining that he is too short (by about ten inches) and too handsome for the role. Lee Child again defends the choice in an interview with the British film magazine, Empire, out this week, saying, “the movie is not going to match the book anyway. If you look at what [screenwriter/director Christopher] McQuarrie and Cruise have done before [McQuarrie wrote the screenplay for Valkyrie, in which Cruise starred], I think this Reacher will be more clinical – the scalpel rather than the sledgehammer. What people forget is that Tom Cruise is quite possibly the best actor of his generation.”

Unlike height, however, talent is debatable.

The movie is scheduled for release in early 2013. The most recent Reacher novel, The Affair (Delacorte/RH; RH Audio and Books on Tape;  RH Large type) came out last week and is currently at #13 on Amazon sales rankings.

In an interview in the Daily Mail, Child says that he never expected the books to be popular with women, but “Women are fanatically keen on the series, and I’ve spent 15 years trying to find out why…it may be that the lack of commitment, the walking away from relationships is just as much a female fantasy as a male one, perhaps more so. Reacher is the kind of man women might like to have walk up to their door and stay a couple of days, and then leave. Also, Reacher likes and respects women, and that comes through. He doesn’t patronize them. There’s no hint of sexism.”

But the real reason may be that he writes strong female characters, “I don’t see why they should always be the bimbo who twists her ankle and needs rescuing. I write women as strong creatures every bit as competent as Reacher, and sometimes more so.”

As Janet Maslin notes in her NYT review of The Affair, the title refers Reacher’s relationship with a beautiful sheriff, who “acts just like a she-Reacher; she can match him quip for quip, leap for leap, burger for burger. Whether motivated by creative fervor or commercial instinct, Mr. Child has at long last given Reacher sex scenes, but they are stealthily funny: Reacher’s idea of sex, like his idea of everything else, is filled with precise calculation.

The coming fiftieth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death in 2012 is fueling even more Marilyn Obsession (as it was described last week in the NYT Fashion & Style section).

The October Vogue cover story features a photo shoot by Annie Liebowitz of Michelle Williams as Marilyn, the role she plays in the upcoming movie My Week with Marilyn. About her performance, the article says Williams “brings Monroe to life with heartbreaking delicacy and precision without resorting to impersonation or cliché.”

The movie premieres as the centerpiece of the NY film festival and begins its theatrical release on Nov. 4. In addition to Williams as Monroe, Kenneth Branagh plays Sir Laurence Olivier, Eddie Redmayne is Colin Clark and Emma Watson appears in her first post-Harry Potter role, as a wardrobe assistant.

Based on a book that will be published for the first time in the U.S. next week, it’s about the friendship between Marilyn and Colin Clark, the son of Sir Kenneth Clark (most well-known to Americans for his 1969 BBC series, Civilization), that developed during the troubled shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl. Clark wrote two memoirs about that time, both of which caused a sensation when they were published in the UK over ten years ago.

My Week with Marilyn is also being released in audio (Dreamscape and on OverDrive), featuring Simon Prebble, one of AudioFile’s Best Voices of 2009, who takes on the challenge of reproducing Monroe’s breathy voice (listen to a clip here).

My Week with Marilyn Colin Clark Retail Price: $16.00 Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Weinstein Books – (2011-10-04) ISBN / EAN: 1602861498 / 9781602861497

In 2004, Colin Clark made his own, charmingly retro, documentary film based on his memoirs.

Also coming next week is a book of previously unpublished photos of Marilyn. It is featured in Vanity Fair.

Marilyn: Intimate Exposures Susan Bernard Retail Price: $35.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Sterling Signature – (2011-10-04) ISBN / EAN: 140278001X / 9781402780011