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Ken Burns three-part series on Prohibition, based on the book Last Call by Daniel Okrent (Scribner, 2010), begins this Sunday on PBS and runs through Tuesday. The series will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on Oct. 2nd.
Okrent, who, in addition to being a writer, is the inventor of Rotisserie (aka “Fantasy”) Baseball. He also appeared in Burns Baseball series.
Watch the full episode. See more Ken Burns.
As the Muppets freely admit, it’s high time for a new parody. Previous trailers for The Muppets movie, coming this Thanksgiving, have parodied The Hangover (The Fuzzy Pack) and The Green Lantern (Being Green).
Now comes The Girl with the Froggie Tattoo (compare it to the original here).
What WOULD Stieg Larsson think?
They may need to change their slogan to “It’s Not TV, It’s Books.”
Neil Gaiman told a crowd at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday that he will be adapting American Gods for HBO. The deal, which was announced, in June has now been finalized. In the original announcement, The Hollywood Reporter said it was the next project for Tom Hanks’ Playtone production company, with an expected debut of 2013 at the earliest.
The 2001 book was reissued as a hardcover “Author’s Preferred Text 10th Anniversary Edition” in June.
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HBO has had some success with book adaptations, including Game of Thrones (season two begins in April), Too Big to Fail, Mildred Pierce and John Adams. A roster of other book-related projects are in the works:
The Day the Laughter Stopped — a film about the downfall of silent screen star Fatty Arbuckle based on The Day the Laughter Stopped by David A. Yallop (St. Martins, 1976; now out of print, but still owned by many libraries). Eric Stonestreet (Modern Family) has signed to play the tragic star, with Barry Levinson directing.
The Leftovers — based on the forthcoming novel by Tom Perotta (St. Martin’s, 8/30) about what happens to those who are left behind after “The Rapture.” Variety reported last week that HBO is developing a series based on the book.
Earlier announcements:
HBO Film: Game Change
Producer: Playtone (Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman)
Director: Jay Roach
Starring: Julianne Moore (Sarah Palin), Ed Haris (John McCain), Woody Harrelson (Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign strategist)
Based on: Book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (Harper, 2010) about John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Status: Wrapping; Moore as Palin, above.
More projects after the jump:
How do you follow up a successful movie adaptation? How about a TV series?
ABC is developing Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer into a series reports Variety.
The film starred Matthew McConaughey.
It’s part of a trend; NBC is doing a series in the upcoming season based on John Grisham’s The Firm.
After the author’s appearance on the Rachel Ray Show yesterday, Syndrome W: A Woman’s Guide to Reversing Weight Gain, by Harriette R. Mogul, rose to #18 on Amazon’s sales rankings.
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The title of Brian Selznick’s book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret has been reduced to simply Hugo for the Martin Scorsese adaptation (that’s right, the director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Gangs of New York, goes family-friendly and 3-D this time).
It arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving. The first trailer has just appeared on the Web (watch the HD version here).
This Fall, Scholastic will publish The Hugo Movie Companion (Oct), and the Hugo Cabret Notebook (Nov), a facsimile of the notebook that Cabret uses in the movie. Both are by Brian Selznick.
A childhood favorite, The Borrowers by Mary Norton (Harcourt, 1953) is coming to screens in two forms; an animated movie from Japan and a BBC live-action film, to be shown on BBC-One at Christmas (no news on when it may appear in the US).
Called Arrietty, after Arriety Clock, the borrower family’s teenage daughter, the Japanese film will be dubbed in the US by Amy Poehler, Will Arnett and Carol Burnett (the trailer below is the British version, dubbed by other actors) and is scheduled for release next year, on February 17.
The BBC adaptation, called The Borrowers and starring Stephen Fry, Victoria Wood and Christopher Eccleston, just began filming.
The Borrowers was adapted as a film in 1997 with John Goodman, Jim Broadbent and Celia Imrie, as well as an American 1973 made-for-TV movie and a 1992 BBC TV series.
Mitchell Zuckoff, author of Lost of Shangri-La, appeared on The Daily Show last night.
As a result, the book rose to #46 on Amazon’s sales rankings (from #184 yesterday). It’s been rising on the IdieBound Hardcover Non-fiction list (currently at #14) and is at #19 on the NYT list.
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Larger Print; HarperLuxe; 9780062065049; $26.99
Audio; Books on Tape; UNABR; 9780307917256; $40
Audio and eBook on OverDrive
Last night marked the finale of Game of Thrones, HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s first book in A Song of Ice and Fire series, which has made best sellers of all the books (Book 5, A Dance with Dragons, Random House, July 1, is currently at #3 on Amazon’s sales rankings. The 4-vol boxed set is at #1).
Season Two begins in the Spring of 2012. Production hasn’t begun yet, which is the reason the teaser trailer is a bit sketchy.
In the works is a special-effects-heavy HBO series based on Neil Gaiman’s award-winning novel, American Gods. The next project for Tom Hanks’ production company, Playtone, it is planned for six seasons, each with 10 to 12 hour-long episodes and will debut in 2013 at the earliest, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The 2001 book is being reissued as a hardcover “Author’s Preferred Text 10th Anniversary Edition” later this month.
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The May 30th finale of La Reina Del Sur, Telemundo’s Spanish-language series based on the novel of the same title by Spanish novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte achieved the highest ratings for its time slot, regardless of language
The finale also gave a boost to the Spanish-language tie-in, a thriller about a Mexican woman who becomes the head of one of the biggest drug trafficking rings in the south of Spain. It rose to #196 on Amazon sales rankings; the English translation (Plume, 2005), rose as well, but only to #2,461.
In December, Alfaguara released the tie-in edition of the 2002 book.
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The Oprah Show sprints to its conclusion on Wednesday. In 1996, the show introduced Oprah’s Book Club. Although those segments didn’t bring the highest ratings, Oprah tells USA Today that she is “going to try to develop a show for books and authors” on her network, OWN.
What are low ratings for television are huge for publishing. The “Oprah Effect” has been unsurpassed in its influence on book sales; Oprah editions of the 70 titles in the club sold an estimated 55 million copies, according to USA Today’s source.
In a separate article, the AP analyzes the sales of specific titles, saying they present a “surprisingly erratic pattern” from title to title. The top Oprah author? Eckhart Tolle.
But the other living authors in the club have also found their lives transformed. In USA Today, Wally Lamb, author of two Oprah picks (She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True) describes what it was like to get the news, twice.
Just in time for BEA, Doubleday has announced that the next John Grisham legal thriller is The Litigators. On sale 10/25, It will also be available as an ebook for library lending. The cover below is just a placeholder; the final will be unveiled later.
THE LITIGATORS by John Grisham
Doubleday
On-Sale Date: 10/25/11
HC: 9780385535137
E-book: 9780385535250
There will be more Grisham this fall. He is co-producing a series for NBC, based on his first major success, The Firm. It was adapted as a movie, starring Tom Cruise, in 1993.
Whatever James Frey’s reasons were to ignore the advice of friends and lawyers and return to the Oprah Show five years after his famous tongue-lashing, the appearance offered him the opportunity to bring attention to his new book, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. And that it did; the $50 print version rose to #253 from a lowly #10,286 on Amazon’s sales rankings and the $9.99 Kindle edition rose to #69.
Although the Oprah site describes the book as “the story of the Second Coming of Christ in today’s modern world — but in James’ book, Christ is a bisexual former alcoholic who lives in the Bronx and impregnates a stripper,” that description is not in the televised interview. Oprah simply says it is “controversial” because any book that uses “Bible” in the title will be. Frey says he hopes the book will “change people’s lives for the better” by getting them to “think about God differently,” making it sound tailor-made for the Oprah audience.
It was reviewed last month by Dierdre Donahue in USA Today, who offers a more nuanced plot summary,
[The Messiah Ben] goes out to heal the world one sexual encounter at a time, though sometimes with more than one partner, among them fat lonely women, self-hating gay men and crack-addicted lap dancers. When Ben and his followers gather in secret at an upstate farm, they share the love with the kind of uninhibited variety not seen since Plato’s Retreat closed.
She counsels, “Frey is yanking your chain to sell books. Already published in the UK, Testament has received some good reviews there. Probably because it confirms many nonbelievers’ conviction that much of this country is one big David Koresh/Branch Davidian nest of sects and racism.”
Few libraries own the print edition (the ebook version is not available for library lending). Those that do are showing some holds.
Did James Frey seem oddly removed in the first segment of his Oprah reunion show yesterday? (See highlights on The Daily Beast site).
Perhaps we still aren’t seeing the real James Frey. In a recent interview on the site The Big Think, far from calling the 2006 tongue-lashing a “personal car wreck,” as he characterized it to Oprah, he says it changed his life for the better;
The Million Little Pieces controversy really freed me to be as radical as I want, to break every rule I want and to not have to care what other people thought. It was great.
We’ll see which James Frey shows up for the second part of the interview today.
As a result of the show, A Million Little Pieces moved up the Amazon sales rankings to #61, from #3,530.