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Isherwood-Huxley Hawked at Frankfurt
Judy Quinn -- 10/13/97
Thank Sharon Stone for bringing to light Jacob's Hands, a collaboration by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood that will now be a fall 1998 Buzz Books/SMP hardcover novella featuring an original cover by artist Don Barcardi, who was Isherwood's lover.
The actress was reading the mammoth (1000-plus pages) HarperCollins title The Diaries of Christopher Isherwood, and came across a mention of the story of the Forrest Gump-like faith healer Jacob and his bittersweet relationship with beautiful singer Sharon, one of two never-produced screenplays British expatriates Isherwood and Huxley worked on while both were in Hollywood in the 1940s. Stone, who already has an option with Universal to remake the 1948 film A Woman's Vengeance, based on Huxley's short story "The Gioconda Smile," sought to option this work for film, prompting agent Dorris Halsey (who represented both Huxley and Isherwood) to search and eventually find a 100-page narrative adaptation of the screenplay that survived a fire in Huxley's home in the 1960s.

Stone eventually passed on the option (it went instead to producers Arthur Axelman of Rialto Films and Dorothea Petrie). The book deal came about when Nina Wiener, L.A.-based colleague of Buzz Books/SMP executive editor Jim Fitzgerald, contacted Halsey's colleague Kimberley Cameron soon after the movie deal. SMP paid mid-five figures for world rights and expects a six-figure return at Frankfurt. Indeed, Halsey decries the decline of publishing interest in Huxley here; she gave this project first to HarperCollins, which publishes the key Huxley backlist, and whose U.K. literary counterpart, Flamingo (now also the name for the literary imprint here), did a publishing push at Huxley's 1994 centennial. While Halsey is admittedly a biased Huxley fan, she has something to fuel the fire: Universal/NBC's remake of Brave New World has just been greenlighted to air during the May sweeps.
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