Wizards and hobbits dominated the fall season, shattering box office and publishing records. Kids fueled that unprecedented consumption, but adults will get their chance later this winter and early spring, when Hollywood goes to war and deep into the mind. The season's roster brings several blockbuster novels to the screen, as well as a Pulitzer Prize winner and a Nobel laureate's first novel. The good news for the book industry is that the top four movie tie-ins alone will push more than two million books into stores.
No one could have predicted that we would be at war going into 2002, particularly not a year or two ago, when most of the films now set for release between January and April 2002 went into production. In fact, the media romance with war history launched in part by Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation had begun to ebb in the wake of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of World War II books and movies. But what a difference a September day makes. Among the spring's films, several about our boys (and girls) overseas seem eerily prescient--and poised for success.
Black Hawk Down (Jan.) is the first cinematic shot across the bow. Since the book's publication in 1999, Mark Bowden's harrowing account of the fateful U.S. campaign in Somalia has sold steadily in hardcover, as well as in trade and mass market paperback, with a spike in all formats after September 11. "People are passionate about this book," said Morgan Entrekin, who published the hardcover at Atlantic Monthly Press and sold the paperback rights to Penguin Putnam. "We went to press for 10,000 hardcover copies three weeks ago, and they're all gone now, so we're going back for more," he said. Meanwhile, Signet is rolling out an impressive 402,000 copies of the mass market tie-in.
In the film, director Ridley Scott focuses on man's character in battle. Although the story involves a failed mission, the movie is expected to draw a large crowd because of Bowden's uniquely comprehensive view of individual soldiers experiencing modern warfare on the ground. "The same military units that were in Mogadishu--Delta Force, Tenth Mountain Division--went to Afghanistan," said Entrekin. "People want to know more, and the book offers that. It's terrifying but inspiring to see these young men behave with such courage and humanity in the face of a violently life-threatening situation."
Similar themes permeate the film We Were Soldiers (Mar.), adapted and directed by Randy Wallace, who scripted the award-winning epic Braveheart. He bought the book at an airport kiosk and knew he had to do the movie by the time the plane touched down. But in a rare reversal, the authors were the ones who needed convincing. General Harold "Hal" Moore and Joseph L. Halloway had lived this story of a harrowing 56-hour battle in Vietnam's la Drang valley and resisted turning it over to Hollywood. Wallace's obvious passion won them over. Now, Avon is planning a half-million-copy print run, said assistant publicity director Dee Dee D Bartlo. "The movie's phenomenal exposure allows us to expand into places like the major wholesalers that we weren't able to reach before with the trade paperback."
Like Black Hawk Down, the film puts the audience in the middle of the action, much as it did war correspondent Halloway, who found himself pitching in to help save lives. "This is a story about people, not politics," said Dani Lemmon, who runs The Wheelhouse, Wallace's production company. "When the soldiers went over in 1965, they left behind families, didn't know what they were getting into and came back to a changed world. A lot of these guys weren't able to talk about their experiences when they came home." The book gave the vets a way to begin to open up to their families and to each other.
The film may provide a similar opportunity for others looking to reconnect with their pasts and their families, as it did for actress Keri Russell, who stars in the film, and her father. "They'd never talked about Vietnam," said Lemmon, "but when he discovered she was doing this movie, it all came pouring out."
Hollywood is often accused of aiming low and missing, but a surprisingly wide field of literary adaptations are arriving between now and April. Many of these films--a disproportionate number of which hail from Miramax--are backed by impressive casts and award-laden directors. In other words, the marketing dollars will be flowing, which should help drive book sales as well. Almost all of the January offerings are sneaking in with limited releases around Christmas to make them eligible for the Oscars in March, but the wide rollouts--and the big box-office dollars--are all after the first of the year.
Despite a Pulitzer for author Annie Proulx and a million-dollar option to Columbia Pictures, The Shipping News (Jan.) initially foundered on Hollywood's rocky shoals, shifting directors and stars several times. Columbia eventually partnered with Miramax before pulling out entirely, but Miramax was able to attract the Chocolat team of director Lasse Hallstrom (who had been aboard years earlier) and screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs. The first-rate cast is a sort-of Hollywood literati: Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett and the practically regal Judi Dench. In short, Miramax is trying to do what it does better than almost anyone--have it both ways, with a sophisticated film that can appeal to a broad audience. Scribner is betting it'll work to the tune of more than 650,000 copies, counting trade and mass market editions.
Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind (Jan.) presented a filmmaking challenge from the outset. As Variety's editor Peter Bart mused recently, "How do you shoot a mind? Particularly the tortured mind of a math genius?" According to Bart, director Ron Howard--who humanized tech jargon in Apollo 13--has succeeded brilliantly. And, ultimately, this is not a story about math, but "a moving story about the triumph of the spirit," according to Universal Pictures chairman Stacey Sinder. It doesn't hurt to have Oscar-winner and Aussie hunk Russell Crowe in the lead.
The tie-in edition features Crowe in a pose that, by total coincidence, is surprisingly similar to the original book cover art featuring John Forbes Nash. "Perhaps it shows you," said Simon & Schuster Trade v-p and director of publicity Marcia Burch, "how fully Russell Crowe inhabited the character." Nasar has been a consultant throughout the filming and will be doing fund-raisers at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, where Nash worked.
With A.S. Byatt's Possession (Mar.), USA Films is emulating the formula Miramax perfected with The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje's successful but ruggedly complex novel. Both stories involve extensive time cuts and parallel relationships. "The film can offer a window into the book to readers who might've been intimidated before, but who now want to delve into everything the book has to offer," said Russell Perreault, Vintage's director of publicity. Possession should get a jolt from the unusual choice of Neil LaBute as director. His last three films-- In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors and Nurse Betty--were conspicuously edgy and provocative. USA Films may be hedging their bets somewhat with Gwyneth Paltrow in one of the lead roles--another Miramax-esque tactic.
Hoping for Oscar nods, Miramax is prereleasing Iris (Feb.), based on Elegy for Iris, John Bayley's account of his 40-year relationship with the writer Iris Murdoch, who succumbed to Alzheimer's in 1999. Building on a surge of renewed interest in Murdoch in the past few years, Borders is planning a big promotional effort in February featuring all of her books as well as Bayley's. Picador USA is issuing 50,000 tie-in editions featuring Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, who play the older and younger Iris, respectively.
Coming out only a few months after V.S. Naipaul was awarded a Nobel Prize, Ismail Merchant's adaptation of Mystic Masseur (Mar.) is based on the author's debut novel, his first one to arrive on the silver screen. Vintage had been planning to re-release all of Naipaul's books even before the news from Stockholm, but between the prize and the film, the timing is exquisite and might help garner more attention for what is sure to be a limited art house release.
Three new films use World War II as a backdrop to tell intimate, sophisticated stories. Charlotte Gray (Jan.), based on Sebastian Faulks's World War II novel about a Scottish woman trying to find her missing RAF pilot lover with the help of a French Resistance fighter in Paris, goes wide the week before Black Hawk Down. With a deft performance by star Cate Blanchett, this atmospheric film could broaden Faulks's audience. John Katzenbach's Hart's War , a February release set in a German POW camp, is about a Harvard Law student who defends a black officer falsely accused of murder. MGM is putting together a marketing campaign that uses real POWs, much like Paramount did for Saving Private Ryan. Ballantine plans an initial print run of more than 200,000 copies, with a jacket featuring film stars Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell. Meanwhile, Graham Swift's 1996 Booker Prize winner, Last Orders (Mar.), uses the war as a jumping-off point for a group of friends who are taking the ashes of their former brother-in-arms to a seaside town to scatter them. Fred Schepisi directs Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and Tom Courtenay in the art house release.
Of course, the studios also have their outright commercial juggernauts. Warner Brothers has put a hip-hop spin on its new Anne Rice film, Queen of the Damned (Feb.), a byzantine adaptation that even involves elements from The Vampire Lestat. Rice's intensely loyal fans were outraged at every reported deviation, even though many rumors turned out to be false. Ballantine hopes the film will attract a new group of fans, though everyone is proceeding cautiously in the wake of the untimely death of the film's star, pop singer Aaliyah.
Nicholas Sparks's A Walk to Remember (Jan.) has a particularly good opportunity to expand the author's audience. The film is aimed squarely at the younger viewers that are the mainstay of the blockbuster film business. Pop star Mandy Moore toplines, and Warner Books is planning an initial mass market run of 450,000.
E.T. (Mar.) is coming back for his 20th anniversary, spurring Universal to modify its logo to include the famous shot of Elliott and E.T. bicycling across the sky. Scribner is rolling out a two-book novelization by William Kotzwinkle, while Simon Spotlight has the kids' market covered with a novelization and a chapter book for older readers, a storybook and two paper-over-boards paperbacks for younger ones. While the hype for the new Star Wars movie, Attack of the Clones , is nearly deafening, that film is not due until the summer.
Perhaps most moving of all, however, is a story of heroism wrought from grim determination both on and off the screen: The Count of Monte Cristo (Feb.), Dumas's epic tale of revenge and intrigue. Screenwriter Jay Wolpert had spent his career in game shows, producing The Price Is Right and even winning the 1969 Jeopardy championship. But he'd always wanted to write films, particularly swashbucklers. In 1996, he agreed to produce game shows for MTM as long as they would let him write one script a year. Wolpert's draft for Monte Cristo never got made, but when Spyglass Entertainment was considering him as a writer for another swashbuckler, the company was so impressed by his script for Monte Cristo that the other project was put aside, and Wolpert's script was a go instead.
"I went to a Saturday afternoon show filled with rowdy kids," said Wolpert, "and the Count of Monte Cristo trailer comes on the screen. Suddenly, you couldn't hear a pin drop. They haven't seen a story like this in a hundred years!" In keeping with the times, the tie-in edition from Signet is abridged, but the passion of the film, by all accounts, is not. "It's a timeless story," said producer Derek Evans, "so much so that when you read the book, you realize how often parts of the story have been ripped off in other movies."
