Hollywood's obsession with youth got a helping hand from the publishing industry this week with a long lineup of teen manuscripts.
Marc Platt, who took Legally Blonde from a subpar manuscript to the $95 million—plus Reese Witherspoon franchise, is going back to school with Jen Calonita's Secrets of My Hollywood Life. The Little, Brown novel about a burned-out teenage TV star who disguises herself as a suburban girl is described by one scout who got a look at the partial as "Notting Hill set in a high school." On celebrity and all things adolescent, Calonita has unbeatable cred—she's a senior editor at Teen People; Gersh's Sarah Self is handling.
SarahSelf has another YA novel on deck, Plan B by Jennifer O'Connell, in which a hyperefficient teen whose plans to graduate second in her class, get into Yale and travel to Europe are jeopardized when her bad-boy stepbrother comes to town. MTV Books will publish; Amy Schiffman will sell the rights with Self.
Paramount snapped up the rightsto Prep, newcomer CurtisSittenfeld's boarding school coming-of-age tale, with former studio production chief Jon Goldwyn producing. The well-received Random House novel about an outsider thrown into an unfamiliar world of privilege and entitlement shares some fish-out-of water themes with Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. Wolfe's novel, a New York Times bestseller that was read by all the major studios last fall, has yet to find a Hollywood home. (See Behind the Bestsellers, p. 14.)
First novel with a college setting, a murder and a doorstopper length (600+ pages)? The obvious comparison to Donna Tartt's The Secret History is sure to follow. One scout who's read Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, currently on submission from CAA's Richard Green, pitched it as "The Secret History meets Prep." Viking's Carole DeSanti bought the novel about a college coed who may have been involved with the death of a boarding school friend. With any luck, the book will have a smoother ride to the screen than did Tartt's, which is widely considered to be one of the great unmade projects in Hollywood. Some of the industry's best and brightest (Alan Pakula; Shine's Scott Hicks) have taken a crack at the novel, which Warner Bros. optioned back in the early '90s.
Briefs...Karyn Bosnak, the resourceful young woman who buried herself in debt, invited strangers to bail her out through her Web site (www.SaveKaryn.com) and scored a book and movie deal from her experience, tries her hand at fiction with Twenty Times a Lady. RLR's Jennifer Unter just sold the book to Allison Callahan at HarperCollins. Original Artists is on submission for the film. The premise—a woman realizes she's about to exceed her self-imposed limit of 20 sexual partners before she gets married and must go back to choose one of them as Mr. Right—is, according to one New York exec, "Decent if a little creepy."... Publishers may be hunting high and low for the next Da Vinci Code, but Hollywood seems to think one is enough. (Or maybe no one wants to compete against the upcoming TomHanks/Brian Grazer adaptation of the Dan Brown phenomenon.) The Madonna List, described as "a Canadian Da Vinci Code" leaked to scouts last week, but Hollywood Reader can't track down anyone who's read it. "No one cares," said a studio exec.
