Twilight Zone
Gargoyles and evil Twilight Queens have nothing on good old teenage street smarts in Lisa Papademetriou's The Wizard, the Witch and Two Girls from Jersey (Penguin/Razorbill, May). A female-driven YA fantasy traces the quest of rivals Heather and Veronica after a wayward bar-code scanner transports the Garden State classmates into the novel they are fighting over. After accidentally killing off the fantasy tale's heroine, the two must tackle the evil Twilight Queen on their own. Attracted to the novel's fantastical elements, Nickelodeon Movies/Paramount Pictures' Damon Ross approached Papademetriou's agent, Rosemary Stimola of the Stimola Literary Studio, at the Bologna Book Fair and soon after optioned the title for the studio. Stimola's film coagent, Stephen Moore at the Paul Kohner Agency, helped negotiate the deal.
Love, Inc.
Having already scored hits with The Notebook, Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember, tearjerker specialist Nicholas Sparks is looking for another cinematic hit. UTA's Howie Sanders has just submitted Sparks's novel Dear John, due out in October from Warner Books, to Hollywood. A former army recruit meets the girl of his dreams, only to leave her when he feels duty-bound to re-enlist post-9/11. Expect to break out the hankies when she falls for someone else in his absence. Theresa Park of the Park Literary Group reps Sparks for lit.
Briefs...
After the über-success of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Johnny Depp is returning to his quirky, indie roots. The actor has tapped director Terry Zwigoff (Art School Confidential) to helm and coadapt French author Laurent Graff's Happy Days (Carroll & Graf, 2004), in which a 35-year-old man retreats to the titular retirement center, where he meets terminal cancer patient Mireille.... Also tackling the difficult topic of cancer are Vanessa Redgrave, Toni Collette and Claire Danes, who have all signed on to star in Focus Features' adaptation of Susan Minot's Evening (Knopf, 1998). Redgrave will play a terminally ill patient who recalls a short-lived love affair, with Collette and Danes as her distressed daughters. Oscar-nominated Hungarian director Lajos Koltai will direct from an adaptation by Michael Cunningham (The Hours).
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