According to the Hollywood Reporter, J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy—the author's first post-Potter project—is headed to the BBC in 2014. Harry et al. ended their tenure on the silver screen last summer with the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
The Guardian's Jason Solomons chooses "The 10 best screen adaptations" (including Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, pictured above). All ten of Solomons's selections are adapted from (more or less) literary sources.
Back in March, Universal Studios and Focus Features paid $5 million for the film rights to E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey; in June, L.A. Weekly's Barbie Davenporte detailed Smash Pictures' plans to beat Universal and Focus to the punch by producing their own porn adaptation of the S&M sleeper. Davenporte quotes Smash executive Stuart Wall as saying, "Since they are going to make a mainstream [film] of the books, too, dabbling in the adult world we're choosing to go with a XXX adaptation which will stay very true to the book and its S&M-themed romance."
Universal has decided that Smash's Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation (or This Isn't Fifty Shades of Grey - This is a XXX Parody, as per Smash's website) is too true indeed—the company is taking the makers of the x-rated Fifty Shades to court. In the plaintiffs' complaint, they write that "[b]y lifting exact dialogue, characters, events, story and style from the Fifty Shades trilogy, Smash Pictures ensured that the first XXX adaptation was, in fact, as close as possible to the original works."
James's Fifty Shades, of course, famously started out as Twilight fanfic.
Here's author David Mitchell in the Times, musing on the forthcoming film adaptation of his novel Cloud Atlas. While Mitchell's farily open-minded about the process of adapting fiction to film ("film adaptations of novels are prone to failure not because they are too faithless but too faithful"), he remains convinced that films do things that novels don't: "Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made."
Sounds like Mitchell subscribes to what Kamilla Elliott would call the incarnational concept of adaptation—one marked by the rhetoric of "materialization" and "realization."
Over at /Film, writer/director Drew Goddard discusses the Cabin in the Woods video game that wasn't. Major spoilers await those who haven't seen the film; those who have can probably guess how the game would've played out...
The Cabin in the Woods—quite possibly the smartest horror film since Scream—is out on Blu-ray and DVD now.
THR's Lesley Goldberg reports that NBC is developing a "modern take on Wuthering Heights" to be "set against the backdrop of Napa Valley."
The project (current title: Napa) will be produced by Greg Berlanti, whose small screen adaptation of DC Comics' Green Arrow bows on the CW in October.
Deadline reports that the Coen brothers will executive produce a television adaptation of their 1996 film Fargo for FX; as the A.V. Club's Sean O'Neal points out, "Fargo already had its TV shot in 2003 with Edie Falco in the Frances McDormand role, and it never made it past the pilot."
From the folks who brought you the Breaking Bad RPG comes The Wire: Evil vs. Slightly Less Evil. Lots of easter eggs for hardcore Wire fans, including a warp whistle that lets the player skip level two entirely.
The New York Times's Brooks Barnes discusses the "Dicey Path from App to Hit Show." Barnes quotes Andy Mooney—former chairman of Disney Consumer Products and current adviser to app collective Talking Friends (run by the mobile start-up Outfit7)—as saying that studios are "waking up to the power of mobile as a form of franchise creation — that the next Shrek or Mickey Mouse could start as an app."
But studio officials say that mobile games "face the same challenge in Hollywood as more traditional video games ... They are both active, first-person experiences; the player has control over where the action goes. But movies and televisoin shows are passive experiences, and sitting and watching a screen often leaves game fans feeling bored."
The New York Times's A.O. Scott and David Carr discuss literary adaptations past and present in the latest episode of "The Sweet Spot," with Scott venturing that for filmmakers, "the imperative of fidelity" is "the road to mediocrity."
Here's the New York Times's Charles Isherwood complaining that "[t]oo often the particular delights of a stage production evaporate considerably — if not entirely — in the translation" from stage to screen. Using the recent screen adaptations of Leslye Headland's Bachelorette and Chris D'Arienzo's Rock of Ages as grist for the mill, Isherwood argues that "[m]aking plays work as movies is always challenging, but comedies and musicals pose particular problems that often prove insurmountable. Both genres rely more deeply than drama on the immediacy of the audience's response."
THR's Lesley Goldberg says that Bravo is moving forward with a small screen reboot of the 1988 cult classic Heathers as part of the network's plan to get scripted programming on the air next year.
The series—an obvious complement to Bravo's Real Housewives franchise—will pick up 20 years after the film, "with Veronica ([Winona] Ryder's character) returning home to Sherwood with her teenage daughter, who must contend with the next generation of mean girls: the Ashleys: the daughters of the surviving Heathers."
Jenny Bicks (currently wrapping up her tenure as executive producer over at Showtime's The Big C) will write and produce the project.
Vulture reports that Brian K. Vaughn's comic book series Y: The Last Man may finally be headed to the big screen after spending nearly a decade in development limbo. "Well-placed sources" tell Vulture that New Line "is very pleased with a draft [of the screenplay] from former Jericho writers Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia, and has already begun the process of meeting with director candidates to hire for the project."
Y revolves around the last man left on earth (and his pet monkey) after a plague wipes out the rest of the world's male mammals.
Roger Ebert may soon be reviewing his own biopic: The famed film critic tweeted on Friday that director Steve James, screenwriter Steven Zaillian and Martin Scorsese will develop a documentary based on his 2011 memoir Life Itself.
James directed 1994's Hoop Dreams, one of Ebert's all-time "Great Movies."
P.T. Anderson's The Master isn't out for a couple of weeks yet, but the auteur's already talking up his next project to Empire—a long-in-the-works film adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, set to star Robert Downey Jr. as oft-stoned P.I. Doc Sportello.
Michiko Kakutani once described Inherent Vice as "Pynchon Lite" (a recommendation if I ever heard one), and Anderson himself likens the novel to "a Cheech and Chong movie."
Mikael Salomon's miniseries adaptation of Robin Cook's 1977 thriller Coma concludes on A&E tonight (you can watch part one online now); Cook's novel was previously turned into a 1978 film written and directed by Michael Crichton.
Here's the New York Times's Neil Genzlinger on the "revisiting," which stars Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose as Susan Wheeler, "a medical student who while training at [a] hospital realizes that something nefarious is going on."
Obviously: A Breaking Bad/Cooking Mama mash-up, c/o @cocoalasca.
Previously: 16-bit Breaking Bad.
The Guardian's Lisa Marks discusses "How film went to the theatre"—a nice companion piece to Patrick Healy's like-minded article for the New York Times back in January.
Forget what Bret Easton Ellis said before—as the Guardian's Ben Child explains, the author is now officially off the shortlist of screenwriters being considered to adapt E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey to the screen (a shortlist that does not include Jim Piddock, as BEE had previously indicated).
Among those in contention: Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love., Tangled, Bolt, Cars), Veena Sud (she of the much-reviled, now-cancelled The Killing remake), Karen Croner (One True Thing) and Kelly Marcel (of the also-cancelled Terra Nova).
Deadline's Nellie Andreeva reports that Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics will serve as inspiration for a new NBC drama called Pariah in which "the Mayor of San Diego appoints a rogue academic with no law enforcement background to run a task force using Freakonimics-inspired alternative methods of policing."
Freakonomics was previously adapted as an anthology documentary in 2010.
