Adapted for the Small Screen

Adapted from: "The Lost Weekend" movie poster

"Looking to transform Hollywood’s pile of unproduced scripts into publishable e-books, James West, a motion-picture industry entrepreneur, has launched Script Lit. The company licenses optioned, but never produced, scripts, to turn them into commercial fiction. At the end of April, Script Lit released its first e-book novella—Mom of the Year by screenwriter Denise Pischinger—and plans to offer three more titles later this year. It’s no secret that Hollywood studios option a lot of scripts that never become movies—scripts that may be quite good but are victimized by bad timing or arbitrary decisions of the studio, West said. West has been making his pitch to Hollywood studios since last fall, asking them to give him access to their scripts and hoping to sell the studios on the potential for finding bestsellers in an otherwise inert mound of content. “There are compelling stories in these scripts. The studios love the idea,” he said, though he acknowledged that some have been slow to act, adding, “there’s a lot of legal stuff to go through.”…

     West decided to launch Script Lit and publish the books himself as e-book original novellas, with POD [Print-On-Demand] paperbacks to come. West said he licenses the rights to each script directly from the writer’s agent or manager and hires a ghostwriter to create a narrative context for the story. He noted that screenwriters aren’t necessarily novelists, so he’s put together a staff with two in-house novelists who have experience writing in a variety of commercial genres.
      'We keep all the script’s original dialogue in the book—the dialogue is important—and take the setting and tone, and I have a staff of writers enrich the story and turn it into literary and narrative prose.' He emphasized that the original screenwriter is credited as the book’s author."
— Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly
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"F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed there were no second acts in American life. Do posthumous ones count? If not, Fitzgerald himself would have been forgotten, his work being almost completely out of print by the time of his death in 1940. Charles Jackson has been forgotten, if contemporary readers ever knew him in the first place. Even his most famous work, the 1944 novel The Lost Weekend, is better known today for its film adaptation directed by Billy Wilder in 1945.

     I don't know that anything would have changed if Blake Bailey's new Jackson biography, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, hadn't prompted Vintage Books to release a new edition of The Lost Weekend and a slightly reordered version of Jackson's 1950 collection The Sunnier Side and Other Stories."
— Charles Taylor, The Phoenix
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Buy all of Charles Jackson's books here...

Riffing on Mothers

“...this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, from his novel Mother Night (from Goodreads)

"The new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's American classic/required high school reading The Great Gatsby is exactly how I remember the book: With a hip-hop-tinged drunken pillow fight in 3-D starring sweaty Tobey Maguire.
     As an elevator pitch, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Baz Luhrmann's ultra-modern take on The Great Gatsby. His thoroughly modern update of Shakespeare—which, like Gatsby, stars Leonardo DiCaprio—is a joy. Plus, the timelessness of the 1925 novel makes any playful anachronisms (rap and rock music in the soundtrack, grinding dancing, and so forth) all the less suspicious.
     But the result is almost unforgivably terrible, gratingly earnest in a way that the novel never was. When classic lines of narration from the beloved book start floating directly at your face as a 3-D special effects gimmick, it's a challenge not to groan audibly in your seat."
― Asawin Suebsaeng, Mother Jones
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"Kate Moss, a widely known supermodel, was given this ring by her fiancé Jamie Hince who is a member of the well known band The Kills. According to the grapevine, Jamie Hince chose the ring after going through a whole variety of engagement rings because he specifically wanted to propose to her with an engagement ring worn by Zelda Fitzgerald. Apparently, he scoured the city for a genuine diamond ring worn by Zelda Fitzgerald, before finally giving up and purchasing an expensive replica. The devotion to find an engagement ring linked to Zelda comes from the fact that Kate Moss is a sort of a fan of the free spirit that was Zelda. Additionally, both Jamie Hince and Kate Moss have revealed that their favorite book is The Beautiful and the Damned written by Zelda’s husband.
     The ring mimics the wedding band worn by Zelda Fitzgerald who is quite famous for her wild and free attitude. The original engagement ring was given to her by the famous author F Scott Fitzgerald who has written legendary works like This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. Zelda was proposed to by Scott in March of 1921. However, the original engagement ring actually dates further back because Scott proposed to Zelda with his mother’s ring. Therefore, the design of the ring that Jamie Hince gave to Kate Moss dates even further back than 1921."
— Abazios Diamonds
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Illuminated

Source image from: oilpaintingsframes.com

"It’s curious how much of literature we are conditioned to consider unliterary. Few would contest the canonization of Bleak House, Vanity Fair, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but these classics have something in common we may be prone to disregard: each was published with profuse illustrations, and in each case the author relied on the artwork not only to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the book but to add meaningfully to the story. […]

     I suspect that most fiction writers would instinctively agree that interacting with visual representations of a book in draft can help give shape to evanescent impressions or inspire new ideas. (In the most famous instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald 'wrote in' the image of T. J. Eckleburg’s haunting optometry billboard after seeing Francis Cugat’s dust-jacket design for The Great Gatsby) […]

Then there is the future of digital readers, which erode that largely theoretical firewall writers have installed to keep their work from the corrupting influence of film. E-readers allow you to read text, look at pictures, and watch videos on the same device; already, 'transmedia' books such as 2012’s The Silent History have appeared that combine all three elements into the reading experience. (E-readers will also relieve the strain of printing costs, one of the factors that have led publishing houses to discourage illustrations.)"
— Sam Sacks, The New Yorker
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Setting, Setting, Setting

From: netgiant

"The Kings Point estate said to have been the inspiration for the West Egg mansion in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has sold, according to a press release by the real estate firm that listed the property.
     The price has not yet been made public. Neither has the name of the buyer.
     John Handler last owned the home, known as the Brickman estate. Handler was found dead there in 2008; he was 57. His wife, Jennifer Eley-Handler, who was principal pianist for the Long Island Philharmonic, died two years earlier in an accident.
     On the market since September 2010, the 20-acre property was most recently listed for $39.5 million."
— Lisa Doll Bruno, The Miami Herald
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For more details about the property, go here...

From: Sherlockipedia

"221B Baker Street is the London address of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, created by author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the United Kingdom, postal addresses with a number followed by a letter may indicate a separate address within a larger, often residential building. Baker Street in Holmes' time was a high-class residential district, and Holmes' apartment was probably part of a Georgian terrace.
     At the time the Holmes stories were published, addresses in Baker Street did not go as high as 221. Baker Street was later extended, and in 1932 the Abbey National Building Society moved into premises at 219–229 Baker Street. For many years, Abbey National employed a full-time secretary to answer mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes. In 1990, a blue plaque signifying 221B Baker Street was installed at the Sherlock Holmes Museum, situated elsewhere on the same block, and there followed a 15-year dispute between Abbey National and the Holmes Museum for the right to receive mail addressed to 221B Baker Street. Since the closure of Abbey House in 2005, ownership of the address by the Holmes Museum has not been challenged, despite its location between 237 and 241 Baker Street."
— Wikipedia
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