Another Book to Movie--Divergent

"Harry Potter" is over -- probably forever. "The Twilight Saga" is drawing its second-to-last breaths in the box office and, while "The Hunger Games" hasn't yet hit theaters, March will be here and gone before we know it.

What's a YA-meets-movies fan supposed to do?

Derive comfort from Veronica Roth's deal with Summit, that's what. The studio that brought "Twilight" to life snapped up the rights to her debut novel "Divergent" last March, and with "Snow White and the Huntsman" writer Evan Daugherty tackling the adaptation, we're more excited than ever to see Roth's chilling vision of the future on the big screen.

In honor of Dystopian Week — an online celebration we're having with our friends at theFABlife and Hollywood Crush — we talked to Ms. Roth and got the scoop on her plans for "Divergent" the movie, her casting wishes and whether she'd like to show up in cameos, a la Stephenie Meyer. (We should mention that we once mistook the 22-year-old author for a movie star at a Summit party so... yes please, cameo.)

People inevitably will make comparisons to Stephenie Meyer, since you're both YA novelists signed to Summit. She's producing her first film now -- are you planning to be Meyer-level involved in the making of "Divergent?"
Not really. At least, I haven’t really been involved with it for very long, so it's hard to say. But I really just love books and I never really watch movies. I'm more into the slow, sort of meditative process and movies are like bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! So I don't know if it's really the place for me. I don't know, it's been really fun to see "Twilight" from the inside, but I'm really just observing, I'm not really involved.

How about casting? The studio has the final say, but are you hoping for anyone in particular?
I really don't know — when it comes to movies, I kind of like to see unknown people. Not faces that have been everywhere, so that would be my dream cast, I guess. Really talented but not really known.

The first book was optioned before you started writing the final two books of the trilogy. Has knowing you'll be seeing these characters in the flesh altered your path? Have you started writing more cinematically?
You know, I think that's how I write naturally. I think we sometimes imagine what it looks like and all the surroundings — all the things people think about when they're filming a movie, and then I just write it down, so nothing has really changed, not really. I think it would be different if they cast people while I was writing, because then I wouldn't be able to separate them in my mind but, right now, it's still all my imagination.

I think it wouldn't be terrible, but I'd rather keep them the way they are and not yet what's happening in the real world. Just what's happening in my fake world.
Veronica Roth

Meyer has cameos in a few of the "Twilight" films. Is that something you want or something you'd actively avoid?
I wouldn't say no. I think it would be so fun. And it's not an experience you think you're ever going to have. So, yeah, I'd like that. But I'm not like, "I must have one!"

I'd like to be one of the Dauntless trying to jump on the train. Or I guess... off the train. That would be fun. I don't think they'd let me do that, because I'm uncoordinated and have poor balance.

That train-jumping scene is pretty brutal. Your book, "The Hunger Games" and some others — they're not for the faint of heart. What defines YA books and movies these days? It is simply the age of the protagonists?
Partially, it's themes. If I have more adult themes in the book, and the protagonist was young and the voice was old, it might be an adult book. But these themes are intensely adolescent, it's having to define yourself and not knowing if you can, especially at such a young age, and I think that's very teen concern. It certainly was my concern when I was a teen.

I think it's mostly about the protagonist and the themes but not so much about the content anymore. It used to be, you'd kind of have to censor yourself if you were writing young adult, but I don't really think that's the case at all these days.

http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/divergent-movie-veronica-roth

Harrison Ford Sought for Ender's Game

Harrison Ford Sought For Ender's Game
Source: Variety , Asa Butterfield
November 29, 2011

Recently rumored for the role, Hugo star Asa Butterfield confirmed earlier today via Twitter that he's officially joined Summit Entertainment's big-screen version of Ender's Game. Now, Variety has word that the next major bit of casting is the role of Colonel Hyrum Graff and that the producers are keen on getting Harrison Ford for the part (though there are said to be other unnamed possibilities as well).

To be directed by Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Ender's Game is based on the science fiction novel series by Orson Scott Card,

Read more: Harrison Ford Sought For Ender's Game - ComingSoon.net http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=84702#ixzz1fA3HtQRv


Dotti Enderle
* * *
CROSSWIRE (Boyds Mills/Calkins Creek)
* Texas Institute of Letters Young Adult Award Recipient
* June Franklin Naylor Award for Best Children’s Book on Texas History
* WWA Spur Award Finalist
www.dottienderle.com

Interview with Mitali Perkins

The Berlin Boxing Club

Richie's Picks: THE BERLIN BOXING CLUB by Robert Sharenow, HarperTeen, April 2011, 416p., ISBN: 978-0-06-157968-8

"All of Germany got swept up in Max Mania. He flew home in grand style on the Hindenburg, the largest airship in the world and the pride of the Nazi fleet. Thousands turned up to greet him when he landed in Frankfurt, and the event was covered on live radio. Every newspaper and magazine featured photographs of Max and stories about the fight. Almost instantly Max's name and face appeared on products all over Europe as he endorsed everything from his favorite brand of almonds to shirt collars to motor oil. Max also acquired the rights to distribute the film of the Louis fight in Germany, and it quickly became the number one box office hit across the country under the title Max Schmeling's Victory--A German Victory."

Ten months ago, I wrote about a great new picture book for older readers, A NATION'S HOPE: THE STORY OF BOXING LEGEND JOE LOUIS. That lyrical, true story is centered around the historic second boxing match between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. In their first meeting two years earlier -- which led to the Max Mania described in THE BERLIN BOXING CLUB -- Schmeling scored an upset, knocking out Louis in twelve rounds. But in Yankee Stadium, on June 22, 1938, Louis got even by disposing of Schmeling in the first round.

Having previously assumed that Max Schmeling was a racist Nazi pawn, it is a shock to learn from the author's note in THE BERLIN BOXING CLUB that Schmeling was no such thing. In fact, he never joined the Nazi Party and he heroically rescued two Jewish boys on Kristallnacht.

Thus it was that author Robert Sharenow was inspired to write a tale about a Jewish boy to whom Schmeling becomes a mentor. That boy is Karl Stern.

THE BERLIN BOXING CLUB is the story of how young Karl Stern, who does not "look" Jewish, and who has two parents who do not practice that religion, is nevertheless labeled as such and victimized by his Berlin schoolmates during the rise of the Nazi Party. But because his art dealer father is old friends with Max Schmeling, it come to be, in the wake of being forcibly disrobed by schoolmates (to find evidence of his Jewishness), and then badly beaten up, that Karl is offered tutoring in boxing by Schmeling -- at the Berlin Boxing Club -- in exchange for a piece of art (by a Jewish artist) that Max desires.

Over several years, as Karl's skills steadily develop (both as a boxer and as an aspiring cartoonist), life otherwise becomes worse and worse for him and his family. His little sister Hildy clearly has a Jewish "look," and so is singled out by her schoolmates. The family business is failing, thanks to art censorship and laws enacted against Jewish artists and businesses. Then, being defined as Jewish results in Karl being expelled from school, losing his sympathetic and beautiful non-Jewish girlfriend, and his family being evicted from their longtime apartment.

All through these horrors, it is the discipline resulting from the endurance and skill training dictated by Schmeling that keeps Karl believing in his ability to develop fearlessness rather than simply becoming a passive victim of the Nazi atrocities.

THE BERLIN BOXING CLUB is an excellent and exciting sports story that ties right into all the same old bullying issues and hate mongering we are still dealing with today. It is essential that adolescents have the opportunity to define themselves rather than being defined -- and defiled -- by others.

This great historical fiction sports story also enlightened me about Max Schmeling not being a two-dimensional, dumb Nazi shill.

Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
Moderator http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/
http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/people/faculty/partingtonr/partingtonr.php

Neil Gaiman in The Simpsons

On Sunday a special guest star will lend his voice to his yellow-skinned Springfield doppelganger on The Simpsons: bestselling author and comics writer Neil Gaiman.

Speaking with Spinoff Online and other members of the press about his role, Gaiman began by admitting that although the episode, “The Book Job,” centers on Homer’s attempt to write a young-adult novel akin to Twilight, the author has never read Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular books.

“I am a terrible person because I still have not read the Twilight books, and I’m the only one in my house,” he laughed.

Explaining that his daughters loved the series, Gaiman said the last time someone asked his opinion on the popularity of teen literature was shortly after he won the Carnegie Medal for his children’s fantasy novel The Graveyard Book.

“I said I thought there were too many vampires around, it was probably time for something else — and the universe obviously agreed with me because zombies turned up by the busload at that point,” he said. “Now I’m just waiting for the next thing with absolute fascination to see what it is.”

With a laugh he added, “In The Simpsons episode we did I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say Homer decided it was trolls!”

Gaiman said that playing himself on The Simpsons was “great fun,” and something he had been thinking about a lot recently.

“The thing that took me by surprise was they had been asking me for a while to do a cameo on the show and I said yes, when the right script came along,” he said. “But truthfully, what I expected was the normal kind of Simpsons celebrity cameo. You know, Homer says, ‘Not even Neil Gaiman could come up with something as weird as this!’ and then it would cut to me stroking my chin going, ‘You’re right, I couldn’t!’ and the scene would continue.”

However, when Gaiman received the script, “I started to read it and discovered that I was in it all the way through and I was actually having to act and that stuff happens! It was enormously fun and kind of weird and kind of wonderful.”

The author contrasted his Simpsons role with his other television cameos. “In the past year or so I’ve got to play myself several times, and they’re always very different me’s I was doing,” he said. “The me I did in Arthur, the PBS cartoon, was very different from this version of me. It’s kind of weird!”

“I think if they ever hand out Oscars for Best Person Playing Neil Gaiman, I have a shot!” he added.

In addition to Gaiman’s Simpsons debut, this year also marks the 15th anniversary of Neverwhere, his short-lived BBC fantasy series that he adapted as a companion novel. Looking back to his start in the 1990s, Gaiman said he thought the biggest difference in the literary and genre-fiction world was that the doors had opened up to admit teen readers.

“Quite honestly the biggest change in teen horror is there wasn’t any. The biggest change in teen lit is that it exists,” Gaiman said, adding, “If you go back even 15 years there was definitely a tendency at that point to go from kids’ books to adult books. The idea that people would be writing books aimed primarily at a teen audience is really cool and really new, and the idea of YA books being genre books is, again, cool and new.

Returning to Neverwhere, the author continued, “Fifteen years ago, when things like Neverwhere were coming out, everything I did was published as adult fiction, which it still is. [Now] winning the Young Adult Library Association Award for adult books that kids and teens would like, I’m really glad that teens have their own books.”

However, Gaiman also emphasized he feels teens should be free to read “adult” books as well. “On the other hand, I’m still a huge believer in books, and I hate the idea of anybody being cut off from books that they’d like because they think they aren’t ready for them yet,” he said.

Going back to his episode, Gaiman playfully compared the Neil Gaiman on The Simpsons to the “Neil Gaiman in real life.”

“Truthfully, the real-life me almost never hangs around in Barnes & Noble-like bookstores waiting to find a group of local townsfolk who have decided to write a pseudonymous young-adult fantasy series, offering my services — and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t be doing the catering!” he joked.

He said the biggest difference, and challenge, for acting in the episode was adopting an American accent — not because he had to do a good American accent, but because he had to do a spectacularly bad one.

“I think that was the hardest thing in the studio, because they asked me to do one line in a really bad American accent,” Gaiman said, “and I did what I thought was a bad American accent, and I was told no, it has to be to Americans the equivalent of what Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins is to the English.”

“I was pushed to achieve those sort of heights — or depths!” the author added with laugh.

Gaiman also promised that “The Book Job” contains many in-jokes and references to his works, although he said the biggest surprise is just how much acting he was required to do.

“The weird thing, honestly, in this was I actually had to act, which I wasn’t expecting!” he said. “Unfortunately, or fortunately, Matt Selman was the executive producer of the episode, which was written by Dan Vebber from Futurama, and written brilliantly, and I think it was Matt’s idea that I do it because Matt loves my audio books and assumed I could actually properly act because I do it in my audio books!”

Turning away from The Simpsons for a moment, Gaiman touched on his recent West Coast book and music tour with with his wife and ex-Dresden Dolls musician/songwriter Amanda Palmer.

“We had 10 days with nothing planned, and we had to get from Los Angeles to Vancouver, so we decided instead of doing this sort of ambling, vacation drive up the coast we’d take to the cities and do ‘An Evening With Neil Gaiman And Amanda Palmer’ in each one,” Gaiman said. The author added that the tour quickly sold out as fans on the West Coast got to see Gaiman, “read stories and Amanda sang, and strange and glorious things happened every night.”

However, because Palmer is recording and Gaiman is beginning work on a new novel while being involved in the HBO adaptation of American Gods, he said they wouldn’t do another tour. However, he and Palmer might hold individual events in the future. “For us it’s kind of like a meeting of the clans as the fans get together,” he said.

Gaiman, who also wrote a well-received episode of Doctor Who, laughed when asked if, after HBO and The Simpsons, there were any pop culture spheres left for him to conquer.

“You know, there was actually a point where you look around and you go, ‘OK, I’ve written a Doctor Who episode, been on The Simpsons, that’s pretty much it!’ I would really like to be a head in a jar in Futurama,” he said. “I love these weird little playing Neil Gaiman things that occasionally come up.”

However, as much as he loves doing cameos, the author confessed he now has to say no to “very peculiar things.”

“You know, like ‘Come onto the Food Network and be a judge on a show!’ No, why would they think I’d want to do that? ‘Well, they saw you on Craig Ferguson!’ I definitely don’t want to be a personality,” he said. “I’m a writer. I love doing goofy stuff, too, but it’s time to go back to being a writer now.”

This led the author back to the recent explosion in teen lit as he expounded upon what he saw as the problem that plagues fiction when a genre becomes hugely successful.

“Whether it’s wizards or vampires, whether it’s zombies or werewolves, and for that matter right now you got fairy tale characters and a whole lot more — when the stuff happens and it’s created by people who believe in them and other people look around and go, ‘Ah, this is a way to make money,’ things mean less and less,” Gaiman said. “It’s like old-style photocopies. When you photocopy a photocopy and then photocopy a photocopy, pretty soon you wind up with a gray sheet of paper with faint lines on it. I worry that you do end up fairly rapidly with the gray sheets of paper.”

However, the author said the most important thing is not the quality of the material but the ability to spark an interest in reading.

“On the other hand, I also know having grown up as a devoted reader that, as a kid, your first exposure to anything, whether it’s a good book or a bad book, whether it’s written with care and love or just tossed off by somebody who really doesn’t care, the truth is that when kids encounter books they bring themselves to them, and the place you find the magic can be anywhere,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be in a great book, it can be in a terrible book.”

Gaiman admitted he’s happy with the way his career has progressed, and that if he could go back in time to give his younger self advice, he wouldn’t do it.

“I would hate to go back and try and change anything,” he said. “It might be like the Ray Bradbury story where a guy steps on some bark and crushes a butterfly and the entire course of human history is changed. I really like it where I am and would be incredibly loathe to change anything.”

Pausing, the author then admitted the only advice he would give to his younger self was something Stephen King said to him in the early ‘90s, just as Sandman was beginning to take off.

“I think probably my only piece of advice to myself would probably be a piece of advice that Stephen King tried to give me, and given that I more or less ignored it from Stephen King I would probably ignore it from me, which is, he told me to enjoy it more. He said, ‘You’re on this great ride, just enjoy it,’” Gaiman said. “I enjoy it a lot more now.”

“The Book Job” episode of The Simpsons airs Sunday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Fox.
Tags: featured, Fox, Neil Gaiman, The Simpsons

http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/2011/11/19/neil-gaiman-on-his-simpsons-appearance-teen-lit-and-trolls/

Japanese Culture Program

Thanks to Ms. Sandy Ho, our Anime Club thoroughly enjoyed our Japanese Culture Program.
The club sampled Japanese food, browsed through samples of Japanese Anime, sampled Japanese Science magazines, learned about some of the history (such as the robots or "dolls" used to serve the emperors in the 1700's) and learned some basic Japanese, such as how to write their names in that language. Enjoy some of our snapshots above.

Catching Fire Movie--Are You Ready?

Simon Beaufoy to Draft Hunger Games Sequel?
Source: Deadline

November 16, 2011



With the first film's full trailer hitting earlier this week and hopes high for a top-tier franchise, the producers of The Hunger Games are already eyeing the sequel, which will adapt Suzanne Collins' second book, Catching Fire. Deadline reports that a new writer is likely to be brought into the mix and the studio's current choice is Slumdog Millionaire scribe Simon Beaufoy.

Gary Ross, the director of the first film, wrote the screenplay with Collins, but it is suggested that his busy post-production schedule precludes him from following suit with Catching Fire. He is planning, however, to return as director.

Following Slumdog, Beaufoy re-teamed with director Danny Boyle for 127 Hours. His next work, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is being directed by Lasse Hallström and will hit theaters March 2, 2012.

It was reported last week that, to justify a sequel, the first film will have to gross over $100 million domestically, something that the studio has every confidence in.


Read more: Simon Beaufoy to Draft Hunger Games Sequel? - ComingSoon.net http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=84321#ixzz1dykqY9eM







Dotti Enderle

* * *

CROSSWIRE (Boyds Mills/Calkins Creek)

* Texas Institute of Letters Young Adult Award Recipient

* June Franklin Naylor Award for Best Children’s Book on Texas History

* WWA Spur Award Finalist

www.dottienderle.com