Kodansha is One Up on Oscar, Stone
-- Publishers Weekly, 4/14/1997
Kodansha editor-in-chief Philip Turner had reason to smile when filmmaker Jessica Yu won an Academy Award for her documentary
Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, and it wasn't just because of her charming jest that her Oscar outfit cost more than the 35-minute film. Fortuitously, two years ago Turner had signed up the autobiography of Mark O'Brien, a Berkeley, Calif., writer and poet who, for 41 of his 47 years, has lived with an iron lung. Kodansha will bring out O'Brien's
How I Became a Human Being: A Disabled Man's Quest for Independence, written with Gillian Kendall, in spring 1998. And after the Oscars, there was still more good news: Oliver Stone entered into a verbal agreement with Yu for a feature film adaptation, and is expected to option the Kodansha book as its basis. But though Turner told
PW he'll probably double his originally planned 10,000 first printing because of movie buzz (the documentary is expected to air on Cinemax and HBO this spring), he said the book will have plenty of stand-alone interest. Included in O'Brien's memoir will be his "exploration of an erotic life" and his conversations about disability with Stephen Hawking.
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