Hollywood Reader

This week: Three deals and a stripper.

By Jason Anthony -- Publishers Weekly, 7/25/2005

Globalization has

its critics, but Curtis Brown's Holly Frederick isn't one of them. Frederick is closing the deal on Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby (Atria, 2001), a sort of Chinese Bright Lights, Big City. Though Hui lives in the U.S., the novel didn't make much of an impact here or in her native China, where it was banned by nightlife-hating apparatchiks. However, it made a huge splash in Japan and Europe, selling about 500,000 copies in the U.K. and Japan alone. Now the German company Berenger Pfahl Film has trumped one other bidder to make an English-language film of the book. (Previously the Japanese producer Artist House held the option.) The film deal comes at an opportune time for Curtis Brown's Kirsten Manges as she readies Hui's followup novel, Marrying Buddha, for U.S. submission.

The O.C. cools off

with John Green's YA novel, Looking for Alaska (Dutton, Mar.). The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz will adapt and direct for Paramount. The Alaska in the title refers not to the 49th state but to smoldering teen vixen Alaska Young, a self-destructive bad girl who casts a spell on nearly every boy she meets (see PW's Flying Starts profile, June 27). The town seems to have had a collective delayed reaction to this one: though the book has been available for months, multiple offers came rolling in to Venture Management's Adrian Loudermilk just last week. (Note: Loudermilk died in a car accident Saturday, July 16, in California. The 30-year-old manager had also produced the direct-to-DVD Bushisms, based on the book series by Jacob Weisberg.)

Alaska isn't the only literary property Paramount added to its slate last week. The studio moved aggressively to take Gordon Korman's Born to Rock (Hyperion, fall 2006) off the market 72 hours after Holly Frederick submitted it (see Hollywood Reader, July 18). The novel combines elements of Almost Famous with About a Boy. By one count, Korman's novel is the 10th literary acquisition the studio has made in just five months. "It's exciting to see this once creatively moribund studio go after interesting books," said a person connected to the New York literary scene. "They're buying a good mix of smart, commercial and edgy."

Not one for the kids

is Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper (Gotham, Dec.) by Diablo Cody, a blunt and funny memoir about getting naked for strangers in the glamour-deficient city of Minneapolis. Cody moved to Minnesota to be with a guy she met over the Internet. With her artsy ambitions thwarted ("When I eventually auditioned for a local electropop quintet, the band members looked at me like I was farting the theme from Mahogany"), Cody danced at local dives that make Tad's Steaks look like the Bellagio. The Gersh Agency's Sarah Self will submit the manuscript shortly, which Cody plans to adapt herself. (The busy Cody sold her dark comedy screenplay Juno to Mandate last year and currently is writing a feature for Warner Bros.) Paula Balzer of Sarah Lazin Books reps Cody for lit.

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