Hollywood Reader

What better time than after the holidays to circulate a novel about love, loss, literary treachery and the endurance of family? An intricate tale about a grieving father, his commitment-phobic girlfriend and her divorced parents, Brian Morton's Breakable You, to be published by Harcourt in September, will begin making film rounds next month. Interest in the title may be heightened because of the concurrent start of production on an adaptation of Morton's Starting Out in the Evening, which was published by Crown in 1997 and sold to Berkley's Signature Line. Starring Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose as Heather Wolfe, an ambitious graduate student, and Frank Langella as a crotchety novelist (and reluctant subject of Heather's thesis), the indie film—which is being produced by Indigent Films—is being directed by newbie Andrew Wagner based on a screenplay he co-wrote with Fred Parnes. The deal was closed by Indigent's Nancy Israel and Harvey Klinger of Harvey Klinger Inc., who represents Morton for both lit and film.

Our bold prediction for 2006? Novelists will replace singer-songwriters as Hollywood's biopic (and possibly Oscar-bait?) subjects of choice. In the upcoming year, a number of writer-centric films are scheduled to make their way before a camera, including Babe director Chris Noonan's Miss Potter, as in Beatrix, in late March. Renée Zellweger—who last played a writer in 1998's adaptation of Anna Quindlen's One True Thing—will star as the legendary creator of Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin. Meanwhile, Anthony Hopkins is attached to play Ernest Hemingway in Papa, director Adrian Noble's take on the larger-than-life author. On the more fanciful side, feeding off Spain's Don Quixote fever (2006 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the story's first part), Spanish filmmaker Ines Paris will begin directing Miguel and William, a fictional tale speculating upon Shakespeare's four-year absence from historical record, in late February (Van Helsing's Will Kempplays the bard to veteran Spanish actor Juan Luis Galiardo's Cervantes). Meanwhile, Spanish director Antonio Hernandez is directing his own Cervantes adventure comedy, based on screenwriter Terry Kahn's adaptation of Stephen Marlowe's 1997 novelized bio, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes (Arcade).

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