How to Eat Fried Worms: Opening August 25

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on August 10, 2006 Sign up now!

by Allia Benner, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 8/10/2006

Thomas Rockwell’s classic novel, How to Eat Fried Worms, has been a recipe for boyhood fun for 33 years. Later this month, the tale that has attracted a generation of reluctant readers to the world of books will make its debut on the big screen. How to Eat Fried Worms follows 11-year-old Billy, the new kid in school, who accidentally challenges the school bully and must eat 15 worms in 15 days in order to save himself from disgrace (though the film condenses the time frame, so that Billy must eat 10 worms in one day). Since its publication in 1973, How to Eat Fried Worms has sold close to three million copies worldwide. Despite the book’s popularity, it took 20 years for the film rights to be optioned, and 12 years to make the transition from rights sale to movie premiere.

Adapted and directed by Bob Dolman, the movie version of How to Eat Fried Worms features Luke Benward as Billy and Adam Hicks as Joe, the bully (known as Alan in the book). Tom Cavanagh, Ty Panitz and Hallie Kate Eisenberg also star. The film was produced with an estimated $20 million budget by Walden Media, and is being distributed by New Line Cinema. Yearling issued 300,000 copies of a paperback tie-in edition on July 11, with the movie poster as the cover.

In an interview in a recent insert in School Library Journal with Rockwell, who is the son of artist Norman Rockwell, the author said that the greatest message he would like How to Eat Fried Worms to send to readers and viewers is that “doing something difficult, even something yucky, may lead to something nice—as well as a wonderful sense of accomplishment.”

In fact, the idea for his story came from one such trial in Rockwell’s life. “I’d just come back from a meeting with an editor that hadn’t gone well,” he said in the interview. “They didn’t like the book I’d just written and I was feeling unhappy, like I could eat fried worms.” He then sat down and wrote about that very sensation.

Interestingly, the new movie has been banned in Malaysia for an indeterminate reason. It joins 180 other titles, including Saturday Night Fever, Babe, and Brokeback Mountain, on the Malaysian banned films list.

Click here for more information on the How to Eat Fried Worms movie.

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