I’m an avid reader and there’s lots of books out there that will be adapted so I figured I’d tackle these two under one post, I hope you don’t mind. If I were you, I’d go to the nearest B&N and read the following novels before the movie versions hit theaters. I say B&N because I love that place, you don’t have to buy, just chill for hours and turn the pages…
As we know, Brad Pitt is still going to star in MONEYBALL, the project that had a rough time last year, in the middle of a tug of war between Steven Soderbergh and Amy Pascal of Sony. But the project is finally up and running again in the hands of director Bennett Miller (Capote). According to Vulture, Pitt still wants to be in the universe of the book’s author Michael Lewis, as his production company Plan B options Lewis’ next book THE BIG SHORT: INSIDE THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE. By the way, Lewis is also the guy who penned the book THE BLIND SIDE, the adaptation was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress
This is the official synopsis of the book THE BIG SHORT…
“Truth really is stranger than fiction. Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar’s Poker to explain how the event we were told was impossible–the free fall of the American economy–finally occurred; how the things that we wanted, like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.
Michael Lewis’s splendid cast of characters includes villains, a few heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish: high government officials, including the watchdogs; heads of major investment banks (some overlap here with previous category); perhaps even the face in your mirror. In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve. He proves yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.”
This next one is a Ghost story, I kid you not. Paranormal Activity revived this for all of us. Hammer Films, the production company behind the upcoming remake LET ME IN, has bought the screen rights to the Susan Hill book, THE WOMAN IN BLACK.
Scribe Jane Goldman who adapted Stardust and the upcoming Kick-Ass will write the screenplay and James Watkins will direct
Here’s the official synopsis of the book..
“What real reader does not yearn, somewhere in the recesses of his or her heart, for a really literate, first-class thriller: one that chills the body with foreboding of dark deeds to come, but warms the soul with perceptions and language at once astute and vivid? In other words, a ghost story by Jane Austen.
Austen we cannot, alas, give you, but Susan Hill’s remarkable Woman In Black comes as close as the late twentieth century is likely to provide. Set on the obligatory English moor, on an isolated causeway, the story’s hero is Arthur Kipps, an up-and-coming young solicitor who has come north to attend the funeral and settle the estate of Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The routine formalities he anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare: the rocking chair in the nursery of the deserted Eel Marsh House, the eerie sound of pony and trap, a child’s scream in the fog, and, most dreadfully, and for Kipps most tragically, the woman in black.
The Woman In Black is both a brilliant exercise in atmosphere and controlled horror and a delicious spine-tingler-proof positive that that neglected genre, the ghost story, isn’t dead after all. “
