The publishers warned us that they were merely doing a service to the scholarly public, that there was no money in the project; they couldn't afford to reset text and commentary and would have to go on using the ancient stereotypes. Still, the new series will, like the old ones, be worth waiting for. Despite inevitable variations in quality, these editions have been for the best part of a century about the most useful Shakespeare texts you could hope to find Their history has not been uniformly glorious. The editors enlisted at the outset of the second series, including myself, were told to revise the old versions rather than edit from scratch. The present new edition starts off briskly with Titus Andronicus, King Henry V and Antony and Cleopatra (Routledge, £30 each in hardback or £5.99 in paperback), but the pace may slow, for there are tougher problems ahead than any encountered in these inaugural volumes.
This is third time round for the Arden Shakespeare. The first set was ground out between 1899 and 1944, and the second between 1946 and 1982 - slow going. My new novel concerns a christening inside a gradually imploding cathedral, where an idiot-savant is about to sign a contract .. I was asked by Renaissance Films to write a movie around the Lloyds `Names', about a cross-section of people in a Syndicate that failed."Four Weddings Gridiron meaty role commerce I started straight away. There's far more chance for an English writer to sell to Hollywood if you set your book, at least in part, in America - as with Green River Rising by Tim Willocks (in the Deep South), or The Horse-Whisperer (Montana) or The Gridiron (LA) And the world of business is a hot subject. I'm working on a screenplay of Moby Dick at the moment."Getting a star interested in a meaty central role is a guarantee of funding, as with Redford and the Horse book; Craig Thomas apparently wrote to Clint Eastwood to say he wrote Firefox with him in mind, and the film got made. All the Merchant-Ivory mining of the works of Forster has led them to rediscover their own literature: Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne [The Scarlet Letter is out soon, with Demi Moore].
.' and you can see why: all the work's been done, the `I's dotted and the `T's crossed America's very big on the classics now. The success of the book - a thriller about a "smart building" in Los Angeles that turns on its occupants - follows the news about Nick Evans's The Horse Whisperer, which was sold to Robert Redford's Sundance studio for $3 million.Can anyone join in? What kind of books is Hollywood looking for, these days? I asked Mr Kerr, who was chosen as one of the 20 Best of Young British scribes in 1993 and is more au fait than most with the ways of Hollywood, what goes down well these days."A guy from Creative Artists Associated told me lately, `The only treatments the big studios are reading these days are called novels. This will be heartening news for writers who have hitherto assumed that film producers are interested only in "high-concept" screenplays which yoke two successful films into a promising hybrid ("Sort of Home Alone meets Reservoir Dogs"), or update classic texts like Little Women ("The unexpected movie triumph of the year!"). Working Title made headlines last week after they signed up the film rights to Philip Kerr's The Gridiron (published by Chatto on 8 June) for a million dollars. Underneath, his T- shirt bore a message of international peace and goodwill distilled into a monosyllable: "Fuck".
No doubt about it, in wonderland the anarchist is winning the war.. Working Title, the British film company that made Four Weddings and a Funeral, has announced that it is on the lookout for modern British novels with filmic potential. Either you vote for Zhirinovsky and gun down Grozny or you disturb the peace by singing anti-war songs on your guitar.One delicious vignette found the willing conscript sitting for his military photo: after the flash he rapidly handed over his beret and combat jacket, front-loading for ease of entry, to the next sitter. You couldn't really warm to either, but they served to cement the impression that in modern, polarised Moscow there is no such thing as a middle of the road.
One left his comically tearful grandmother to serve his country, while the other dodged the draft by artificially faking high blood pressure. "Don't get in the way when he's filming me," she instructed her older sister.A third film contrasted the tale of two conscripts, a martial artist and an anarchist. Whether she was dolefully mourning the loss of her childhood or triumphantly raising aloft her fistful of roubles, the camera loved her. One of the drivers whom she bumptiously asked to "give me some money" shielded his face from the lens.