Serenity Leaves Some Things Out
oss Whedon, writer and director of the upcoming SF film Serenity, told SCI FI Wire that he had to leave out some things in translating his failed Fox TV show Firefly to the big screen. "Absolutely," he said in an interview. "I mean, in a series you have an indefinite amount of time to explore everything, and in a movie you have momentum to serve that does not allow you to [do that]."
Serenity picks up the story of the crew of a transport ship 500 years in the future. In a spoiler for the movie, Whedon offers an example: He wasn't able to delve as deeply into the past of Shepherd Book, played by Ron Glass. "With Book, it was almost a gag when [Capt. Mal Reynolds, played by Nathan Fillion,] says, 'You gotta tell me about that sometime.' ... That was everybody's moment of, 'OK, [now we'll get the story].' And then [Book] said, 'No, I don't.' It's a joke, but it's a joke very much based in character. Book is somebody who ... sets his rules, and he's very firm about them, and one [rule] is that '[the past is] something I've left behind that clearly is unpleasant and clearly has given me insider knowledge of the workings of a corrupt government, and that's really all you need to know.'"
There's a hint that perhaps Book may have been an Operative for the Alliance, much like Chiwetel Ejiofor's character, but that is not pursued. "Exactly," Whedon said. "And that's exactly how I wanted to leave it. However, when people ask, 'Have you had ideas about the sequel?' Don't think that's not part of it. But for the purposes of the [first] movie, it wasn't necessary. ... Because what was necessary was: 'Here's somebody Mal looks up to and will actually listen to.' That was what we needed to know about Book."
In another spoiler for the movie, Whedon admitted that he didn't pursue the relationship between Fillion's Reynolds and Morena Baccarin's courtesan character, Inara. "In terms of Mal and Inara, I think there was much more resolved than we would have had for a very long time in any way in the show, which is very simply that they do actually admit that they like each other," Whedon said. "Which for them is a huge step. Doesn't mean that they still won't have the same problems they had before they admitted it. In fact, they might have a few more. It might be problems that involve smooching, and that's what the audience needs."
Serenity is being released by Universal Pictures on Sept. 30. Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Serenity Stars Shot Guns!
ast members of Joss Whedon's upcoming SF movie Serenity told SCI FI Wire that they all had to undergo weapons training for a climactic battle scene.
"Yeah. I had to do archery," Morena Baccarin said about her courtesan character, Inara. "I really took to it, actually. I remember when we were shooting ... that scene came where I'm supposed to shoot one of the Reavers with an arrow, and the whole set is like, 'All right, let's clear the set. Only the people that need to be here have to be here. Everybody put on goggles.' All the camera guys have these hard hats on, and everybody is freaking out. And they gave me an 'X' to hit. Every time, I hit that 'X.' They were like, 'Ooh, OK!'"
Serenity centers on the ragtag crew of a transport ship 500 years in the future as they contend with both the soldiers of an oppressive government called the Alliance and cannibalistic savages called Reavers.
Jewel Staite, who plays the mechanic Kaylee, said that she had to train on all kinds of guns. "Yeah," she said. "They make me shoot everything, from this big [indicates a small weapon] to this big [a large one], and this one gun was so incredibly heavy. ... I looked like the biggest geek in the world. I was leaning back, it was so heavy. And I thought I would be cute that day and wear shorts and a tank top, and every time I would shoot the gun, it would sort of ricochet, and I would get little burns all over my legs. And it wasn't super fun. But it was ... crazy. Everybody else thought it was fun but me. I was scared."
Adam Baldwin, who plays the mercenary Jayne, had the opposite feeling. "I thought it was fun. ... I've been comfortable with weapons for years."
Even cast members who wouldn't normally carry guns got training, such as Sean Maher, who plays the refined doctor Simon Tam. "We weren't sure who exactly was shooting what, so they just had us ... get familiar with everything that could possibly find its way into the script somehow," Maher said. " So there was a lot of firing to be done."
Summer Glau, who plays Simon's mysterious sister, River, had to undergo martial-arts and stunt training for a climactic fight scene in which she contends with dozens of opponents. "It's all me," she said. "There were two dangerous stunts that they wouldn't let me do. ... One, falling down the stairs. That was just too risky. And one other flip that my stunt double ended up getting hurt doing, and I felt terrible. But everything else, I mean, those swords and ... all the blade work, I did myself. All the guns I did myself, the daggers. Joss wanted it to look real. And I felt it. Every punch, every kick. " Serenity opens Sept. 30.
MirrorMask Was Joint Effort
eil Gaiman, who co-wrote the upcoming fantasy film MirrorMask with artist and director Dave McKean, told SCI FI Wire that he deferred to McKean on most of the major creative decisions. "He had an idea of what he could do, which I didn't," Gaiman said in an interview. "He had the idea that, for $4 million, he could actually make this thing. And he knew kind of how he could do it. And I had to trust him a lot on that. So if he'd say,'Oh, you can't do this,' I wouldn't do it. He really had an idea going in what his technical limitations were. That gave him sort of a senior role."
Gaiman's collaboration with McKean goes back to the seminal DC Vertigo comic-book series Sandman, for which McKean created the cover art. But MirrorMask is the first project that the two have written together. "We had great arguments, which was actually very odd at the time, because we'd never had them," Gaiman said. "We've worked together for 17 years, and we'd never argued before. Normally we have this lovely, strict demarcation of roles. I needed something. I'd give it to Dave. Dave would give me what I needed. It was nice and simple. But we couldn't do that this time. If we had $100 million, we probably would have done it like that again, a strict demarcation of roles. I would have gone off and written something and given it to Dave, and he would have made it. But we didn't. We had 4 million. And we were trying to make a fantasy movie that would actually look beautiful and contain all this wonderful stuff."
MirrorMask is the story of a young girl named Helena, who wants to run away from the circus and join real life. But when her mother falls ill, her feelings of guilt lead her to dream of a fantastical world in which she must save the sleeping queen of light from the evil queen of darkness.
Though many of the story elements are familiar themes in Gaiman's work, he said that they were often ideas brought up by McKean. "A lot of those were actually Dave things," he said. "I mean, that was some of the stuff the Dave and I were fighting about, because Dave would say, 'I like the idea of this mother, and she's going to be the queen of light and the queen of dark.' And I'm going, 'Yeah, but I just did Coraline, and I had an Other Mother there and a girl, and do we really want to do that?' And Dave would say, 'Yes.' I was going, 'I've done Alice in Wonderland now a couple of times. Do I want to do again?' So there's definitely a level on which some of the things that are most obviously me, aren't. They're Dave." MirrorMask opens in select theaters on Sept. 30.
MirrorMask Eschews Reality
ave McKean, who directed and co-wrote the fantasy film MirrorMask, told SCI FI Wire that rather than trying to mimic reality using computer-generated effects, he wanted to create something that could not exist in the real world. "I'm not really bothered about making things look natural or realistic," McKean said in an interview. "Skies can be made of paper and characters can be made of piles of books. It doesn't matter. It's an imaginative world. It's an imagined world. And it's all in [the main character's] head anyway. And to try and make everything look realistic seems to be a very narrow approach, when digital can be anything, really. Animation is within everything. And certainly, I think because CG is so technical that people have set these technical goals of making water and people look like people. And they are fantastic technical goals, but you can do anything."
MirrorMask is the story of a girl named Helena, who has a dream about a fantastical world in which she must save the sleeping queen of light from the evil queen of darkness. In a technique similar to the recent films Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Sin City, the film's actors were shot against a blue screen, with all of the backgrounds and some of the characters added in later through digital animation. MirrorMask, however, is different in that it uses a mixture of media, both on the set and in the post-production process.
"My 2-D stuff, my paintings and illustrations, have always been a mixture, a collage of photographs and sculpture and painting and drawing and all sorts of things," McKean said. "So that side of it wasn't so difficult. Just the scale of it, the amount of screen time, the amount of data and the amount of people involved, that was the difficult thing. And getting computers to work and talk to each other. Boring technical stuff, that was the drag. The fun of it was bringing all the elements together."
Co-writer Neil Gaiman, who has worked with McKean for nearly 20 years, said in a separate interview that he appreciated McKean's desire for the film's art not to imitate life. "I think what Dave did that was special was, he decided from the word go that he wasn't in search of realism," Gaiman said. "There was no quest for realism going on here. There was no quest for reproducing reality. The place where the cost comes, a lot of the time, is just reproducing reality. Trying to make it look like you're there. And Dave went, 'No, we're not going to do that.' That's why the idea of this is a dream world. It can look like anything. And you can have metal textures for the sky." MirrorMask opens in select theaters on Sept. 30.
Gaiman Gets Funny In Anansi
eil Gaiman, author of the fantastical novel Anansi Boys, told SCI FI Wire that the book allowed him to return to the kind of comedic writing he hasn't done since he co-wrote Good Omens with Terry Pratchett in 1990. "I got to write my funny novel," Gaiman said in an interview. "I wanted to write a funny one ever since Good Omens. It got to the point where everyone was convinced that Good Omens was me writing a very serious book, with Terry Pratchett dancing along behind me, scattering jokes like little flowers. So I thought, 'Well, I'm going to write a funny novel.' And it is."
Although the character of Anansi, based on a trickster spider-god from West African folklore, made a memorable appearance in Gaiman's previous novel, American Gods, he said that the new book has only a tangential relationship to the last one. "I had the idea for Anansi Boys in about 1996," he said. "And had these characters floating around in my head, but wasn't quite sure whether it was a film or a TV series or a book, or what it was. So I borrowed the character for American Gods. Also, because I knew that he was going to die on page one of Anansi Boys, which really doesn't give much away, since it's page one."
The story centers on a talent agent named Fat Charlie Nancy, who travels from London to Florida after his estranged father's death and discovers that he was in reality the god Anansi. He also learns that he has a living brother, Spider, who has inherited their father's gifts and love of mischief.
"People say, 'Is it a sequel to American Gods?'" Gaiman said. 'And I have to say, 'No, it's not.' ... It's a comic novel that's also a thriller and also a ghost story and also horror. I tried to put everything in there. And it's also the kind of novel that makes people feel good at the end. American Gods did a lot of things, but that wasn't one of them."
Dunst Confirms Spidey 3 Villains
irsten Dunst, who will reprise the role of Mary Jane Watson in Sam Raimi's upcoming third Spider-Man movie, has confirmed rumors that the sequel's villains will be Venom and Sandman, Zap2It reported. The report confirms widespread rumors that Thomas Haden Church and Topher Grace would play the villains, though Sony and Marvel have so far declined to comment.
"Maybe I wasn't supposed to say that," Dunst said while promoting her new movie Elizabethtown. When she checked with her representative, the rep assured her that the information has already been released, the site reported.
Dunst was less clear on who would play whom. At first, she said that Church would play Venom and Grace would take on Sandman. She then reversed herself when a journalist expressed disbelief. "It's the other way around," she reportedly said. "You're right."
Sandman is a career criminal whose irradiated body can turn into a sand-like substance, the site reported. Venom is an alien symbiote that once masqueraded as Spider-Man's costume before taking over the body of ex-reporter Eddie Brock, who has a beef with Spider-Man over a journalism-related embarrassment.
Alleged Star Wars Pirates Charged
ederal officials on Sept. 27 charged eight people with several crimes related to the illegal theft, copying and Internet distribution of Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, the Reuters news service reported.
Before the movie even opened last May, an illegally made copy could be downloaded from the Internet, and that copy was traced back to an editing facility in Lakewood, Calif.
The U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles filed a copyright infringement charge against Albert Valente, 28, of Lakewood for taking the Star Wars copy from the post-production house where he worked, the trade paper reported. He has pleaded guilty, the U.S. Attorney's office said in a statement. Six others were charged with copyright infringement and other misdemeanors for copying and distributing the Star Wars film that Valente took.
One defendant, Marc Hoaglin, 36, of Huntington Beach, Calif., was charged with a felony for putting the movie on the Web, where it could be downloaded by anybody. Hoaglin could face up to as much as three years in jail.
Separately, the U.S. Attorney charged Ronald Redding, 37, of Linthicum Heights, Md., with misdemeanor copyright infringement for giving away his screener copy of Million Dollar Baby, which was sent to him for Academy Awards voting. He agreed to plead guilty, the U.S. Attorney said. And Eric Wright, 43, of Bellflower, Calif., pleaded guilty to one count of trafficking in counterfeit DVD labels for films such as The Incredibles and Friday Night Lights. He faces up to five years in a federal prison.
Episode III DVD Details Revealed
ucasfilm announced that Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith will debut on DVD Nov. 1 in a two-disc set with a host of features, including a featurette titled Within a Minute. The newly produced feature offers insight into the complexity of creating a single 49-second sequence of Episode III, showcasing the amount of work that goes into one short sequence. The featurette was created from more than 600 hours of material gathered throughout the process of making Episode III and is hosted by producer Rick McCallum.
The DVD also includes deleted scenes, such as one showing Yoda's arriving on the swamp planet of Dagobah.
The DVD has a newly recorded audio commentary from director George Lucas and members of the movie's crew. New featurettes include The Chosen One and It's All for Real that look at Anakin Skywalker's transformation into Darth Vader and the creation of the stunts in the climactic lightsaber duel between Anakin Skywalker (Hyaden Christensen) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor).
Card Debuts Web Magazine
ultiple award-winning SF author Orson Scott Card told SCI FI Wire that he will be helming a new online genre fiction magazine, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. Although Card (Ender's Game) usually prefers print ventures, he decided on a magazine "that really uses the power of the Web," he said in an interview.
Medicine Show will include "special-value items," such as audio books, Card said. "In fact, [Card's short story] 'Mazer in Prison' has an audio production included for the price of the first issue," he said. The story, which will be downloadable as an MP3 file, will be read by Stefan Rudnicki, who won an Audie award for his performance of Card's novel Lost Boys.
Card said that he believes online magazines have benefits over print, such as a reduced price ($2.50 per issue, payable through PayPal), as well as the ability to add new material without adhering to a rigid publication schedule. Plus, "we can also serialize a novel in a single issue," he said. "A new section is added each week."
The current production schedule is quarterly, with columnists writing monthly. Each issue will contain a story set within Card's popular Ender's Game universe, though Card himself may not write each one.
Card said that he considers new writers to be the lifeblood of the magazine, and Medicine Show will be accepting submissions from authors after the first issue appears. "We're paying 6 cents a word, up to $500, in the ballpark for a professional publication," he said. The first issue of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show will debut Oct. 15.
Card Balances Projects
F luminary Orson Scott Card told SCI FI Wire that he is fulfilling a 30-year dream with the creation of his new Web magazine, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. "I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first," he said in an interview. "It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas."
The magazine title was chosen in a competition among his peers. "It's not the vanity project it sounds like," he said. "The 'Orson Scott Card' part is really about Google. We want the magazine to pop up first if somebody Googles my name. But around here we just call it The Intergalactic Medicine Show."
Card said that editing other people's stories improved his own writing. "When it's someone else's story, it's easier to see structural and technical problems that are invisible in your own," he said.
Card's other current projects include a novel now titled Empire. "It's being developed as part of an overarching game, movie and novel franchise with Donald Mustard [lead designer of GlyphX] and his game-design team," he said. Card has worked with Mustard before, when he wrote the script for GlyphX's popular video game Advent Rising. "I like working with people who are smarter than me," Card said.
Editing a start-up magazine while maintaining a writing career has its drawbacks, Card said. "I've got two ridiculously overdue stories," he said. "Editors are probably burning little effigies of me right now."
X Marks The Night Stalker
rank Spotnitz, executive producer of ABC's upcoming supernatural series Night Stalker, told SCI FI Wire that he's not surprised his new series has some similarities to The X-Files, which Spotnitz also produced. "I think it is just natural, because the original Night Stalker inspired The X-Files," he said in an interview. "And so it's not surprising that they would have some similar themes."
Night Stalker is inspired by the '70s classic series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which starred Darren McGavin as a seedy reporter who tended to run into vampires and monsters on his way to a story. "I grew up on this show, like [The X-Files creator] Chris [Carter]," Spotnitz said. "[I] loved this character. Even though Carl Kolchak's quite different than he was 30 years ago in this version; still, just to have that name and that history ... ."
Spotnitz's reimagining of the Night Stalker story has updated the main character, played by Stuart Townsend. He's a more serious Kolchak, searching for the answers to his wife's murder, which may just have something to do with a red mark that appears on the victims of a violent, possibly supernatural death. "I wanted something that had emotional and personal resonance for Kolchak," Spotnitz said. "He himself is suspected of murdering his wife. He believes something supernatural is responsible for it. He believes all the supernatural deaths that occur in the world are connected in some way, but he doesn't quite yet understand how. ... He's looking for that mark every week, but he's not always going to find it. But he's always looking for it, so it's going to lead him to all kinds of strange mysteries, scary mysteries, inevitably scary."
Beyond the scariness factor, Night Stalker will also mix in a little humor after the first episode, Spotnitz promised. "I just couldn't figure out how to put the humor in the pilot," he said. The first episode introduces us to Kolchak's world and explores the details of his wife's murder.
Spotnitz and his crew were also able to give a wink to the old series by inserting a digital shot of Darren McGavin as Kolchak into one of the pilot's early scenes. "We looked at the first Kolchak TV movie for shots of him [as the original character] that were framed and lit in such a way that we could go back to the negative," Spotnitz said. "There were only a handful of shots that were even eligible for that, but we found that one, and what McGavin's actually putting into his bag is a wooden cross for a vampire. We blew it up, and we digitally put him in the newsroom."
Subsequent episodes will also have a bit of fun. "The first episode after the pilot is about these people who are being attacked in an office building downtown, and their bodies are being mummified," Spotnitz said. "It's pretty cool and scary and fun. It feels a lot like the old Night Stalker. More than I even expected. It has a lot more humor than the pilot. I think you'll see most of the episodes have a lot more humor than what the pilot does."
The Oct. 6 episode is called "The Five People You Meet in Hell." "It was directed by Rob Bowman of X-Files," Spotnitz said. "It's about a Charles Manson-like cult leader who goes to jail and is blinded and put in solitary confinement. Now that he's lost his sight, and he's in solitary, he's able to focus his mind so he can manipulate people outside the prison walls to do terrible things. It's very, very scary." Night Stalker premieres Sept. 29 and will air Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Night Stalker Has Answers
rank Spotnitz, executive producer of ABC's upcoming Night Stalker, told SCI FI Wire that he had to figure out how the mystery would turn out before ABC made a commitment to pick up the show. "I have all the answers," Spotnitz said in an interview. "I had to write them all down for the network [laughs]. I had to prove that to them before they picked up the series. All the important questions in the show have already been asked in that pilot, and the life of the show—however many years I'm fortunate enough to do this—will be devoted to getting deeper into those questions, rather than raising new ones."
Spotnitz developed Night Stalker for ABC based on the 1970s TV movies and series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which starred Darren McGavin. Spotnitz saw it as an opportunity to delve back into the strange and bizarre after executive-producing The X-Files for several years.
"I think there needs to be a sense of reality when you approach this kind of storytelling, especially on network television," Spotnitz said. "It has to really persuade people who would not be inclined to watch this genre to give it a chance, to suspend their disbelief. So I wanted to ground it in reality as best I could. And one of the things I struggled with was how could it be that Carl Kolchak was a reporter for a newspaper and, first of all, managed to come across these things every week, and second, comes across them, and it doesn't change the world based upon his reporting. Because in the real world if a reporter for the L.A. Times or the New York Times came across a vampire even once, it would be worldwide international news that would change our understanding of the world we live in."
Once he figured out that out, Spotnitz set about working out how to keep his Night Stalker scares as personal as possible. "I love those 'Don't go in that house!' moments, but I like them when I know I would go in that house, too," he said. "I don't like them when it's like, 'Oh, come on. You'd never go in that house.' But I love it when it's, 'Of course you would do that. I would [go], too, if I were in that situation.' That’s what's haunting, and that's what would keep me awake at night after I watched the show."
In an effort to give this haunting new series an equally haunting look, a new type of digital camera is being used for the show. "There actually is a brand-new camera for some of the season's pilot, called Genesis by Panavision, that no one had ever used before," he said. "We were the first, and I believe Superman, filming in Australia with Bryan Singer, is the second to use it. It's a very exciting time, because it's like the revolution is going on with consumer cameras and digital photography that's happening on the professional side. [The camera is] great, because it picks up very, very low levels of light. So you don't have to have any artificial lighting at all. You can see way off. Like you're filming the city at night, and you can see way down the street. You can see clouds in the night sky, which on film, the sky is just black at night." Night Stalker premieres Sept. 29 in its regular Thursday 9 p.m. ET/PT timeslot.
Tales Erects Homeless Camp
he SF movie Southland Tales drew criticism from homeless people and others when it set up a fake homeless encampment set in the middle of downtown Los Angeles over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The movie erected tents, plastic tarps and old shopping carts stuffed with clothing, bottles and cans along the intersection of Hill and 4th streets for filming of the apocalyptic story set in L.A. in 2008.
Actors portraying homeless people inhabited the encampment as action scenes were shot Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Security guards were posted to shoo away real street people who hoped to scavenge through the props for recyclables and usable clothing, the Times reported.
Visiting Resonates For Kidman
icole Kidman, who just began filming the SF film The Visiting, said in a press conference in Washington last week that she was attracted to the project because of the personal dynamics between the lead character and her son. "I think it's just whether I respond to the themes of the movie," Kidman told reporters. "And I think particularly with this it was, I suppose, a theme that runs through a lot of my films, [which] is the love that a mother has for a child."
In The Visiting, Kidman plays a psychiatrist who discovers that the source of a mysterious epidemic that has been altering the behavior of humans is extraterrestrial, and that her son may be the key to stopping an invasion. Oscar-nominated German director Oliver Hirschbiegel is directing, under the supervision of The Matrix producer Joel Silver. The Visiting also stars Jeremy Northam (Gosford Park) and Daniel Craig (Layer Cake).
Kidman said that she feels the film is very topical in light of current events. "I think also now with what's happening, particularly in New Orleans, you see these families coming together and staying together and trying to find your children," she said. "The loss of a child, all of those are all things, are very, very powerful. And that's something that I respond to. ... So that's what I'm sort of feeding off at the moment." The Visiting is currently shooting in Baltimore and Washington for release in 2006.
Visiting Explores Fear
oel Silver, executive producer of the upcoming SF film The Visiting, said in a press conference that the film will rely on psychological manipulation rather than special effects. "This is about fear, this movie," he told reporters in Washington last week. "And it's not that much of a visual-effects picture. It's very smart. And I think that what [director Oliver Hirschbiegel] is doing is telling a really kind of insidious tale that has great resonance for today and is scary and threatening and an interesting way of telling a science-fiction thriller."
The Visiting, loosely based on author Jack Finney's original novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers, stars Nicole Kidman as a psychiatrist who discovers that her son may be the key to stopping a mysterious epidemic that has been altering the personalities of human beings. Jeremy Northam and Daniel Craig also star.
"This is a character-based movie," Silver added. "Oliver is very specific how he makes a picture. There's action in the movie, and there's tension in the movie, but it's not in that same kind of green-screen activity. So it's a very different kind of science-fiction picture. It's really more intellectual and very smart. And I think what Oliver is intending to do is something people haven't seen before, and that always excites me."
Hirschbiegel, whose last film, Downfall, was nominated last year for an Academy Award for best foreign film, reiterated in the same press conference that the film will explore the theme of fear. "Everybody understands about fear," he said. "The key fear we're dealing with here is the fear to lose someone loved and not to be loved anymore, to find a world waking up that has changed completely. Like, the people you cared for are not the people they used to be. ... Then, on another scale, we all know that in any civilization, fear by the people who were in power was always used to get the people to do what they wanted. And, of course, there's references to that in this movie as well." The Visiting is currently shooting in Baltimore and Washington for release in 2006.
SF Solitaire Develops
arner Independent Pictures has hired writer Greg Widen (Highlander) to adapt Kelley Eskridge's science-fiction thriller Solitaire for Cherry Road Films to produce, Variety reported.
Set in a future where the software and pharmaceutical industries are about to merge into one powerful entity, Solitaire centers on a female computer engineer who is wrongly sent to an experimental prison, the trade paper reported.
The producers are Cherry Road co-presidents Kendall Morgan and Bo Hyde. Cherry Road head of development Tommaso Fiacchino, who brought in the project, will executive-produce.
Cherry Road is currently producing the SF movie Southland Tales, directed and written by Richard Kelly, which wraps shooting this week. Universal will distribute the film in the United States. Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Jin-Shei Speaks To Women
F author Alma Alexander, whose novel The Secrets of Jin-shei has been nominated for an Endeavour Award, told SCI FI Wire that since the book's release, she has been inundated with comments, mail and blogs from fans about their discovery of Jin-shei, which refers to women's pledging lifelong sisterhood to non-related women. Alexander based her concept on a Chinese principle called Jiebai Zhimei. "My readers have actually been taking this concept out of the story and into the world," she said in an interview. "There is a need out there, and I seem to have given it a name, a shape. I'm humbled by the depth of the response to this book, and very proud of it."
The story takes place in a fictional China: fictional because Alexander has never visited the country. She created her China by reading everything she could about the country. Her extensive research has paid off. "I've been asked by at least one person who has been to China and has seen real locations like Peking and the Forbidden City and the like, whether I've ever been there, because I have the sense of the place down very well," she said.
Alexander was born Alma Hromic in Yugoslavia ("Alexander" is based on her middle name, Aleksandra) and raised in various African countries before settling in Washington. This background has not provided material for a book, but Alexander said she is in discussion with her editors to write an historical fantasy drama based on Yugoslavia. In the meantime, her next project is The Embers of Heaven, to be released in January in Australia and New Zealand and in Great Britain in February. There is no American publisher as of yet, she said, but companies are reading it. Embers is set in the same world as Jin-shei, but 400 years later. Alexander does not consider it a sequel.
The Endeavour Award honors outstanding published SF or fantasy by a Pacific Northwest author. It will be presented at OryCon in November and carries a $1,000 prize.
Ghost Scares Up Ratings
he Sept. 23 premiere of CBS's Ghost Whisperer scored well with audiences, drawing 11.4 million and a 2.9 rating, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The audience for the 8 p.m. ET/PT show grew by nearly 1 million viewers from its first half-hour to its second.
Following at 9 p.m., CBS lost some momentum with the second airing of Threshold, which drew 9 million viewers and a 2.6 rating, a drop from its Ghost lead-in, but on par with last week's audience for its two-hour premiere.
Meanwhile, over on ABC, the network will postpone the Sept. 28 premieres of its 8-9 p.m. comedies George Lopez and Freddie for one week to make room for a rerun of the season premiere of Lost, which will lead into the drama thriller's second episode at 9 p.m. ABC said it decided to repeat the Lost season opener after receiving calls from viewers who missed part of the episode because of hurricane-related news pre-emption.
Gromit Tones Down Accents
nimator Nick Park told SCI FI Wire that he went back to tone down the British accents of his stop-motion-animated characters to make his upcoming Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit movie more accessible to U.S. audiences.
"We screened it for British children, and we screened it for American children, and we made some changes after that," Park said about the first feature film about the cheese-obsessed man and his clever dog. The characters, made from plasticine (or molding clay), have already won two Academy Awards for best animated short, but this is the first time they appear in a feature-lenth film. And that made Park nervous.
"I wasn't sure how it was going to translate in the longer feature-length format," Park said in an interview. "We kept changing things until the last minute, until last week, in fact, before we brought the film over. We had to change some of the language, tone down some of the British accents and make them speak more clearly so the American audiences could understand it all better. That way people can't just call it a quirky British movie."
Were-Rabbit is nonetheless quirky, as the lovable characters try humanely to curb an epidemic of rabbits, inadvertently creating a giant "were-rabbit" in the process. Some of the British social elite in the film are voiced by Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes. Park brought his two famous 10-inch-tall characters with him for his interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto.
"Some things were not funny enough," Parks said. "Some of the jokes didn't fit. So we lost some animation. We'll have some of it on the DVD in the director's cut."
Park foresees another Wallace & Gromit feature and possibly a sequel to his last hit film, Chicken Run. But he said that doesn't know how the animated process can become any less time-consuming. And he refuses to use computer animation. To create five minutes of the stop-motion footage, 250 people manipulate the characters and film them for months. It took Park and his team 18 months to shoot the principal photography for Were-Rabbit, and it's been five years since Chicken Run. Were-Rabbit is being released by DreamWorks on Oct. 7.
Bonham Carter Loves Puppet Toons
elena Bonham Carter, who voices characters in both the upcoming Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and the current Corpse Bride, told SCI FI Wire that it's pure coincidence that she's in two stop-motion-animation movies being released within weeks of each other. In Wallace & Gromit, Bonham Carter voices Lady Tottington; in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, she's the title character. "That tells you how long ago I started these, and how long they take," Bonham Carter said of the films' timing. "It's a good indication of the length of these projects, because I started when I was pregnant with Billy [the child she had with director Burton in October 2003]. So I was inappropriate for any kind of other part, with my body. So that's why it was something that sort of fit."
Stop-motion animation is a slow and painstaking process. The people who did Wallace & Gromit last made the feature Chicken Run five years ago, and Burton did The Nightmare Before Christmas 12 years ago.
"It's almost a monopoly on stop-motion," Bonham Carter said. "In fact, there were only two stop-motion features going on, and I got parts in both of them. How I did that, I had to audition. It is a different kind of acting, yet how I approach them is exactly like the sort of approach to real life, or whatever normal movies are called. I just treated each part the same: the characters, the choices and everything."
Bonham Carter, who was promoting both films at the Toronto International Film Festival, said she went overboard in her preparation for both parts. "I even learned the lines I didn't have to," she said. "I just really went full overboard with it. I found it easier to learn my lines, rather than read it. You can't, you just have to act as much as you would, even though you're not actually being filmed. But it's your voice. You still have to act, basically."
Bonham Carter declined to pick a favorite between the two films. But she said that the Wallace & Gromit team was "much more anal" than the Corpse Bride people. "But they're lovely," she said. "All animators are anal."
The biggest benefit of doing animated movies is avoiding the time-consuming costuming and makeup that Bonham Carter has suffered in past films, from Frankenstein to Burton's Planet of the Apes. "It doesn't matter what you look like," she said about animation voice work. "That's what's good about being cast in it. It doesn't matter what time you wake up. It doesn't matter: no hair, no makeup. It's great."
Corpse Bride is now playing. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit opens Oct. 7.
Bonham Carter Bit Into Wallace
elena Bonham Carter, who voices the character of Lady Tottington in the upcoming stop-motion-animated movie Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, told SCI FI Wire that she sent for the teeth she wore as a talking chimp in Planet of the Apes as soon as she saw the clay model of her character.
"I looked at her and noticed she's got teeth, and I thought, 'I've got teeth at home,'" Bonham Carter said in an interview. "And I used my teeth to help with the character."
In Wallace & Gromit, Bonham Carter voices the upper-crust hostess of the Giant Vegetable Competition, which is being ravaged by rabbits. The brilliant inventor Wallace and his clever dog, Gromit, come to their aid.
Nick Park, the creator of the characters and co-director of the movie, said he wasn't sure that Bonham Carter's false teeth were a good idea at first. But when he was sold after hearing her voice. "She called home and got her prosthetic teeth from Planet of the Apes, and we then added more teeth to the puppet," said Park, who directed this first Wallace & Gromit movie with Steve Box. "She didn't keep them in when we recorded, because she couldn't speak well with them in, but it inspired the character."
The teeth were fit for Bonham Carter when she played Ari the chimp in the Apes remake, which was directed by Bonham Carter's boyfriend Tim Burton in 2001. The teeth also helped her in the role she played in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which she played Charlie's mother.
"I didn't know what to do with the part in Charlie," Bonham Carter said. "It wasn't much of a part, really, so I used teeth for that, too. I looked like a chipmunk in the outtakes, but I have a new philosophy: When in doubt, pop teeth in!" Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit opens Oct. 7.
Were-Rabbit Full Of Homages
ick Park, co-director of the upcoming stop-motion-animated film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, told SCI FI Wire that he used his vast love and knowledge of classic movies to make many film references in the horror spoof. Park and his team of 250 animators studied the creatures and characters in classic horror films, from Alfred Hitchcock to the monster movies of the 1930s.
"Yes, we have some references to Hitchcock, [and] King Kong and Ray Harryhausen references, of course," Park said. "We looked at Lon Chaney Jr., The Wolf Man, werewolf movies, the Universal horror pictures of the 1930s, the classic Invisible Man, and many of the secondary characters in them, like the priest or vicar, the skeptical policeman, those kind of characters."
In Were-Rabbit, Peter Sallis voices the cheese-loving hero, Wallace, as he did in two earlier Oscar-winning shorts, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. Wallace's faithful, brainy companion, Gromit the dog, doesn't speak. Academy Award nominees Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter give voice to the roles of the aristocratic Victor Quartermaine and Lady Tottington, characters also based in part on those in earlier movies.
"For the aristocracy, for the characters that Helena and Ralph voice, we looked at films like Barry Lyndon and the pomposity of many of the characters played by Charles Laughton, or the dashing aristocrat like Orson Welles, or the characters in Wuthering Heights," Park said. "Helena and Ralph really put a lot into their characters."
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit will be released Oct. 7.
Gromit Was Almost a Cat
n a disturbing revelation, Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park told SCI FI Wire that his lovable, expressive dog Gromit was initially supposed to be a cat. "He was going to be a cat at first, and then when I was molding him, I found out it was simply easier to make a dog," said Park, who created the Academy Award-winning stop-motion-animated duo of a cheese-loving Englishman and his brilliant dog. "They became a couple, like an elderly husband and wife, and Gromit is the long-suffering wife, always rolling his eyes."
Even more disturbing, when Park decided to make Gromit a dog, he first gave him a voice. "I had Gromit with a Scooby-Doo kind of voice, a bit gravelly," Park said. "In the drawings he always had a mouth."
Eventually, Park decided against that, and the current Gromit doesn't speak and has no mouth. "He became more intelligent that way, and it became more of a dog-and-man relationship," Park said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the characters' first full-length movie, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, screened.
Park brought the actual 10-inch clay Wallace and Gromit figures to the interview with him in Toronto and showed how the dog's expression could change with a bit of manipulation of an eyebrow. "You look into an animal's face and wonder what he is thinking, and that is the idea," Park said.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, featuring the voices of Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, is scheduled for release on Oct. 7.
Bean: Hill Is A Wrap
ean Bean (The Island) told SCI FI Wire he has two days left at the end of September to finish the video-game-inspired movie Silent Hill. "It seems like a long time, but we still haven't finished that," Bean said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival. "We've got two days left on it. It's going really well. You've got this guy, Christophe Gans, who's quite bizarre. He's quite crazy, very eloquent and poetic."
French director Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) is adapting the Japanese horror video game for the big screen. In Silent Hill, Bean plays the father of a girl who needs to confront her fears. She goes to a "very creepy, murky and dangerous world, which is all in different time levels, different planes," Bean said. His character is stuck in the real world trying to find his wife and daughter. The way Gans shoots, there are lots of cobwebs, fog and moody atmosphere, Bean said. (Bean also appears in the upcoming horror movie The Dark, as well as North Country and Jodie Foster's current movie, Flightplan.)
"[Gans] is quite an inspiration, as Jodie was," Bean said. "She was an inspiration. It's always very thrilling to be working with someone like that, [who] believes in what we're doing. But this guy is wonderful. He's got a great vision, a great eye, and a bit like Peter Jackson. He captures things in a very strange way." Bean played Boromir in Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Although he has worked on the Silent Hill film project for more than half a year, he confessed that he has yet to play the PlayStation 2 game. "I'm not very good with computer games, but my daughters are," Bean said.
SCI FI Green-Lights Eureka
CI FI Channel has given a green light for production of 13 hours of a new original series, Eureka, a drama about a seemingly ordinary town whose residents lead extraordinary lives. The order includes a two-hour pilot for the series, which will star Colin Ferguson, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Greg Germann, Joe Morton, Debrah Farentino, Maury Chaykin, Matt Frewer and Jordan Hinson, the network announced.
Eureka is set in a picturesque Pacific Northwest town that is shrouded in secrecy, a community of scientific geniuses assembled by the government to conduct top-secret research, where anything can happen. And does.
The series is executive-produced by Andrew Cosby (Haunted) and co-executive-produced by Jamie Paglia; production is slated to begin in January 2006 in Vancouver, Canada, for a summer 2006 premiere. Peter O'Fallon directed the pilot. In it, federal marshal Jack Carter (Ferguson) wrecks his car in the town of Eureka while transporting a teenage fugitive. Stranded, Carter quickly discovers that Eureka is not all it appears when a child vanishes in the catastrophic aftermath of an accident caused by a creation of one of the town's eccentric residents. Instinctively, he inserts himself into the investigation, working alongside the town's sheriff (Maury Chaykin) and an agent from the Department of Defense (Richardson-Whitfield). As the case unfolds, Carter is let in on one of the country's best-kept government secrets: Eureka is a haven created for the world's greatest minds to live, work and create. But, unknown to most, mystery, conspiracy and long-simmering secrets lurk just beneath the surface of this seemingly idyllic town.
Time Ranges Far And Wide
ew York-based SF author Richard Bowes told SCI FI Wire that his new book, From the Files of the Time Rangers, is a "mosaic novel," an integrated collection of several short stories, some of which first appeared on SCIFI.COM's SCI Fiction page. The book, featuring time travelers who patrol the "time stream," ranges far and wide, from Greco-Roman times to the election of the U.S. president. Bowes has also created an early 1960s pulp SF writer named Ignace as one of his characters.
"When Ignace is speaking, he speaks in the voice of the old Jewish writers and newspapermen that I knew when I first came to New York City," Bowes said in an interview. Bowes couches the story in the style of that pulp writer. "That was such a kick to do," he said. "I was happy to see that those parts in which I wrote as Ignace were part of my subconscious. It was exactly the way he would have written it."
Bowes said that he bases his work in part on personal experience. "All fiction is [a] method of turning experience into metaphor," he said. "Some people's personal experience would be the scientific method." He added: "Gregory Benford is a well-thought-of scientist who writes SF, but often sets it within the context of the life of scientists. It's hard SF, but it's also autobiographical."
Time Rangers is personal for a different reason, Bowes said. "We all travel in time. The world I grew up in has largely disappeared and is now an historical period. Some of it is regrettable. And some of it, good riddance."
Previous works by Bowes have won the World Fantasy Award and the Lambda Award, as well as two Nebula nominations. "I was especially happy with the Lambda Award [which honors gay, lesbian and transgendered fiction], an award outside the genre," Bowes said. "People have told me it's the only fantasy and science fiction that they've read."
New Smallville Season Will Surprise
lfred Gough, executive producer of The WB's Smallville, told SCI FI Wire the upcoming fifth season will take Clark (Tom Welling), Chloe (Allison Mack) and Lana (Kristin Kreuk) into a brave new frontier: college. The college environment will "open up the storytelling, getting into some stories with some more adult themes. Bigger themes. Even Superman themes," Gough said in an interview.
Gough added: "You'll see the Fortress of Solitude. ... What's in that spaceship is also going to be very interesting. It will propel the show in a new direction. You're going to see Lex [Michael Rosenbaum] and Clark much more at odds this year. You'll see Lana and Clark together. And I think you'll see Chloe and Clark become much better friends. She'll reveal that she knows the secret pretty early on, so that's sort of a bond for their friendship. And it's interesting, because your best friend knows the secret. Your girlfriend doesn't. And then there will be some interesting things going on with the parents, too. Lionel [John Glover] is up to no good, as usual."
Smallville will also visit Metropolis more, Gough said. "Then we're going to do an episode where we meet a young Aquaman," he added. But the biggest news is that James Marsters will play Brainiac for at least seven episodes, he said. "You'll see him in the premiere, but his stories kick in around episode four."
All the regulars will return, except one, Gough said. "Everyone but Jensen Ackles, who, of course, got hit by a meteor and moved to Tuesday nights on a new show [laughs]." Ackles, who played Jason Teague on Smallville, stars in The WB series Supernatural. Smallville moves to its new 8 p.m. ET/PT Thursday timeslot, starting Sept. 29.
Book Auction Raises $90,000
n auction raised $90,000 for the right to be named a character or place or thing in books by best-selling authors such as SF writer David Brin, Stephen King and Lemony Snicket, the Associated Press reported. The money goes to the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting freedom of information, expression and petition. It's the group's largest single fund-raising event.
The auction, which began Sept. 1 and ended Sept. 25, offered up 19 authors and attracted bids from hundreds of fans across the country, the AP reported.
King drew the largest bid. Pam Alexander of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., spent $25,100 to get her brother's name, Ray Huizenga, in King's upcoming novel Cell, which King calls "a violent piece of work." The new horror story focuses on a set of rampaging zombies controlled by cell phones.
The most unusual offering was probably from Brin: "How about something original? Let the bidder choose between: The name of a rogue moon on a collision course with a doomed planet, an exotic and gruesome disease of unknown origin, or an entire species of wise, ancient extraterrestrials." The winning bid: $2,250.
And Lemony Snicket offered bidders the chance to be "an utterance" by Sunny Baudelaire in the 13th book of his Unfortunate Events series. "Pronunciation and/or spelling may be slightly 'mutilated.'" The utterance cost the unidentified bidder $6,300.
Disney Dives Into Marines
alt Disney Pictures has set Brent Maddock and Steve Wilson (Tremors) to write an untitled film about the Navy Marine Mammal Program, Variety reported. They'll be writing dialogue for otters, sea lions and dolphins, as the film will be told from the point of view of the animals being trained for military rescue operations, the trade paper reported.
The movie will merge two pitches bought by the studio on the subject. One was for a live-action film set up by producer Patrick Aiello, with Mark Ciardi and Gordon Gray's Mayhem Pictures. The other was for an animated film hatched by I Am Sam director Jessie Nelson and Nina Laden, an author of children's books. All five will produce.
The film will likely be live action, but could be a computer-animation project. The story is set at the San Diego Marine Mammals base, where the Navy trains animals to rescue downed pilots, protect ships and do other underwater stunts humans can't.
007 Field Narrows
ariety reported that the field of actors under consideration to replace Pierce Brosnan as James Bond has narrowed to Daniel Craig (Layer Cake), Henry Cavill (a contender for Superman), Sam Worthington and Goran Visnjic (E.R.). Screen tests are being completed this week, the trade paper reported.
The lack of big names results from the producing Broccoli family's unwillingness to break precedent and pay gross points to a 007, eliminating such rumored stars as Clive Owen from the Bond derby, the trade paper reported. They'll surely get their Bond for a fraction of the $25 million or so paid on the last film to Brosnan before he was dumped. Martin Campbell starts production in January on the next Bond movie, Casino Royale, for Sony.
Game Touts Magazine
new "alternate-reality game" appears to have begun on the Internet at the Now Playing Magazine Web site. The site displays a yellow arrow with the legend "What counts? ywn7wp SMS To: US 1-646-270-5537" and a URL for "yellowarrow.net."
When readers send a text message of the code "ywn7wp" to the telephone number (646) 270-5537, a text reply returns in a couple of minutes directing callers to the starting point of the game.
The game appears to be the same one hinted at in an ad on page 12 of the current fall issue of Now Playing Magazine, which coincidentally features an article on alternate-reality games entitled "Meet the Puppet Masters."
Author Is Himself A Healer
F author Michael Blumlein told SCI FI Wire that he drew on his experience as an internist and teacher of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center, for his new book, The Healer. In it, Payne is a member of a minority offshoot of humanity called the Grotesques who, among other traits, have the power to heal people. The side effect of this power is a mysterious burnout called "The Drain."
"From time to time I do feel drained," Blumlein said in an interview about his own exhaustion after working at the medical center. "It's an occupational hazard, probably for many occupations, but in medicine maybe more than most. Giving is so central to how I practice: giving attention, giving help, giving advice. It's a privilege to be able to do this, but it can be tiring. What makes it possible, besides the occasional vacation, is the satisfaction of seeing someone get better and knowing (or at least imagining) that you played a part in that."
Blumlein holds a medical degree, but does not practice full-time. Still, it can be a challenge for him to find time to write. He has accomplished this by writing on weekends, days he's not at the clinic and early in the morning on days he is. "I have a very busy life. I work hard," he said. "I do wish sometimes that it could be easier, but I'm not prepared to give up either of my passions, medicine or writing."
Since he intimately understands the subject matter, it may not surprise readers to know that Payne shares many of Blumlein's views from more than 30 years in medicine. The views characters express in the novel about religion, class distinction and power dynamics in the world are also those of the author. But Blumlein said that he does not mean to be preachy. He proudly points to a comment from noted SF author Ursula K. Le Guin: "Michael Blumlein takes the literalized metaphors of science fiction to an entirely new place: the illness and the health of the human body. His novel is a study of power, but not mere political power or technological power; what it wonderfully imagines and examines is the healer's power, the gift of curing and the responsibility and the mystery of that gift."
Zellweger Tops Potter
enee Zellweger will star in Miss Potter, a biographical movie about children's fantasy author Beatrix Potter, for David Kirschner Productions and Phoenix Pictures, Variety reported. Ewan McGregor is in talks to play Norman, Potter's publisher and love interest, the trade paper reported.
Chris Noonan, who has not helmed a feature since 1995's Babe, will direct a script by Richard Maltby Jr. Shooting is slated to begin on location in the United Kingdom in March.
Director Bruce Beresford and Cate Blanchett had been previously attached to the project.
Miss Potter explores the life of the author of such beloved children's books as The Tale of Peter Rabbit and her struggle for independence in Victorian England. The live-action movie will have some animated elements.
USA Orders 4400 Third Season
SA Network is bringing back The 4400 for a third season, Variety reported. Production on 13 new episodes will begin next year for a summer 2006 premiere, the trade paper reported.
The SF drama's second season ranked as summer's number-one cable show among adults aged 18-49, better than F/X's The Closer and The Shield. Though down from the first season's ratings, when The 4400 was presented as a limited five-episode event, the season maintained a solid average of 3.7 million total viewers. The first season also received an Emmy nomination for best miniseries.
Ira Steven Behr, Scott Peters, Maira Suro and Perry Simon executive-produce the show.
Cast members Billy Campbell, Joel Gretsch and Jacqueline McKenzie are all expected to return for the third season, the trade paper reported.
USA Network is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Paradise Takes A Long Road
F author Jerry Oltion, whose novel Paradise Passed has been nominated for an Endeavour Award, told SCI FI Wire that the nomination caps a 22-year struggle, with some hard lessons learned along the way. It took him eight years to finish the first draft, because he believed people who told him the religious thesis of the novel—that faith is dangerous and religion is the antithesis of understanding—was dangerous. After several attempts to tone it down, Oltion decided he wasn't being true to the story he envisioned, so he wrote it the way he wanted.
Then came 14 years of shopping the manuscript to editors. Several suggested rewrites, and Oltion complied, but no one bought the work. "I got all sorts of reasons, ranging from 'The sales force wouldn't know what to do with it' to 'We don't want the kind of controversy this could spark,'" Oltion said. "One editor said it matched her own ideology, but not her boss', and she didn't want to put her job in jeopardy. That sort of confession usually came out during one-on-one discussions at conventions. On paper, the reasons were more like, 'Sorry, not for us.' It really opened my eyes to the hidden forces at work in the publishing world. Beginning writers think the only thing they have to do is please an editor, but I learned that editors can't always buy what they want."
Finally, Oltion found a buyer in Wheatland Press. When he held his work in book form, he cried. "It was everything I had hoped it would be when I started writing it, and two decades of struggle just made it all the more joyous when it finally came together," he said. And now he has his nomination. The Endeavour Award honors outstanding published SF or fantasy by a Pacific Northwest author. It will be presented at OryCon in November and carries a $1,000 prize.
"It's really exciting to receive this kind of recognition for a book that means so much to me," Oltion said. "I've always thought it was a great book, but it took such a long time to find a publisher for it that I began to wonder if I was deluding myself. So this nomination, coupled with the fan mail I've gotten, restores my faith in the book, and in my reason for writing it."
SCI FI Summer Soars
CI FI Channel reported its highest ratings ever for the summer, with its SCI FI Friday night block of prime-time original programming ranking the channel as the number-one cable network among adults aged 18-49 and 25-54 for the entire third quarter. SCI FI Channel averaged more viewers in those demographics on Fridays than even The WB or UPN.
The SCI FI Wednesday block of alternative reality series also scored well for SCI FI, delivering double- and triple-digit increases among young adults. And the channel's Saturday action-movie franchise did well, with Pterodactyl pulling in more than 3.1 million viewers to become the highest-rated original movie in SCI FI history.
SCI FI's total day ratings for the third quarter saw an 11 percent increase in viewers aged 25-54, a 12 percent increase in those aged 18-49 and a 12 percent jump in those aged 18-34 over the same quarter a year ago.
The Sept. 16 season finale of Stargate SG-1 and a new episode of Battlestar Galactica were the top two cable entertainment programs among adults aged 25-54 that night. A week later, the summer finale of Battlestar Galactica drew 2.3 million viewers and became the top entertainment program on cable for the night among viewers aged 25-54 and was also the only non-news program to finish within cable's top 10 among that demographic.
Alba Dreams of Jeannie
essica Alba hasn't given up her dream of starring in a film version of the 1970s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, according to ComingSoon.net. While promoting her new film Into the Blue in New York, Alba told the site that she has had a few meetings with Sony, which owns the rights to the project, but she is still waiting on a completed script. "I've definitely met a couple times with Sony and we've talked about it," Alba said. "The script is just not in the shape that I would want it to be in if I was going to do it. I want to do the show and I want the charm of the show. I don't want to do a version of the modern thing. No. People want to see Jeannie, and so that's all the conversations have been about."
Alba also talked about the kind of leading man she would like to see in the role of Major Nelson, played by Larry Hagman in the series. "It needs to be a two-hander," she said. "It needs to be a very strong leading man, who is funny and all the things that you love about Larry Hagman. He's beautiful and he's unassuming, and then you need to have a Jeannie, who's just a little spitfire, but is innocent and funny and wants to please her man."
Best-Seller Award Winners Named
he winners for The Book Standard's first annual Bestseller Awards, honoring the most commercially successful titles in 100 categories (as audited by Nielsen BookScan), have been announced. The winners of this year's awards were announced at The Book Standard Summit 2005 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on Sept. 22. Taking top honors for overall best-seller was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling, which sold 6.4 million copies in a single month. Potter also won in the audio books, juvenile fiction and hardcover categories. A list of other genre winners follows:
Adult Fiction: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Comics and Graphic Novels, Manga: .hack//Legend of the Twilight, Vol. 3 by Tatsuya Hamazaki
Comics and Graphic Novels, Superheroes: Batman: Hush, Vol. 1 by Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, Scott Williams
Debut Novels (published during award timeframe): The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Fantasy: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Horror: Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
Mass-Market Paperback: Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
Romance: Blue Dahlia (In the Garden, book one) by Nora Roberts
Romance, Fantasy: Blue Dahlia (In the Garden, book one) by Nora Roberts
Romance, Time Travel: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Sci-Fi: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Poetry, Adult: The Odyssey by Homer
A complete list of the winners in all categories has been posted on the Web.
Zellweger Has Eye On Remake
enee Zellweger is attached to star in a remake of the Pang brothers' psychological thriller The Eye, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The original 2002 Hong Kong thriller, titled Jian Gui, centered on a woman who sees more than she bargained for when she regains her vision after a cornea transplant.
Tom Cruise, who co-starred with Zellweger in Jerry Maguire, is producing the film. Hideo Nakata, who directed the Japanese horror hit Ringu, as well as the the English-language remake The Ring and its sequel, has signed on to direct. The studio is targeting an early 2006 start date, the trade paper reported.
Cherry Producing New SF Pilot
arc Cherry, who created the Emmy award-winning series Desperate Housewives, is working on a new SF pilot for ABC along with Don Mancini, creator of the horror franchise Child's Play, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Cherry, who will executive-produce the new series, described the one-hour suspense drama as Touched by an Angel meets Quantum Leap.
The show, titled Kill Switch, centers on a woman who is executed for killing her daughter's murderer and then enters a sort of purgatory, wherein every week she finds herself in the body of someone about to be killed. It's up to her to figure out who the murderer will be and prevent it from happening, the trade paper reported. "Instead of a whodunit, it's a who-will-do-it," Cherry said.
Mancini, who is writing the pilot and will also executive-produce, told the trade paper he took the project to Cherry because its sensibility was similar to Desperate Housewives. "The tone isn't exactly like Desperate Housewives" he said. "But it has humor and wit in it. [It] seemed like something in his wheelhouse."
Screen Finds Ghost In Machine
F author Justina Robson told SCI FI Wire that her novel Silver Screen tackles the philosophical issue of where life ends and machine begins. "That is one of the $64 million questions," Robson said in an interview. Silver Screen is now being released in the United States six years after its original British publication.
Robson said that some people want to define life as a sum of processes functioning together in a biological machine that is the human body. "Yet not everyone is happy with defining life as simply the sum of all these processes, and this is because, in human terms, we want to take our consciousness and experience into account, too," she said. "They are part of life, perhaps emergent properties of it. So the question was, as I saw it: Can those be emergent properties of non-living systems [that] mimic lifeforms such as humans? And then I think you have to realize that if something can mimic us that well, even if it does not do so biologically, then it's possible there is no significant difference between it and us. Does physical structure matter, if the output of two different things is indistinguishable? In Silver Screen, this is the big question. The A.I.s don't replicate human biology, but they generate human behaviors; wherefore not therefore human?"
Robson said that she is aware this sounds like questions explored earlier in works by SF authors William Gibson and Philip K. Dick. One reader even accused Robson of stealing all her ideas from Gibson, which stung the author. She said that she has read only Gibson's Burning Chrome and Neuromancer and didn't find anything similar to her work. In fact, Robson's antagonist, Roy, is her response to Roy Batty from Dick's short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the inspiration for Rutger Hauer's replicant character in the film Blade Runner, which was based on the story.
"My Roy is a human aspiring to machine existence, which is fused, for him, with notions of divinity and transcendence," Robson said. "My Roy is quite anti-human. His counterpart, the heroine Anjuli, is strongly human, but regards herself as a machine because of her perfect memory. I was trying the human/machine thing out from all angles."
Silver Screen was the first novel Robson wrote and the second to be released in the United States, after Natural History, which was published earlier this year. Lou Anders, the publisher at Pyr who is releasing Silver Screen, said that he was impressed with Robson's work after he read it. "I thought [it was] brilliant; hard SF with make-you-think concepts, plenty of action and a strong feminist angle, without losing appeal to either gender," Anders said. "She's a force, and I expect her to be a major player in the genre."
Next up for Robson is Living Next Door to the God of Love, which she describes as "a book into which I poured pretty much everything I had creatively bottled up in me since I was in my teens." Stateside, her novel Mappa Mundi will debut next year.
Sarah's Raver Does Double Duty
im Raver, who stars in Lifetime's upcoming original movie Haunting Sarah, told SCI FI Wire she appears in nearly every frame of the film, and half the time she's in it twice, playing identical twin sisters Erica and Heather Rose. "It's a story about two sisters that have to deal with a terrible loss," Raver (24) said in an interview. "It's an interesting concept. ... How far do you go with wanting your child back? And that's where it kind of crosses that line into the supernatural. So it's their journey, their relationship."
In Haunting Sarah, Raver plays a twin who loses her young son in an accident, while the other twin's daughter begins acting strangely. The two sisters find themselves switching belief systems when Heather, a pediatrician, begins to believe that her dead son might be trying to communicate with her. Meanwhile, Erica, a professor of mythology, plays the skeptic.
"I think when you lose a child, pretty much you're willing to do anything to get that child back or the memory of that child back, to actually cross that line," Raver said. Still, with this film, "you're never quite sure. Do they just go into this kind of crazed insanity because of the pain? Or is it really true? It's a fine line."
Raver said that she welcomed the opportunity to play twins. "How many people get to play two separate people?" she asked. But she added that playing the two characters nearly drove her mad. "I felt like I was doing regional theater, where you're doing two plays at one time, where there's one rehearsal and then the other rehearsal. Except these people were interacting with one another," she said. "So that was just like, 'You're Heather. ... You're Erica. ... You're Heather. ... You're Erica.' [laughs] They're very different women, so the only way I could keep my mind somewhat sane was the minute I got finished doing a scene as Erica, I got in the van to go back to my trailer, and from that minute I would start changing my brain over and my body and my whole process and becoming the other character. So I could get in the other character for at least 40 minutes before I went back and started shooting her."
The cast and crew figured out a unique way to refer to Raver. "They started calling me Herica, like Heather/Erica," she said. "Forget the Kim Raver factor. No one could even deal with that, because three people was just way too many people [laughs]." Haunting Sarah will premiere on Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Briefly Noted
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Fox Animation has hired Matthew Weiss to write the script for a film based on the popular licensed character Emily the Strange, created by Rob Reger, Variety reported.
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NBC has given a pilot commitment to a new sitcom from Victor Fresco, creator of the short-lived Fox series Andy Richter Controls the Universe, about an average guy caught in an epic struggle between good and evil, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
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Ann-Margret has joined the cast of Walt Disney Pictures' The Santa Clause 3, playing the mother-in-law of Tim Allen's Santa, who is trying to save Christmas from Jack Frost while trying to keep his family life in order, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
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The Sept. 25 second-season premiere of ABC's hit series Desperate Housewives averaged a healthy 12.1 rating, or 28.2 million viewers, up a steep 36 percent from its premiere last September, but down a bit from last May's season finale, Variety reported.
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Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media will produce Bridge to Terabithia, a fantasy movie based on Katherine Paterson's children's novel, about a boy and girl who create the imaginary world of Terabithia, a land with giants, trolls and other magical beings, Variety reported.
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Fox 2000 and New Regency are teaming to produce a feature film adaptation of Ted Naifeh's comic book Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, the story of a young girl who moves into her eccentric uncle's house, where she's thrown into a world of warlocks, witchcraft and goblins, Variety reported.
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Demi Moore (Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle) and Ashton Kutcher (Dude, Where's My Car?) were married in the Los Angeles area on Sept. 24, Us Weekly and People magazines reported.
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