Foaming at the mouth is more like it. Hollywood’s appetite for books has turned the New York publishing industry into an ant farm with agents, producers and scouts scurrying for properties. Studios have been book-happy for years, but they’ve never reached so deeply or so frantically into their pockets. Michael Crichton’s airline thriller “Airframe,” in stores this week, was sold to Disney in October for a record-breaking $8 million to $10 million. The spectacular deal brought gasps around Hollywood, but the author is producing the movie as well as writing the first draft of the screenplay.
Besides, it’s almost time to gasp over other deals. Tom Wolfe will let studios wrestle for his unpublished novel ““Chocolate City,’’ said to be about the fall of a Donald Trump-type mogul in Atlanta. And novelist Don DeLillo, whose end-of-the-century epic, “Pafko at the Wall,” brought a $1.7 million advance, has Hollywood so hot he’s already making demands: he’ll talk only to people who’ve actually read his 1,400-page manuscript and can say something intelligent about it. The nerve! Moviemakers aren’t the keenest critics. One film scout remembers the stampede for a newly discovered manuscript by “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott. “A producer called about the book, which Alcott wrote when she was very young,” he says. “He just had to know about it and I was trying to calm him down. And suddenly he said, “By the way, is it a period piece?'”
Part of what’s driving the current rush, obviously, is the success of the Crichton, Grisham and Clancy franchises. But literary works also have a certain snob appeal. And novels tend to make far richer source material than cheesy spec scripts. “Buy a book and you get a beginning, a middle and an end,” says one studio executive. Buy a spec script and you get, It’s “Pretty Woman” on an aircraft carrier! As literary agent Loretta Barrett puts it, “When you run out of gimmicky ideas, you have to go back to the original: the storyteller.”
Lately, Hollywood has been so enamored by the idea of books that producers can’t wait for them to actually become books. Twentieth Century Fox spent more than $1 million on a 19-page book outline called “Working on a Miracle,” about a man who manages to arrest his HIV. Paramount shelled out $1.2 million for a 16-page proposal of Philip Kerr’s “A Five Year Plan.” And producer Scott Rudin paid Michael Chabon $1.2 million for “The Golden Age,” based on a two-page letter. “I’m dreaming of a day when you only have to imagine a book to sell it,” says an agent. “It’s the easiest money in Hollywood.”
One reason studios are gobbling up properties faster is that they’re getting them faster. That’s partly because publishers are often owned by conglomerates with studios in L.A.: “Notes from editorial meetings at publishing companies now go directly to their sister studios,” says agent Ron Bernstein. And it’s partly because there’s a new breed of film scouts in New York who alert L.A. to new manuscripts. Scouts pounce on material in even the most larval state–which irritates agents. “They may feel they have a first draft of a project that’s not ready,” says one scout. “But the mandate from L.A. is “We don’t care. Is it something I have to worry about?'”
For authors, there’s a downside to Hollywood’s group-think mentality: if you’re not hot, you’re dead cold. Say somebody leaks a draft of your novel to a scout, and one assistant at one studio doesn’t like it. Suddenly, nobody will touch you. Game over. Says author Carcaterra, “If the book gets leaked, you lose whatever momentum you had. So we don’t send the book to anyone’s mailroom till it’s ready. Once it gets near a Xerox machine, you’re dead.”
All the hype and high blood pressure surrounding the acquisition of books can be bad for studios, too. “Here’s how it works,” says another film scout. “Some 23-year-old, perfectly intelligent girl with no gift for the movie business calls asking to see a book. Maybe she’s from DreamWorks. So the agent calls people and says, “DreamWorks is very interested.’ All these people around town think DreamWorks is bidding and, before you know it, it’s gone crazy. The book often ends up being bought by people who haven’t read it, don’t like it and don’t know what to do with it. “The Chamber’ was like that.” Ron Howard and Imagine Entertainment bought Grisham’s unwritten book for $3.5 million. When the first draft came in, Howard realized it wouldn’t work as a movie and dropped out. But because of its sizable investment, Imagine made a movie, hoping to break even. ““The Chamber’’ film was the first Grisham flop.
There are large issues in the ether here. Do we really want Hollywood and publishing in bed together? Are books getting worse as a result? Are movies getting any better? Ultimately, these are moot points because the two industries will never be torn asunder. “It used to be that the coasts were really separated,” says a studio executive. “We could read a manuscript and have time to think about it. Now, because of faxes and e-mail, we’re lucky if we have 20 minutes.” Twenty minutes is plenty of time to make a decision–a bad one, anyway.
