SFFWorld News – 9/14/08

 
SFFWorld News – 9/14/08

1) Stephen J. Cannell has plans to turn his 1980’s hit scifi television series The Greatest American Hero into a feature film. Attending a 25th anniversary reunion for the show held by the Screen Actors Guild, Cannell announced that a screenplay is already underway. Director Stephen Herek is reportedly attached to the project. The Greatest American Hero ran for three seasons in the U.S. on ABC, from 1981-83. It starred William Katt (currently guest-starring on Heroes,) as high school teacher Ralph Hinkley, who is selected by aliens to wear a superpowered suit to help people and save the world, but has to do so without an instruction manual. Connie Sellecca played Hinkley’s long-suffering girlfriend and Robert Culp played an FBI agent who forces Hinkley to work with the government. Cannell says the three actors would have major roles, not just cameos, in the feature film adaptation. The show has remained a cult sci-fi favorite at conventions and appears in syndicated re-runs. The Greatest American Hero has also been turned into a new comic book written by William Katt and his partner Chris Folino for their imprint Catastrophic Comics, with the first issue due in November. There may also be an online series of animated shorts for the show, voiced by Katt, Culp and Sellecca.

2) Evil Dead: The Musical, the adaptation of the Evil Dead films for the stage, will become a feature film – Evil Dead: The Musical in 3-D, it was announced at the Toronto Film Festival. The stage musical was created by Christopher Bond and choreographer Hinton Battle, with the blessings of the films’ creator-director Sam Raimi, who has also okayed the film version. It has drawn rave reviews for its bizarre songs and copious fake blood-letting all over its audiences.

3) George Clooney and Grant Heslov are producing the scifi war movie The Men Who Stare at Goats through their production company Mandate Pictures. Clooney will star and Heslov will direct from a script by Peter Straughan. The movie is an adaptation of journalist Jon Ronson’s novel of the same title, about a reporter in war-torn Iraq who stumbles upon a secret U.S. Army unit trying to create and use soldiers with psychic powers. The film may shoot in the fall with a release date in 2009.

4) Korean film studio CJ Entertainment has formed a deal with Universal Pictures and Focus Features to help produce and distribute world-wide the vampire film Thirst, to be directed by Park Chanwook. Thirst stars Kim Ok-bi, Song Kang-ho, and Sin Ha-kyun, and concerns a priest who participates in a medical experiment to find a cure for a deadly disease that goes horribly wrong. A tentative release date has been set for mid-2009.

5) Pontypool, the film adaptation of Tony Burgess’ much loved zombie novel Pontypool Changes Everything, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Directed by Bruce McDonald, the film concerns a radio-show host, played by Stephen McHattie who is also in up-coming Watchmen, who is stuck in his make-shift broadcasting station in the basement of a church while his small Ontario town is invaded by humans altered by an alien virus. The film will be distributed in Canada by Maple Pictures. The movie also stars Peter Mooney of Falcon Beach fame and Ashley Greene who is appearing in the up-coming vampire film Twilight.

6) Judge Robert Patterson in U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled on September 8 in favor of Warner Brothers Entertainment and author J.K. Rowling in their lawsuit over the publication of an unofficial encyclopedic companion to Rowling’s mega-huge Harry Potter book series. Potter fan Steven Jan Vander Ark had long maintained a popular fan website called the Harry Potter Lexicon, with Rowling’s acceptance. But when Vander Ark attempted to expand and publish a written version of the lexicon with Michigan-based publisher RDR Books for profit, Rowling, along with Warner Brothers who have ownership of the Harry Potter films, filed for an injunction, claiming the book contained substantial excerpts and copyrighted material from her books. The five month trial resulted in a decision that: “Plaintiffs have shown that the Lexicon copies a sufficient quantity of the Harry Potter series to support a finding of substantial similarity between the Lexicon and Rowling’s novels.” Publication of the book has been halted and Rowling and Warner Brothers were awarded damages of $6,750. RDR Books may attempt to appeal the ruling. Rowling plans to issue an official lexicon companion book to her series at a later time.

7) Leading SFF monthly magazines Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact, both owned by Dell Magazines, are getting a make-over. Effective as of their December 2008 issues, the magazines will go from digest size to a slightly wider and taller newsrack size, will have fewer pages of content but will remain at the same price. The move is supposedly due to declining circulations and increased production costs. Analog plans to shrink font sizes, so as to keep the same number of stories, but Asimov’s will lose room for about 4,000 words an issue, about the length of one short story.

8) Marc Gascoigne, formerly publisher for Solaris Books and Black Library in the U.K., has been hired to head up HarperCollins U.K.’s new SF imprint Angry Robot, launching in July 2009. HarperCollins will also continue its regular U.K. SFF imprint Harper Voyager. Angry Robot plans to sell titles directly to the consumer in print and digital form through its website as well as through booksellers and other direct mail venues. The imprint will publish 2-3 new books per month, primarily in paperback. It will also offer print-on-demand services for reprinted and out-of-print classics. 

9) Novelist Jeff Carlson’s Plague Year has been optioned for film by Jim McNally of Seven Seas Production. The SF novel concerns medical nanotechnology which breaks loose and devours all warm-blooded life below 10,000 feet elevation, causing human survivors to flee to high climes. It is the first in a planned trilogy published by Penguin Ace in North America; the sequel of which, Plague War, was released in August. Carlson won the Writers of the Future Award for his novelette “The Frozen Sky.”