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MOVIES
Shawn Levy

Hollywood hits the books hard this fall

Brian Truitt
USA TODAY
Rosamund Pike, left, and Ben Affleck in 'Gone Girl.'

After a summer break of superheroes and transforming robots, Hollywood's hitting the books harder than ever this fall.

Cinema schedules are starting to resemble best-seller lists. Between now and the onslaught of Oscar-ready heavy-hitters arriving in November, Hollywood will release more than two dozen films based on books, with genres ranging from mystery novels (Liam Neeson as a private investigator in Lawrence Block's A Walk Among the Tombstones, out Sept. 19) to horror tomes (Daniel Radcliffe gets devilish in the Halloween-pegged Horns by Joe Hill, Oct. 31).

Author Gillian Flynn, who adapted her own wildly popular novel Gone Girl (Oct. 3), sees increasing appreciation for books by studios.

"It's a very good time to be a writer," she says. "As much as there are giant explosions in the summer, there seems to be an interest in moodier and more character-driven works at other times of the year."

One of the reasons why movie folks are doing their homework: "By adapting a best-selling novel, you've automatically got a high-profile script that helps entice big-name stars to your project," says Erik Davis of movie ticket website Fandango. "This, in turn, betters your chances for positive Oscar buzz in the fall season, when post-summer audiences are hungry for story rather than spectacle.''

"Movies need great stories, and oftentimes literature is the domain of great storytelling,'' adds Shawn Levy, director of the comedy This is Where I Leave You (Sept. 19), based on the Jonathan Tropper novel. "So Hollywood will take it wherever it can get it.''

Here are 10 highlights among the book-turned-movie fare hitting theaters this fall:

Tom Hardy in 'The Drop.'

The Drop (Sept. 12)

• Director: Michaël R. Roskam

Stars: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini

Author: Dennis Lehane

Plot: Brooklyn bartender Bob Saginowski (Hardy) finds an abandoned puppy in a garbage can, awakening something inside of him while romance — and criminal doings — loom.

Footnotes:The Drop started as a failed novel in 2000, then became a short story, then a screenplay and came back to being a novel released this year. "I've spent the better part of a decade checking in and out on Bob. He's family," says Lehane, adding that unlike the folks in his Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone works, Bob isn't that conflicted a guy. "It's an extremely difficult thing to write about somebody who is essentially good."


Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster, left), Thomas (Dylan O'Brein), Minho (Ki Hong Lee), Frypan (Dexter Darden) in 'The Maze Runner.'

The Maze Runner (Sept. 19)

Director: Wes Ball

Stars: Dylan O'Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Will Poulter

Author: James Dashner

Plot: Young Thomas (O'Brien) wakes up with no memory and is stuck in a village full of other boys, with their only escape seemingly being through a towering, danger-filled maze.

Footnotes: Ball, who makes a quick appearance in the film as the victim of a monstrous Griever, made a concerted effort to stick closely to Dashner's popular young-adult series. "The only little things we changed were things that needed to be changed on a cinematic level," Ball says. "All the fans who are looking for their favorite scenes, they are going to be in the movie."


Tina Fey and Jason Bateman in 'This is Where I Leave You.'

This is Where I Leave You (Sept. 19)

Director: Shawn Levy

Stars: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver

Author: Jonathan Tropper

Plot: Four siblings (Bateman, Fey, Driver and Corey Stoll) return with their families to their childhood home to bicker, reconnect and sit shiva following the death of their father.

Footnotes: The brother-sister relationship between Judd (Bateman) and Wendy (Fey) and their rooftop heart-to-hearts spoke to Levy's own life when he first read Tropper's 2009 novel. "There's an intimacy and a friction between brother and sister, whether you're kids or grownups, that is unique," Levy says. "The book is about many things — marriage, infidelity, adulthood, parents — but the movie is above all about the blessing of sibling-hood."


Eggs (center, voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright) is surrounded by his Boxtroll friends in the animated picture 'The Boxtrolls.'

The Boxtrolls (Sept. 26)

Directors: Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable

Stars (voices): Isaac Hempstead Wright, Elle Fanning, Ben Kingsley

Author: Alan Snow

Plot: A boy named Eggs (Wright), who's been raised by underground monsters clad in boxes, has to save his "family" from an above-ground threat.

Footnotes: There were several races of creatures Snow included in his 2005 book Here Be Monsters!, including Cabbageheads and Sea Cows. But in creating the stop-motion animated adventure, Annable gravitated toward the strange little Boxtroll creatures "who only emoted with gurgles and odd sounds," he says. Adds Stacchi: "They're not quite animals but they're not people or 'little me' men, either. We did a good job of capturing the uniqueness of what Alan created."


Rosamund Pike stars as Amy Dunne in "Gone Girl," based on the novel by Gillian Flynn.

Gone Girl (Oct. 3)

Director: David Fincher

Stars: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris

Author: Gillian Flynn

Plot: Nick Dunne (Affleck) becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Pike), and the truth of their seemingly idyllic married life becomes apparent as the mystery unravels.

Footnotes: Fincher nailed the dark humor and kept "the nasty dark spirit of the book intact," says Flynn. And doing the screenplay herself, she played around with dialogue. With a script, "you don't have the room to go on for four pages about the nature of cheese or whatever random thing a novelist can be very indulgent about," she says. "It's trying to figure out what could be removed without the plot collapsing.''


Ed Oxenbould in 'Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.'

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Oct. 10)

Director: Miguel Arteta

Stars: Ed Oxenbould, Steve Carell, Jennifer Garner

Author: Judith Viorst

Plot: On the eve of his birthday — and after yet another really bad day — Alexander (Oxenbould) wishes his family would have a similar experience, and things go from bad to worse for everybody.

Footnotes: Screenwriter Rob Lieber aimed to keep the underdog themes and tone of the classic 1972 children's book, but he also wanted to infuse them with the universality of the 1980s John Hughes films he grew up watching. "More than specifics about what Alexander goes through in the actual book, I feel that people just always liked to think that it was such a refreshing look at childhood," Lieber says. "Everything today is about being precocious and modern. He's not a cute, perky kid who's gung-ho about everything. He really feels like he's suffering, and that's what I feel endures."


Sharon Leal and William Levy in a scene from "Addicted."

Addicted (Oct. 10)

Director: Bille Woodruff

Stars: Sharon Leal, Boris Kodjoe, William Levy

Author: Zane (Kristina Laferne Roberts)

Plot: Zoe (Leal) has her career and her life with a husband (Kodjoe) and kids put in jeopardy when temptations lead her to stray with other men, including a sensitive artist type (Levy).

Footnotes: A good 10 years before 50 Shades of Grey, Zane's 2001 book heated up best-seller lists, and Woodruff tackled the sensual scenes of the adaptation with Hitchcockian flair. "It's a very sexy, erotic thriller, definitely a lot of eye candy, but I didn't go to all the places the book goes with the sex because we'd have an X rating," Woodruff says, laughing. In some ways, he feels the movie is steamier than the book, though not so much so that it failed to get his mom's seal of approval. "She loves the book and she was happy."


Jeremy Renner in 'Kill the Messenger.'

Kill the Messenger (Oct. 10)

Director: Michael Cuesta

Stars: Jeremy Renner, Michael Sheen, Andy Garcia

Authors: Gary Webb and Nick Schou

Plot: Real-life journalist Webb (Renner) is discredited after he writes columns about the possibility thatthe CIA bankrolled Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s.

Footnotes: The story was taken from Webb's Dark Alliance newspaper series (later published as a book) and from Nick Schou's book about Webb, Kill the Messenger. But instead of being an indictment of the CIA or big media, Cuesta wanted to keep the focus on Webb the man. "He wasn't a perfect guy," the Homeland director says of the reporter, whose 2004 death was ruled a suicide. Yet Renner's portrayal is empathetic,'' says Cuesta. "You feel a three-dimensional guy with flaws who's screwed up before and has remorse about that, but at the same time is going to keep going."


James Marsden, left, and Michelle Monaghan in 'The Best of Me.'

The Best of Me (Oct. 17)

Director: Michael Hoffman

Stars: James Marsden, Michelle Monaghan, Luke Bracey

Author: Nicholas Sparks

Plot: Dawson (Marsden) and Amanda (Monaghan) are high school sweethearts who reunite in their Southern hometown more than 20 years after they were driven apart.

Footnotes: Sparks, who's a producer on the film, wrote his novel about a second chance at a first love as an exploration of how people in their 40s are in a transitional period. "When you're in your teens and 20s and 30s, you think all of your wishes can come true,'' Sparks says. "Your 40s is this period where it's the death of whatever your dreams were sometimes, and at the same time a growing realization of, hey, maybe it's OK.''


Colin Firth, background,  peers in on Nicole Kidman in 'Before I Go to Sleep.'

Before I Go to Sleep (Oct. 31)

Director: Rowan Joffe

Stars: Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong

Author: S.J. Watson

Plot: Due to a traumatic attack, Christine (Kidman) wakes up every day with no memory of her past. She begins to leave clues to her predicament for herself, but is given conflicting information about her situation from her devoted husband (Firth) and her secret doctor (Strong).

Footnotes: Christine is an unreliable narrator because of her amnesia, but that gives the thriller an emotional punch, says Joffe, who adapted Watson's novel. "This could be an almost documentary account of the paranoia and mistrust that invades people with Christine's condition." While she keeps a conventional written diary in the book, Joffe had the character use a digital camera to match the visual medium of cinema. Watson "was delighted with it and the film in general," Joffe adds. "So we're all breathing a sigh of relief."

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