Books

The plan is to split 'It' into two films

It looks like Pennywise the Clown will soon be back to make audiences fear clowns for years to come.

Speaking to Vulture on Dec. 4, producer Dan Lin confirmed that True Detective director Cary Fukunaga is on board for a new adaptation of Stephen King’s It.

“The idea is to start official prep in March for a summer shoot,” Lin, a producer on The Lego Movie, told Vulture.

However, Lin said It was too big to keep to one movie, and so the plan is to split It into two films (which, if Lin takes inspiration from Peter Jackson, will turn into a trilogy culminating in It: A Pennywise for Your Thoughts).

Lin only confirmed Fukunaga’s involvement for the first film, but did say he is working to sign on the director for the second one as well.

The two-part film does have some precedent in the case of It, however. The original 1986 novel has only seen one other major adaptation, a two-part miniseries on ABC that aired in 1990. That version is particularly memorable for Tim Curry’s horrifying portrayal of Pennywise the Clown, and should serve as a standard-bearer for clown-based scares as Fukunaga and Lin prep their version.

More so than signing on Fukunaga for both parts, Lin has been most concerned with earning the approval of one man: Stephen King.

“The most important thing is that Stephen King gave us his blessing,” Lin said. “We didn’t want to make this unless he felt it was the right way to go, and when we sent him the script, the response that Cary got back was, ‘Go with God, please! This is the version the studio should make.’ So that was really gratifying.”

This article originally appeared on Entertainment Weekly

'Tis the season to be Harry

On the first day of Christmas, J.K. Rowling will give to you: new Harry Potter material. On the second day of Christmas, she’ll give you some more. And so on, through the 12 days leading up to Christmas Eve.

The author announced the new stories in a newsletter to Pottermore members, explaining that each new installment would be posted at 1 pm GMT (8am ET) every day beginning Dec. 12. The email promises “wonderful writing by J.K. Rowling in Moments from Half-Blood Prince, shiny gold Galleons and even a new potion or two.”

MORE: The Top 10 YA Books of 2014

One story will reportedly center on Draco Malfoy, Harry’s nemesis. In the spirit of the holiday season, maybe he’ll get a little redemption, Ebenezer Scrooge-style.

[Daily Telegraph]

Read next: J.K. Rowling Reveals Her Dream Job If She Weren’t A Writer

The boy who won't grow up has rarely been played by a real boy

It’s pretty much the single most important plot point in Peter Pan: the main character will, in the words of one of the signature songs from the musical based on his story, “stay a boy forever.”

Except that he hasn’t. When Allison Williams—the actress best known, appropriately, for her role on Girls—takes to the skies Thursday night for the live televised version of the play, she’ll be joining a long line of grown women who have played the ever-youthful boy.

In fact, it’s been an even century since Nina Boucicault played the starring role in the original 1904 London production, which came to New York the following year with Maude Adams in the lead. As Slate has reported, there were several reasons to cast women in the role, from the logistics of dealing with child-labor laws to the thought that an adult man wouldn’t seem boyish enough and a real boy wouldn’t be capable. Furthermore, casting an adult as Peter meant the child actors around her could be relatively older too. And the actresses cast as Peter were fully on board with the decision: TIME reported in 1950 that, in her day, Adams would leave the theater in costume, so as not to let young fans know she was a grown-up and a woman.

Other grown women followed her in the stage role, like Marilyn Miller, Eva Le Gallienne and Jean Arthur.

When the musical version of the play arrived in 1954, the tradition—complete with music suited for a female singer—continued. Mary Martin quickly came to be a favorite, and is still associated with the role to this day. “She looks as boyish as can be expected of any grownup of the opposite sex,” TIME noted a review of the Broadway production.

There has, however, been a truly noteworthy deviation from the norm: Disney’s 1953 animated version, not constrained by the demands of live human actors, was able to do what no play could. In that movie Peter is voiced by child actor Bobby Driscoll.

Eventually, the climate of the world will change again, and the interest in dystopia will transition into something else

This post originally appeared on Consequence of Sound.

In the current Hollywood climate, the lust for franchises is at an all-time high. It’s a logical enough response to both the difficulties found in getting the average American viewer into a theater in the past few years, and the never-brighter future of the new, globalized audience for Hollywood tentpole features. In both cases, name recognition is the most logical (if not necessarily the most ideal) means to get people back in seats. For all the theatrical gimmickry that chains have rolled out in recent years (dine-in screenings, electric recliners, flight simulator-style seating), there’s perhaps nothing more verifiable when it comes to packing a house than a continuation of another film that people saw and enjoyed. Consider that of 2014’s top 10 highest-grossing films so far, as of this writing, six are sequels. Of the other four, you have two modern reboots of famed existing characters (Maleficent, Godzilla), a new entry into an existing franchise model (Guardians of the Galaxy), and The LEGO Movie, a surprisingly enjoyable film that’s nevertheless still based on a line of toys.

In the midst of Hollywood’s seemingly endless franchise hunt, one of the most prevalent trends of the past decade has been the renewed interest in the constant adaptation of popular young adult novels. It’s a logical enough approach; rather than greenlighting a film that’ll ideally spawn sequels, you pick up a property with a built-in following and a pre-released series of follow-up installments. Grab the next Hunger Games, and you have three or four movies ready to go from day one. In a recent article, I addressed just how many studios are trying to do exactly that, the latest Hollywood ideal being the next hot dystopian epic to follow Hunger Games, or the more recent successes of The Maze Runner and Divergent.

But what’s perhaps even more interesting than the handful of successfully launched YA adaptations in recent years is the massive volume of failures surrounding them. Vulture explored this question in brief last year, before the runaway success of Catching Fire, again primarily touching more heavily on the films that worked than those that didn’t. At one point, they quote YA publisher Ben Schrank, who explains that, “The fact that there are more people writing better books for young people than ever before, combined with a culture where fewer and fewer people think of themselves as old, makes over-saturation in the immediate future seem unlikely.” But this proliferation of books doesn’t necessarily mean that their popularity will translate; a book engenders a certain kind of more dedicated fandom by dint of its ability to establish a universe in far greater detail than the average 90-minute to two-hour film can muster.

So, back to the question at hand: why have so many adaptations failed? Vulture cites momentum at one point, which could explain Divergent and Maze Runner, especially the former; the market seems to be bullish on YA dystopian adaptations featuring popular young actresses in layered roles with peculiar first names for the time being. But it doesn’t entirely account for the phenomenon. After all, lest we forget (more on that momentarily), before Hunger Games it was Twilight. And it’s not as though studios didn’t try and fling their bodies onto that rapidly accelerating gravy train as well. But the fantasy market didn’t prove so lucrative. Between the time of the first Twilight film’s release in November 2008 and its conclusion with the underrated Breaking Dawn Part 2 in 2012, studios released at least seven other franchise hopefuls with YA pedigrees. Only one was sequelized, and even then, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters underperformed in theaters last summer.

Even dystopia isn’t a complete guarantee; witness duds like The Host, another Stephenie Meyer offering that lacked source material for additional installments but still lent studios a sense of optimism. Or, more recently, Jeff Bridges’ long-gestating production of The Giver, as canonical a YA text as you can find in the present era, and a film which grossed less than $50 million. Films like The Giver and last year’s Ender’s Game aimed squarely for the YA audience, adult and young adult alike, and were based on classic novels that frequently appear on various schools’ English class reading lists, and yet both underperformed to the point where sequels are uncertain, verging on unlikely for the time being.

It’s curious to consider the string of flops in a few different respects, and one of them ties right back to Twilight. The oft-maligned vampire series was a cultural phenomenon upon arrival, the first film’s release having been perfectly timed with the release of the final installment of the printed series, Breaking Dawn. Of the top twenty highest-grossing YA adaptations to date, Twilight accounts for five of them. And yet, the buzz seems to have died down around the series. Sure, part of this can be written off as the innately ephemeral nature of most any popular trend; after a while, the collective consciousness moves on, and the series remains bound for an indeterminate time in that fiscally terrifying purgatory between initial popularity and nostalgic sentiment.

But with Twilight, it’s important to remember that the world started changing as the series progressed, and that series happened to be one major cog in a much larger evolution in American culture. One of the simultaneous booms and busts of the internet age is the ability for audiences to access criticism of their pop culture from every conceivable angle, and to discuss it ad nauseum with others. And given the eventual burnout on Twilight’s reductive gender roles and frequently interpreted moralizing, it makes sense that audiences were already getting enough of it from one source, and weren’t as interested in others. But it still found a crossover audience, which is more than can be said for Beautiful Creatures or The Mortal Instruments or I Am Number Four or City of Ember or Cirque Du Freak or Inkheart. But now, a show of hands: when’s the last time that dedicated Twi-hard in your life brought it up at a family gathering?

And with respect to the matter of audience saturation, that’s as much a sign of burnout as anything. People had their chosen franchise. They couldn’t invest in a dozen at once, because for those who weren’t already reading the books (another desired outcome of the franchise model), it was too much to take on. The proliferation of extremely similar material didn’t help, but the failed YA adaptations even precede Twilight. One of the most notable is still A Series of Unfortunate Events, the would-be Lemony Snicket franchise starter, that failed to see a second installment despite relative success compared to many of the flops that followed. And the burnout became ever more pronounced until last summer, when The Mortal Instruments, a film for which Sony had already kicked off pre-production on a follow-up, made less than $10 million in its opening weekend, on over 3,000 screens nationwide.

This year has seen them as well; even as Divergent was a breakout hit and Maze Runner found more moderate success, albeit with tepid critical and audience reactions alike, the popular franchise Vampire Academy was an unmitigated dud when released to little fanfare in the doldrums of February. It’s not that audiences are inherently uninterested; they just want something new. And studios aren’t going to stop pushing for the next big new thing. Properties are being snapped up one after the next, some of the current dystopian flavor and others attempting to break new ground and be the first to the party. The glut is hardly stopping, and even the existing franchises are trying to stretch as far as possible; like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Breaking Dawn, this weekend sees the release of the first half of the two-part Hunger Games finale Mockingjay, and theDivergent series has already confirmed plans to split its final installment Allegiant in half.

A note on Potter, while the subject has arisen: it’s really those films that studios crave so desperately. While Twilight proved the buying power of the untapped young female demographic, Potter is the four-quadrant franchise to which others aspire. The Pottermodel was less one of a literary adaptation than it was the bellwether of what we’re seeing today with superhero franchises. Everybody saw them, and those who didn’t were still readily aware of their existence at all times. It was a market saturation, sure, but one people embraced. Perhaps what’s happening now, with the seeming disinterest in genre-based franchise offerings not focused on totalitarian governments, is the explosion of the bubble, the one that will inevitably implode in the case of most any pop trend. Buyers set out to find the next Potter, the next Twilight, the next Hunger Games, and they’re likely out to find the next one as we speak.

Dozens of novels have been picked up, and it’s unlikely that the glut ends before at least a few more fatted calves have been sacrificed to the cause. But eventually, the climate of the world will change again, and the interest in dystopia will transition into something else, something unpredictable and unsolvable by most metrics until it’s too late to get out ahead. This is the inherent downside of the YA boom, after all. You can pick a winner with a devoted following, a built-in series ready to go, and even come up with a catchy Twilight Saga-esque franchise subtitle for it all. But audiences will either show up or not, and by the time a movie even sees the light of day, it might already be too late to tap into the zeitgeist. Everybody’s headed for the promised West of the next Hunger Games, and even more will likely circle their wagons when Mockingjay likely starts printing its own money in a few days. But like any riches worth having, the millions conferred by a YA hit are for the few, not the many.

The 24-year-old YouTube and blogging sensation who goes by the online name Zoella has achieved record sales with her first novel "Girl Online"

At just 24, Zoe Sugg, has already become an online sensation, producing beauty and fashion videos on YouTube that have been watched more than 400 million times. But this week the English video blogger also became a literary sensation. Her first novel, Girl Online, sold more copies in its first week of publication in the United Kingdom than any previous debut novel on record and is now the U.K.’s fastest selling book of the year.

The Young Adult novel, which was published on Nov. 25 by Atria/Keywords Press in the U.S. and by Penguin in the U.K., sold more than 78,000 copies in its first week, the highest number of sales in the first week recorded by Nielsen BookScan since they began recording information six years ago, according to The Bookseller. First-week sales for Girl Online, which has been billed as a modern-day Notting Hill for teens, have even eclipsed the first-week sales from the debuts of J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown and EL James.

Commenting on the book’s strong debut, Sugg, who has 2.6 million followers on Twitter, said in a statement, “It’s such an amazing feeling. I’m so grateful to everyone who has bought a copy of Girl Online. I love that so many of my viewers are enjoying the book! This year has been so exciting and this for sure is the icing on the cake.”

Sugg, who is widely known by her blog name, Zoella, first rose to fame with her beauty and make-up tutorials, attracting millions of views from a young and loyal fanbase. When she first started her blog in early 2009 she wrote posts about beauty products she liked or her shopping trips. But before long she branched out and started vlogging (video blogging). Her upbeat, unpretentious tips and tutorials — where she’d demonstrate how to perfect a messy bun or share which drugstore cosmetics she loves — proved popular with her young fans. Sugg then started vlogging about weightier issues such as body image, anxiety and panic attacks and offering life advice for her devoted viewers, cementing her role as an inspiration and idol for millions of young girls.

And thanks to her sunny disposition and wholesome lifestyle — Sugg is vocal about the fact that she doesn’t drink or do drugs — Zoella’s approval rating with parents of young girls also sky-rocketed. In the Telegraph, writer Judith Woods, whose young daughter counts herself among Sugg’s many fans, pronounced the young star “The Perfect Role Model.”

But 2014 has been the year when things really exploded for Sugg offline as well. Not only did she secure a two-book deal with Penguin — Girl Online’s sequel is due out next year — she scored the Teen Choice Award for Choice Web Star: Fashion and Beauty, appeared in British Vogue, launched her own line of beauty products and was even asked by Bob Geldof to sing on the Band Aid charity single for Ebola along with Bono, One Direction and Ed Sheeran.

As her star has risen, Sugg has met some backlash. A handful of British journalists and other bloggers have criticized Sugg and her burgeoning empire. A writer for the Independent described Sugg’s persona as “sickly sweet” and wondered why the vlogger didn’t “encourage kids to spend their pocket money on books or days out with friends, rather than on the latest liquid eyeliner.” Meanwhile, in the Telegraph, a piece described Sugg as “both a product and a figurehead of a generation that is obsessed with staying safe,” not to mention “infuriatingly bland and intimidatingly perfect.”

Not that her fans are swayed by the criticism; tickets for her Girl Online book signings across the U.K. last week sold out within 24 hours. It’s hard to imagine that even Sugg would be bothered by a few naysayers. In an interview with the Financial Times, Sugg reflected on her exploding fame, saying, “I never expected any of this to happen so I’m just going to go with it and make the most of it.”

Read next: The Top 10 Young Adult Books of 2014

The letter, sent to Kerouac before he wrote the Beat classic, will be put up for auction

In December 1950, Jack Kerouac got a letter from his friend Neal Cassady, which recounted a wild weekend in Denver that included climbing out a window to escape the discovery of his affair with a babysitter. According to Kerouac, it was this letter that inspired him to write On the Road in the energetic, disruptive way he did. Also according to Kerouac, this famed epistle had probably been dropped off the side of a houseboat decades ago, never to be held or read ever again.

It turns out Kerouac was, happily, wrong.

The letter, discovered in Oakland—in a box of forgotten submissions to a publishing house—has been recovered in its entire 18 single-spaced pages. The woman who found the so-called “Joan Anderson letter” is putting it up for auction on Dec. 17, the same day it was dated by Cassady 64 years ago. “I never thought it would be discovered,” says John Tytell, a American literature professor at Queens College. “And it’s a fluke that it was.”

Jean Spinosa, a 41-year-old performance artist based in L.A., lost her father in 2011. Digging through his “hoarder-level” belongings in Oakland the next year, she came across several boxes he had inherited from a now defunct publisher called Golden Goose Press. Her father’s music label had shared a small office with the man who ran Golden Goose, Richard Emerson. One day, she says, Emerson decided to close up shop and announced his intention to throw everything out, including boxes full of unopened poems and letters sent in by hopeful authors.

“He just didn’t care. He was going to throw it in the trash,” Spinosa tells TIME, speaking at the Beat Museum in San Francisco, where the entire letter was displayed on Dec. 1 for the first time since its discovery was made public in November. “And my dad, being a little bit of a hoarder that he was, said ‘Those are poems. Why would you throw out anyone’s poems?’” Emerson told him he was free to keep them, and he did.

The Joan Anderson letter, nicknamed after a girlfriend Cassady writes about in the 16,000-word epistle, was enshrined in history as more than just a letter in 1968. That was the year Kerouac did an interview with the Paris Review and this exchange occurred:

INTERVIEWER

What encouraged you to use the “spontaneous” style of On the Road?

KEROUAC

I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed … The letter, the main letter I mean, was forty thousand words long, mind you, a whole short novel. It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better’n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves … Neal and I called it, for convenience, the Joan Anderson Letter.

Kerouac goes on to explain that the letter was so great, he lent it to his friend Allen Ginsberg, who then shopped it around to publishers. The first was a man named Gerd Stern, who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, just to the north of San Francisco. Stern rejected it and, Kerouac imagined in the interview, “This fellow lost the letter: overboard I presume.” What really happened, according to research conducted by Spinosa and the auction house selling the letter, is that Stern gave the letter back to Ginsberg, who then gave it to Emerson for his consideration. “Emerson never read it,” Spinosa says, “and Allen forgot about it.” (Kerouac was also clearly off about the word count.)

The sudden appearance of a long-presumed-dead letter is thrilling for Kerouac obsessors and Beat Generation scholars, who see it as a missing link that may detail how On the Road got made. “I’ve always thought that this letter was crucial to establishing the connection between Neal Cassady’s speech pattern, which was rapid and steeped in the vernacular and unbelievably free, and the source of Kerouac’s inspiration,” Tytell says. “He had broken through to discover something very new, and that letter, that lost letter, I knew was tremendously important.”

About a third of the letter had been copied, presumably by Kerouac, and survived. The rest, left to be imagined, became “mythology” long ago, says Nancy Grace, a professor of English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. “We’ll have to see the letter and see his style in the letter to really be able to tell if it was as influential as the mythology leads us to believe.”

At the Beat Museum in San Francisco, a place where the seats of chairs are ripping and the carpet has some holes, reporters set up their cameras on Monday for a view of the letter arranged in a glass case. Even though they could see the whole pile of pages, the sheets had been arranged to obscure most of the newly rescued words—because, a representative from the auction house explained, while Spinosa owns the letter, the Cassady estate still retains copyright for publishing the work. That will remain true for the buyer who wins the letter later this month.

One hopeful bidder, announced in the midst of the press gathering, is the Beat Museum itself. The largest permanent institution dedicated to the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg—just blocks from their hallowed City Lights bookstore—started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for purchasing the letter. “This has to be out in the world,” says Jerry Cimino, who runs the museum and uses phrases like dig this. “This was their stomping grounds.” In the auction, which will be run by Profiles In History, a house that specializes in Hollywood memorabilia, the lot containing the letter will have a reserve price of $300,000.

Regardless of who wins, at least one man will be happy: Gerd Stern, the fellow who had long been blamed, along with Ginsberg, for losing the letter. As soon as Cimino was allowed to share the news that the letter had been discovered, he called his friend Stern, who now lives in New Jersey. “He goes, ‘Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!’ He must have said it 10 times,” Cimino says. “And he laughed the longest laugh I’ve ever heard.”

Despite a social media campaign to #readwomen this year, most readers stuck to their own sex

A new poll reveals a deep gender divide in our reading habits. Goodreads, the Amazon-owned social media site for avid readers, surveyed 40,000 of their most active users (50% women and 50% men) in England about the books they read that were published in 2014. They found that though men and women read the same number of books, readers stick to authors of their own sex.

Goodreads found that 90% of the 50 most-read books by men were written by men. The converse was true for women: Only five of the 50 most-read titles by women were written by men (and that figure included The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith—the pen name of female Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling).

The survey was inspired by this year’s #readwomen movement, a campaign started by author Joanna Walsh in January. Walsh asked readers to try to balance out their bookshelves in 2014 by including oft-overlooked female authors on their reading lists. Though male and female authors are published in equal numbers, a yearly analysis by the organization Vida: Women in Literary Arts consistently finds that reviewers at top publications are predominantly male and more inclined to review books written by men.

MORE: How a 1960s Literary Trend Brought Us The Hunger Games

Many female authors say that the way their books are packaged encourages readers and reviewers to take them less seriously. Writers like Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner complain that publishers give their books flowery “women-friendly” covers instead of gender-neutral ones—even if the cover does not reflect the content inside.

Picoult recently complained that her works are relegated to “chick-lit” even if they have depth, while male romance novelists like Nicholas Sparks get Hollywood deals for works that would be considered “airport fiction” if written by a woman.

The Goodreads survey reflected this bias among readers: It found that in the first year of publication only 20% of a female author’s audience will be men, while 50% of a male author’s audience will be women.

But the poll did reveal one piece of good news for women authors: Once they got past the covers, readers of both genders rated books by women more highly than books by men.

MORE: Jodi Picoult: What I’m Thankful For

Game of Thrones actress Carice van Houten, who is Dutch, reads the audio book version

The Diary of a Young Girl, otherwise known as the Diary of Anne Frank, is headed to your smart phone for the first time in its original language.

A Dutch-language app containing the bestselling and widely translated book was announced earlier this month by publisher Uitgeverij Prometheus, Haaretz reports. The app also features interactive timelines, photo and video content and an audio book version. Game of Thrones actress Carice van Houten, who is Dutch, reads the audio book version.

The app is not the first Anne Frank app — an English-language one was released last year — but this app is the first to publish the diary in its original language. The diary documents the two years the Frank family spent in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam before thy were discovered and Anne Frank was sent to a concentration camp, where she later died.

[Haaretz]