EarlyWord

The log jam of book adaptations featuring Nicole Kidman is beginning to break up.

Of the several awaiting release, the first to hit theaters, Railway Man, just announced for April 11, may not be the one that people are most looking forward to. Reviews have been mixed (it has already appeared in the U.K.), with The Hollywood Reporter calling it “plodding” but The Independent saying co-star “Colin Firth gives one of his best performaces in this muted but very touching adaptation.”

The 1996 memoir fared better with reviewers. Firth himself says he is “overwhelmed by the story” of British POW Eric Lomax, who, during WW II, was forced into hard labor in Thailand by the Japanese on what was called the “Death Railway.”  His book is still in print in trade paperback, (Norton). UPDATE: We just got word from Norton that a tie-in is due to be released shortly; ISBN 978-0393344073. Thanks, Golda!

In December, Kidman appears as an evil taxidermist, again co-starring with Colin Firth, in the family movie, Paddington.

We’re still waiting to hear about the release of another adaptation co-starring Kidman and Firth, Before I Go to Sleep, about an amnesiac facing the terrifying prospect that she cannot trust those around her. Based on the domestic thriller by S.J. Watson, it is completed and has the potential of going head-to-head with the adaptation of another title in that genre, Gone Girl, coming October 3.

Also awaiting a U.S. release date, but this time not co-starring Firth, is a bio-pic about Princess Grace, based on Grace of Monaco by Jeffrey Robinson (Perseus/Da Capo; Audio, Dreamscape). Originally announced for a March release date and then inexplicably pulled, Grace of Monaco will open the Cannes film festival in May. A new trailer was just released, but no word on a theatrical release.

Also in the works is an adaptation of Kevin Wilson’s quirky The Family Fang, (HarperCollins/Ecco, 2011), which Kidman is producing and plans to star in. Jason Bateman (star of the cult TV show, Arrested Development) has signed to direct as well as co-star and has said he will begin working on it after he finishes directing another adaptation, This Is Where I Leave You, based on the book by Jonathan Tropper. Refreshingly, the latter has a release date of Sept. 12.

Featured on Morning Edition today is former Marine Phil Klay, whose first book, Redeployment, released on Tuesday (Penguin), is a collection of  “a dozen vivid stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the perspectives of the people who experienced it.” (listen to the show here).

The book is also featured on the cover of the upcoming NYT Book Review  (not yet online) and was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the daily NYT last week. Entertainment Weekly gave it an unequivocal  A. It comes with advance praise from an impressive range of writers, attesting to both the author’s authenticity and literary abilities, from Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) to  Colum McCann, (Let the Great World Spin).

It had to happen, of course. Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, author of the ground-breaking 1994 National Book Award Winner and best seller, How We Die, (RH/Vintage), has died at 83.

The New York Times obituary describes the effect his book had on the medical establishment and the issues Nuland dealt with in his own life.

The news is bringing renewed interest in the book which is currently rising on Amazon’s sales rankings.

The following video is worth watching just to hear Matt Lauer bark at Jane Fonda, “Let’s talk about sex.”

Fonda’s new book, released yesterday, is the trade paperback, Being a Teen: Everything Teen Girls & Boys Should Know about Relationships, Sex, Love, Health, Identity & More, (Random House).

One simple piece of advice: “If you can’t talk about sex, you shouldn’t be having it.”

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The first official teaser trailer for the movie Paddington arrived via Yahoo yesterday. The actual movie is a ways off — it debuts on December 12.

Colin Firth is the voice of the animated bear. Playing live-action characters, Mrs. and Mrs. Brown, are Hugh Bonneville (known to Americans primarily as Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey), and Sally Hawkins, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Blue Jasmine. Nicole Kidman plays the evil taxidermist, bent on adding the bear to her collection. The producer is David Heyman, who, as the trailer proclaims, was the producer of the Harry Potter series  The company handling the special effects, Framestone, won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects for Gravity.

The Paddington Bear series began in 1958 with A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond. It will be reissued in July by HarperCollins with illustrations by R.W. Alley (Peggy Fortnum illustrated the original books) and the shortened movie title of simply Paddington. The movie tie-in arrives on Nov. 4.

Baby Gap is also featuring tie-ins in the form of a clothing line.

Official Movie Site: Paddington.com

The trailer shows the UK’s Nov 28 release date; the movie opens here on Dec. 12

The film adaptation of Lisa Genova’s 2008 best seller, Still Alice, (S&S/Gallery) began filming in New York City today (in Harlem, to be more exact), as planned, even though the cast may have wished to be somewhere warmer.

The celebrity sites are all over the stars as they report for duty. The Daily Mail Online snapped Julianne Moore, who plays the lead, Alice, as well as Alec Baldwin who plays her husband, John.  E! Online photographs Kristen Stewart, who plays Alice’s younger daughter Lydia, while Gossip Center reveals Kate Bosworth’s new hair color for her role as Alice’s older daughter, Anna.

Featured on Fresh Air yesterday was Mark Harris on his new a book about filmmakers in WWII, Five Came Back: A Story Of Hollywood And The Second World War, (Penguin Press; Recorded Books).

The author describes the shift in relationships between the film business and the U.S. government, “Hollywood and the federal government held a mutual suspicion of each other. But after Pearl Harbor, the War Department asked Hollywood directors to make short documentaries that could be presented in theaters before the featured films … to show Americans what was at stake, give them a glimpse of what our soldiers were going through and stir up patriotic feelings.”

Coming today on Fresh Air, Kevin Young shares poems from his new collection, Book of Hours, (Knopf) about the death of his father and the birth of his son.

Some days, you just need something lovely to look at:

The book is Surprise-Inside Cakes by Amanda Rettke, (HarperCollins/Morrow, Feb. 19).

AND, there’s a trailer:

Thanks to HarperCollins Library Marketing for posting this on their Library Love Fest blog and lifting our spirits as this long winter slogs on.

This week, Jon Stewart gives rare attention to a novelist (who happens to be well-known as the creator of Family Guy and director of Ted). The rest of the week, he returns to his interest in politics and the future. Colbert should have fun on Tuesday with “the rockstar of the Internet,” Jaron Lanier.

Monday, March 3, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Seth MacFarlane, A Million Ways to Die in the West, (RH/Ballantine; RH Audio; BOT; March 4).

Billed as MacFarlane’s debut novel, this actually began life as a screenplay. A movie of the same title, starring Charlize Theron, Amanda Seyfried, Liam Neeson, as well as MacFarlane himself, premieres on May 30th.

The Wall Street Journal interviewed MacFarlane last week, saying, “In an inversion of the usual adaptation process, Mr. MacFarlane reverse-engineered A Million Ways to Die in the West from a script he co-wrote with his friends and frequent collaborators, Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild.” Guess they never heard of a novelization. Describing the book, the article adds, “The novel is likely to be polarizing—with some finding it bitingly funny and fresh and others dismissing it as juvenile—much like his animated shows and his blockbuster 2012 comedy Ted.”

The trailer for the movie, below (warning, NOT for the squeamish and also NSFW):

The rest of the week:

Tuesday, March 4

Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Jim DeMint, former South Carolina senator, a leading tea partner, and now CEO of conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation. His new book is Falling in Love with America Again, (Hachette/Center Street, March, 2014).

The Colbert Report

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, (trade pbk reprint, March 4, S&S) — Originally published last year, The New York Times called this “brilliant” and “daringly original.”

Thursday, March 6

Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, (Perseus/PublicAffairs, Feb. 11) — The Washington Post calls this a  “masterful synthesis of polls.”

The cult favorite, Veronica Mars TV series, starring Kristen Bell as a teenage sleuth, was canceled after its third season in 2007. Since then, creator Rob Thomas has not allowed the property to die. Through a Kickstarter campaign, (the most successful one to date), he raised the funds for a movie version. He also signed with RH/Vintage for two books based on the character (he has written several novels, including the 1996 YA title Rats Saw God).

The movie debuts on March 14 (see trailer below) and the first book, Veronica Mars: The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line, which features the 28-year-old Mars after the events of the movie, arrives on March 25. It is currently at #29 and rising on Amazon sales rankings.

To catch up on the story, link here.

Also on the horizon is a collection of essays in the Wiley-Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series, coming in May, Veronica Mars and Philosophy: Investigating the Mysteries of Life (Which is a Bitch Until You Die), edited by George A. Dunn.

Just one movie adapted from a book won in the top six Oscar categories, but it won big. 12 Years a Slave was named Best Picture and Lupita Nyong’o, Best Supporting Actress. It also won for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Director McQueen’s speech included a shout-out to the woman who made sure Solomon Northup’s story wasn’t forgotten; “I’d like to thank this amazing historian, Sue Eakin … she gave her life’s work to preserving Solomon’s book.”  Eaken is no longer alive, but her son, Frank, was a guest of the director at the film’s premiere. He also produced an audio of the book narrated by  Louis Gossett Jr. (Blackstone).

McQueen spoke about the book on last week’s CBS Sunday Morning:

The only other adaptation to win awards was The Great Gatsby, which won for both Best Costume and Best Production Design.

Darlene Love, one of the subjects of 20 Feet From Stardom, received a standing ovation after she sang her acceptance for Best Documentary. Love’s 1998 autobiography, My Name Is Love: The Darlene Love Story, (re-released in trade paperback last year by HarperCollins/Morrow), has been acquired by OWN for a television movie.

The Academy Awards, (aka, the “Newbery/Caldecotts of the film business” ), will be announced on Sunday.

With so many book adaptations in the running, rather than join the predictions game, we’ve decided to create our own EarlyWord Awards.

Movie That Created A Classic — 12 Years a Slave 

Director Steve McQueen exaggerates when he claims  the 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup that his movie is based on was “lost for 150 years.” McQueen, who is nominated for Best Director, owes a debt to a 12-year-old girl, Sue Eakin, who came across an old copy of it in the 1930’s and made it her life’s work to bring it back into print. Since it was republished in 1968 through LSU Press, it has been released in several editions and has continued in print due to college adoptions. The movie has brought unprecedented awareness, however, and the book is now also being picked up by high schools.

Movie That Made a Bestseller of A Classic — The Great Gatsby

This could also be called the movie that made publishers rethink tie-ins, since the sales of copies with the original cover outstripped those that feature the movie art.

Not only did director Baz Luhrman’s movie, which is nominated only for Best Costume and Best Production Design, put F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel onto best seller lists (which, to Fitzgerald’s vast disappointment, didn’t happen in his own day), it even inspired Stephen Colbert to go all Oprah and begin his own book club, which included a discussion led by Jennifer Egan.

That magic did not happen for other classics made into movies this year. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (movie by James Franco) and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (movie starring Julianne Moore, Alexander Skarsgård and Steve Coogan) did not lead to best seller status for those books.

Movie That Brought A Book To The U.S. For The First Time — Philomena

Directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen), this movie is up for an Oscar for Best Picture. It is also nominated for Best Actress for star Judi Dench who plays Philomena Lee, an Irish woman forced as a teenager to give her child up for adoption. Originally published in the U.K. in 2010 as The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, it was published for the first time in the U.S. this year as a trade paperback tie-in, titled Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search  (Penguin), with a foreword by Dench.

And, a special award for:

Most Bookish Actress— Jennifer Lawrence

From Winter’s Bone, based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, for which she was nominated in 2011 as Best Actress, to the as-yet-unreleased Serena, based on the novel by Ron Rash, Lawrence has appeared in many book adaptations.

This year, she is nominated for Best Supporting Actress for American Hustle, based on the nonfiction title, The Sting Man: Inside Abscam by Robert W. Greene. The movie is sure to win at least one award, since it is nominated in every major category (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress, as well as Best Supporting Actress).

On to the real Oscars and may the best books win.

With the Oscars  coming on Sunday, you’d expect this week’s  issue of Entertainment Weekly to be all about that event.

But that was so last week. The new cover story declares that all eyes are now on Divergent, opening 3/21, to see if it will follow in the footsteps of Hunger Games, or will bite the dust like Beautiful Creatures (and Mortal Instruments and Vampire Academy).

If book sales are any indicator, it will be an enormous hit. All three titles in Veronica Roth’s YA series have been in the top ten on USA Today‘s best-selling books list for weeks. This week they are all in the top five.

The fall brings two more YA dystopian novel adaptations. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, of course, arrives in theaters on Nov. 21 and is pre-ordained hit.

There’s been far less buzz about the second, The Maze Runner, based on the book by James Dashner. Originally scheduled for Valentine’s Day, it was then moved to September 19. Beyond a few set photos, there’s been little to feed fan anticipation. All of this makes one movie site more than a little worried about its future.

Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. There were German terrorist cells in Amearica during WW I, blowing up American factories and ships and carrying out germ warfare on thousands of American horses being shipped to Europe.

Howard Blum investigates that story in Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (Harper, Feb. 11). He was interviewed on Fresh Air yesterday, sending the book to #57 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

The movie adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 detective novel Inherent Vice (Penguin Press) has just been scheduled for Dec. 12 of this year, which Deadline characterizes as “a plum awards-season release date.” Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master), the movie stars Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson and Benecio Del Toro.

Also releasing that day is the live-action childrens adaptation, Paddington, “inspired by” the 1958 series which begins with A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond. It is being reissued in July by HarperCollins with illustrations by R.W. Alley and the shortened movie title of simply Paddington.

Baby Gap is also featuring tie-ins in the form of a clothing line.