EarlyWord

We thought that the poor box office showing for the adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Hachette/Grand Central, 2012) had finally killed off thoughts of a film based on the grandmother of the mashup genre, Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, also by Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books), but The Hollywood Reporter announces that Lily Collins is now set to star with Burt Steers directing.

Collins follows a string of actresses that have been rumored or announced for the role (Natalie Portman — who is still attached as a producer —  Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Mia Wasikowska and Rooney Mara). Steers is the fourth director attached to the project.

The mashup craze seems to have run its course, but zombies still live.

Last fall, John Grisham told Matt Lauer on the Today Show that he was seriously considering a sequel to his first and favorite novel, A Time to Kill. Over the years, he said, he has “been looking for some other trial [Mississippi lawyer] Jake could have a couple of years after the trial in A Time to Kill…and I’ve found the story.”

Random House just announced that Grisham’s next book will be that sequel, Sycamore Row (via the AP sydicated story), to be published on Oct. 22 by the Doubleday division of Random House (also RH Audio, BOT and RH Large Print).

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Another project announced in 2010, an HBO series based on Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge (Random House) is now gearing up. Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) has been signed to direct with Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins starring. Tom Hanks’ Playtone Partners is co-producing with McDormand’s company. According to Deadline, “Getting this cast, director and a four-hour commitment from HBO is a real testament for McDormand … [who] fell in love with the book before it won the Pulitzer…[and] bought it with her own money.”

Strout’s The Burgess Boys (Random House), her first novel since Kitteridge, was published in March. McDormand’s first production effort, an adaptation of Laura Lippman’s Every Secret Thing, is currently filming.

Back in 2010, when Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling novel, Agincourt (Harper, 2009), about the battle that was also the basis for Shakespeare’s Henry V, was signed for a film, we warned you not to hold your breath. Filmmaker Michael Mann had several other projects in the works. Since then, he has completed two TV series for HBO (Luck and the documentary Witness).

Agincourt is now back in the news; Deadline reports that the script is being rewritten. There is some excitement about Mann’s renewed interest based on his handling of 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans, starring Daniel Day-Lewis (Roger Ebert called it,  “quite an improvement on Cooper’s all but unreadable book”). One more  project stands in the way, however. Mann begins production in June on another feature film.

The new edition of the often-attacked “bible” of American psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders known as  D.S.M., is about to be released and, predictably, it is being preceded by controversy.

The NYT ‘s Dwight Garner examines two books that lead the alarm, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg, (Penguin/Blue Rider; Tantor Audio, 5/13) and Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life by Allen Frances, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 5/14) saying, they are “unalike yet deeply alike, as if they were vastly dissimilar Rube Goldberg devices that each ultimately drop the same antacid tablet into the same glass of water.”

Both, he says, are “repetitive and overlong,” and would have made better magazine articles, but, “Mr. Greenberg is a fresher, funnier writer. He paces the psychiatric stage as if he were part George Carlin, part Gregory House.”

The Zookeeper’s Wife, (Norton, 2007) by Diane Ackerman is the true story about the director of the Warsaw Zoo during WWII, who, with his wife, managed to rescue over 300 Jews from the Nazis. Film rights were signed in 2011.

The adaptation is now moving forward, with actress Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) signed to star and Niki Caro to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

USA Today’s headline, “Stephen King’s 11/22/63 headed to TV,” makes it sound like a a done deal, but the Deadline story it’s based on is less definitive, stating that rights to the novel are being negotiated and that they “hear” the plan is to turn it into ” a TV series or miniseries, likely for cable.”

What is certain is that a series based on another King novel, Under the Dome, begins on CBS on June 24.

The cable channel FX’s adaptation of the first novel in Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampire trilogy, The Strain, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2009) now has a lead, Corey Stoll (who played a character in the Netflix original series, House of Cards).

Del Toro will direct the pilot. According to Deadline, the network is likely to pick it up as a series.

The next project from the creator of the hit cable series Weeds, Jenji Kohan, is an original series for Netflix, Orange Is the New Black, adapted from Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir (Norton). Netflix just announced that all thirteen episodes will be released on July 11.

Netflix recently began developing their own programs, in an effort to attract and retain subscribers. The first two, House Of Cards (February) and Hemlock Grove (April) were also based on books.

Actress Taylor Schilling stars as Piper, who was incarcerated for 13 months in the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut. A Smith college graduate, just beginning her career, she seemed an unlikely candidate for prison, until a ten-year-old drug trafficking charge caught up with her.

At the time of publication, USA Today said the book “transcends the memoir genre’s usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you. You’d expect bad behavior in prison. But it’s the moments of joy, friendship and kindness that the author experienced that make Orange so moving and lovely.”

The next season of the popular British series, Downton Abbey is currently in production. The series’ first black actor has just joined the cast. Gary Carr will play jazz singer Jack Ross, reports the UK’s Independent. A slide show of the other new additions, gives hints about the upcoming story lines (there’s at least one new love interest for Lady Mary).

Among the returning cast members are audience favorites, Shirley MacLaine and Maggie Smith. However, Siobhan Finneran, who played the conniving lady’s maid O’Brien, will not be back.

The author of the best selling Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (RH/Broadway; Tantor Media), Countess Fiona Carnarvon, is publishing a new book about Highclere Castle this fall, featuring Lady Almina’s successor, Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey (RH/Broadway).

Lady Carnarvon, her home and her previous book were featured on CBS Sunday Morning earlier this year.

Diane Sawyer’s heavily promoted interview with Amanda Knox aired on ABC’s Nightline last night.

The full interview is available here. Knox’s book, Waiting to Be Heard, (Harper; HarperLuxe, HarperAudio), released yesterday, rose to #11 on Amazon’s sales rankings as a result.

Entertainment Weekly reviewed it, giving it a “B.”

Ouch! In a review that will surely be a candidate for the next “Hatchet Job of the Year Award,” Michiko Kakutani excoriates John  le Carré’s 23rd novel, A Delicate Truth, (Penguin/Viking; Penguin Audio; Thorndike Large Print), which releases next week.

Earlier, one of Kakutani’s colleagues, Dwight Garner, wrote glowingly about the author in  New York Times Magazine, under the headline, “John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age,” calling A Delicate Truth, “an elegant yet embittered indictment of extraordinary rendition, American right-wing evangelical excess and the corporatization of warfare. It has a gently flickering love story and a jangling ending. And le Carré has not lost his ability to sketch, in a line or two, an entire character.” And, in the UK, The Guardian reports that, with this book, the author returns in “top form.”

Kakutani admits that the book offers one worthwhile bit, in the form of its “atmospheric, movielike opening.” Hollywood sees a movie in it; film rights were sold before publication. It was announced last week that screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed ) has been hired to write the adaptation.

The book already has a movie-like trailer.

Disney’s live-action movie based on Judith Viorst’s 1972 hit children’s Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Atheneum) is making baby steps closer to the screen.  Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) is directing, Steve Carrell is set to star as Alexander’s father, and The Hollywood Reporter writes that Jennifer Garner is in talks to join the cast as the mother.

Production is set to begin this fall.

It seems that some in Hollywood who should know better have claimed that Alex Pettyfer has been signed to play Christian Grey in the film adaptation of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades Of Grey.

Deadline says it isn’t so. Is anything happening? Deadline states that, “A lot of major directors have been discreetly approached, but everyone is waiting on a script by Kelly Marcel. They would not set any cast without input from a filmmaker.”

Last year, after many attempts to bring Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series to the screen, Sony Pictures TV acquired the rights according to Deadline.

Now, nearly a year later, Deadline writes that the project is “slowly inching to the screen” as a the producers have opened a “writers room” for four writers who will be working on the adaptation.

The eighth installment of the series, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, (RH/Delacorte) is coming in December. Gabaldon answered questions about the book earlier this month on Entertainment Weekly‘s “Shelf Life” blog.