Kids’ Stories, Grown-Up Business

For Maurice Sendak, author of “Where the Wild Things Are,” the road from his 300-word children’s classic to big-time Hollywood movie is as fraught and perilous as his protagonist Max’s encounter with the island’s wild things--hairy, yellow-eyed beasts that roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth.

“I’m very excited about the prospect of it but rather cast down by how difficult it is to achieve,” the 74-year-old says by phone from his home in Connecticut. “What the book was to the publishing world of 1960, I want the movie to be to the movie world of today--a totally original, transforming and transfixing work. My feeling is, If it isn’t terrific, why do it? To me, there’s nothing worse than a fine book destroyed just by being turned into a movie whose only purpose is to survive Friday, Saturday and Sunday.”

Sendak evinces the mixture of trepidation and excitement many authors--and devoted readers--feel when Hollywood approaches. Although grown-ups can certainly survive bad Clancy or Grisham movies, the stakes feel higher for children’s and young adult classics, the kind of books that have shaped young psyches for decades and that are often remembered with quasi-religious sentiment.

The challenge has not stopped Sendak from spending the past decade pondering the prospect of bringing his fearsome creatures to cinematic life, and spending three years in active development on the picture with such cohorts as Universal Pictures and new producer Tom Hanks.

They’re hardly alone in their quest to bring our deepest childhood fantasies to the big screen. The success of film versions of “Harry Potter” and “Lord of the Rings” has caused executives all over town to ransack their childhood bookcases for the pearls of their youth. Such totemic titles as “Curious George,” “The Cat in the Hat,” and “Peter Pan,” many of which have been sitting on dusty development shelves for years, are now being turned into gigantic, tent-pole event pictures. Indeed it’s hard to think of one childhood classic, from “The Wind in the Willows” to “A Cricket in Time Square” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” that isn’t being ministered to by an eager team of screenwriters and producers.

To some, Hollywood’s mad search for forgotten childhood favorites is more than a simple convergence of an exploding market for family films and technological know-how, but an authentic attempt to grapple with the nation’s anxious mood. The town has collectively decided to run for its teddy bears.

“I think everyone wants a little departure from the post-9/11 world,” says Douglas Wick, producer of the “Stuart Little” films. He points out that some of the top-grossing films of World War II and the immediate postwar period were Disney’s “Bambi,” “Cinderella,” “Fantasia,” “Pinocchio” and “Song of the South.”

Of course, the Disney films are chock-full of real emotions, not the empty calories of, say, “Scooby-Doo.” For children coping with the carnage of WWII, the wrenching death of Bambi’s mother resonated with the world they faced.

Wick and his wife, Lucy Fisher, are producing the live-action “Peter Pan,” now more than 100 years old but still emotionally relevant, says Fisher. “What’s so great about it, you get to fly away, leave home, take on the worst, meanest grown-up in the world [Captain Hook], played by your father, defeat the grown-up and come home and still be re-embraced by your own family.”

Academy Award-winning actor-director Roberto Benigni says that his new Italian-language version of “Pinocchio,” has “one of the most ancient messages, that we cannot be happy, and yet at the same time, we have the duty to search for happiness.”

In his classic exploration of fairy tales, “The Uses of Enchantment,” psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote about how fairy tales, and their themes of death and the need to be loved, help children wrestle with complicated emotions.

In the last decade, Hollywood has churned out some memorable children’s films from “Toy Story” to “Beauty and the Beast” to “Shrek,” animated comedies and romances that resonate with issues of loss and self-worth.

Upcoming films like “Where the Wild Things Are” or “Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events: The Movie” or “Tuck Everlasting” could even expand the palette to deal with unsentimental emotions like anger, powerlessness and awareness of our own mortality, feelings that affect children as much as their parents in an unsteady world.

Many critics have noted the “Oliver Twist”-like darkness of “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” in which the Baudelaire orphans suffer at the hands of evil Count Olaf. Its author, Daniel Handler--a.k.a. Lemony Snicket--says the books “tap into a general sense of injustice that everyone has felt in childhood, where crucial decisions are made by someone much taller than you and not paying much attention to what you want. Every child feels like their life is being governed by forces who don’t have time to listen and most adults feel that way too.”

Asked if the studio is wary of the darkness implicit in such works as “Where the Wild Things Are,” Universal’s co-president of production, Mary Parent, replies, “Are they dark or are they real? Max has that classic dilemma--he’s powerless but he yearns to be the master of the kingdom. Kids want to be independent, but they depend on their parents and their parents set the rules and dictate the parameters around the kids’ life. Even as adults, we’re not masters of our universe. We also push up against feelings of powerlessness. There’s a reason why these books are world-renowned. They resonate so strongly.”

These books also come with fans--lots of them. “Curious George” has sold some 25 million books, let alone all the ancillary Curious George products in the marketplace. It’s hard to imagine an American child who hasn’t read the absurdist rhymes of “The Cat in the Hat.”

“I think everybody is hungry for brands, and having exhausted some of the more recent brands that can be identified with TV shows and comic books, they’re reaching back to more classic literature,” Paramount Motion Pictures President John Goldwyn says.

“There’s a greater appetite for them because when they work, they work in a gigantic way,” says producer Brian Grazer, who is hoping to follow his “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas” success with big-screen versions of “The Cat in the Hat” and “Curious George.” “They also generate other byproducts that are natural to the piece. It is natural to have some merchandising and toys.”

Kids’ films also have a huge afterlife on DVD and video and, like “The Sound of Music” or “The Wizard of Oz,” can play yearly on TV for decades.

“Now you’ve also got technology. We have the ability to realize these worlds and these characters that wouldn’t be possible years ago,” adds Universal’s Parent. Credit technology for the realism of Stuart Little’s fur and whiskers in “Stuart Little 2.” After years of languishing in development, with eight scripts and as many approaches, “Curious George,” for instance, is finally headed to computer-generated life, with David Silverman, co-director of “Monsters, Inc.,” at the helm.

Yet, as the experience with “Curious George” suggests, these kinds of projects--particularly those based on picture books with strong characters and little plot--can be difficult to translate to the screen. They demand fidelity and yet require ingenuity, and the line between the sacred and the profane (or worse, the boring) can be thin.

Just a few years ago, the industry was leery of trying because even jewel-like versions of such books as “The Little Princess” and “The Secret Garden” didn’t set the box office on fire.

More than a few eyebrows were raised when the “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” Dr. Seuss’ fable of anti-materialism, was turned into a merchandizing bonanza, with green Oreos and Pop-Tarts, and the famed green grouch emblazoned on an array of consumer products. For the studio however, the glossy, eye-popping Grinch made for a very green Christmas.

Now it seems as if every month brings another elaborate casting search for the perfect child to spearhead the next juggernaut. In the last few months, casting directors scoured the U.S., the U.K. and Australia in search of the appropriately pint-sized Peter Pan, ultimately settling on child actor Jeremy Sumpter. The new version of J.M. Barrie’s play will start filming under the guidance of director P.J. Hogan on Sept. 30 in Australia.

“I’m getting a lot of letters from children asking when the [“Lemony Snicket”] auditions are,” Handler says. “I recently got a large package from a boy in New York with his photograph and all his films, which were home movies, and recordings of him singing a song he wrote. My mother has also announced if she’s not an extra, I will no longer be welcome in her home.”

With more than 4 million in sales and its own cult-like following, “Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events: The Movie” is slated to start shooting early next year, with Barry Sonnenfeld directing and Handler writing the script.

To the relief of those who mistrust Hollywood’s propensity for sentimentality and sanctimony, famous children’s books bring with them famous authors, with not only contractual rights but also moral rights over how their works are going to be realized. The writers, or in the case of Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl, the writer’s heirs are the keepers of the faith.

“In every situation, it doesn’t matter what is or isn’t in the contract. The reality is, if you make them [the writers] unhappy, they’re going to be unhappy and verbalize it,” says Warner Bros. Executive Vice President Lorenzo di Bonaventura. “If a studio neglected the integrity of a creative person’s vision, what creative people would come to them?”

In light of “Harry Potter” mania, the studio has treated author J.K. Rowling with the respect befitting the Delphic oracle. Critics carped that the film, directed by Chris Columbus, was slavishly faithful to the book without its own animating purpose or vision--fairly irrelevant complaints to the studio, which is touting its nearly billion-dollar gross and happy author as a Hollywood seal of approval.

“There are people who sell their books. I’m not condemning that, but it ain’t the way I do it,” Sendak says. “The only important thing for me is that I would have control. I would say yes or no to the script, to the technique of making the film. I would bend and compromise. I am by nature a collaborator, but in the case of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ I have to be the final decider.

“That’s something they all have no trouble with. Maybe they make little clay dolls of me out in Los Angeles that I don’t know about. It would explain the arthritic spasms.”

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Rachel Abramowitz is a Times staff writer.