Where the Projects Are

Here’s the status of some of the kid literature projects wending their way to the big screen, in order of probable release:

“Tuck Everlasting”

Every day of filming “Tuck Everlasting,” which is due in October, a crowd of teenagers would assemble near the Maryland movie set bearing dog-eared copies of Natalie Babbitt’s popular young adult novel.

“They’d have me or the actors sign the book,” recalls director Jay Russell (“My Dog Skip”). “It carries a huge responsibility to try to deliver for these kids a version of the story that they will feel does the book justice. It has a unique place in children’s literature. It is dealing with the very heavy theme about death, and death’s place in the life process.”

Yet neither the book nor the film is heavy. Set primarily at the turn of the century, it tells the story of what happens when a sheltered teenager meets a strange, free-spirited family that can never get old. The film boasts more Oscar winners than almost any other film this year, from Ben Kingsley to William Hurt and Sissy Spacek, both of whom approached the project because they’d read the book with their kids.

Although Babbitt’s book is one of the top-grossing children’s books of all time, “she has fought off movie adaptations for years,” Russell says. “It’s impossible to literally adapt a book to the screen. Reading a book is a much more active process, because readers are creating their own movies in their own minds with their own point of view on the characters. There’s no way I’m going to compete with a reader’s imagination. I told her this movie would not be your book, but based on your book. That eased her concerns quite a bit.”

The main difference is that the filmmakers changed the girl (played by “Gilmore Girls’ ” Alexis Bledel) from age 10 to 15, because she falls in love with the family’s 17-year-old son.

Already, an early copy of the film has played like gangbusters at a national librarian’s conference. “We’re a hit with the librarians,” Russell adds with a laugh. “We had to make sure we were OK with the literary crowd.”

“Pinocchio”

As a child, Italian comic-turned-director Roberto Benigni was nicknamed “Pinocchietto” and for the last 20 years, he has dreamed of making a movie version of Carlo Collodi’s classic about a young puppet who yearns to be a boy. “Every time I finished a movie, I would try to make ‘Pinocchio,’ but I never found the courage. I wasn’t brave,” Benigni says from Italy. “I tried to do it with Federico Fellini, and we did a lot of drawings and tests with me as Pinocchio in makeup, and we shot a little film. But then Fellini said to me, ‘Robertino, you have to do ‘Pinocchio,’ not me.’ ”

The film, scheduled for Christmas, was shot on elaborate Italian sound stages, which include three entirely constructed villages. The Blue Fairy, who arrives on a carriage pulled by 200 white mice, is played by Benigni’s wife, Nicoletta Braschi, while the actor has the part of the young puppet.

“This is a fairy tale. The character of Pinocchio is an illusion. It’s a question of spirit. I hope when you see the movie, after the first 10 seconds you see me, I am just Pinocchio. You don’t think about my age. The spirit is the spirit of the boy,” says Benigni, who adjusted all the players to his grown-up-sized Pinocchio. “The other boys who come to school with me--everybody is my age. The land of toys is full of men, gambling and having fun. I didn’t like it to be me big surrounded by little guys.”

There are already more than 20 film renditions of “Pinocchio.” Benigni loves the 1940 Disney version but notes, “Disney couldn’t make the entire story, because they needed to put in the songs. We’re trying to really make for the first time the original full story of ‘Pinocchio.’ ”

Don’t look for a singing, dancing Jiminy Cricket. The film opens with the intrepid insect sternly warning the young, impetuous puppet, “You have to do the right thing. You have to do what you’re told,” Benigni says. “After 10 minutes, Pinocchio goes ‘OK, shut up!’ and kills the cricket. It’s a wonderful scene, very funny, and as in the original story, Jiminy Cricket comes alive again in the shape of a ghost, and he follows Pinocchio for the entire story.” Benigni giggles. “He’s the conscience and you cannot kill your conscience.”

“The Cat in the Hat”

After languishing in development for years, “The Cat in the Hat,” childhood’s most famous ode to anarchy, begins filming in September for a Thanksgiving 2003 release. Mike Myers stars as the Cat. Randy Newman is writing songs, and prominent production designer Bo Welch is making his directorial debut.

The film takes place not in a fantasy world like Whoville, but in a kind of heightened reality, akin to the Technicolor suburbia Welch designed for such Tim Burton films as “Edward Scissorhands.”

Universal’s co-president of production, Mary Parent, says that “it’s just like in the book. It has the famous moment when the children are looking out the window, the cat comes to pay the children a visit and brings along Thing One and Thing Two. The fish can come alive the way he does on the pages of the book with what we have available technically.”

It’s faithful to the book but endows the tale of the mischievous cat with a moral. “They’re kids that are bored,” producer Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment explains. “They’ve enjoyed too many of the luxuries of modern society. The cat emerges and comes to life and becomes a catalyst for creating fun and naughtiness, but teaching them a lesson that even without modern technology, every kid, rich or poor, has access to all these things.”

Dr. Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, is being consulted extensively, as she was on the film version of “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” “I show her every draft of the script and consult with her on casting. She’s a tough customer. It takes a lot of creative energy to satisfy her,” Grazer says, adding that one thing that’s important to her is that “she doesn’t want vulgarity. She refers to it as potty humor.”

The film is also a pleasant coda to a spate of ugly lawsuits between Myers and Imagine and Universal over the implosion of a proposed “Dieter” movie, based on one of Myers’ “Saturday Night Live” characters. “The Cat in the Hat,” it seems, can heal even the worst Hollywood feuds.

Says Grazer, “You get over it when people see the same creative vision.”

“Lemony Snicket’s Seriesof Unfortunate Events: The Movie”

It’s not too often that authors get to appear in the film, but Lemony Snicket will be making his big-screen debut during the 2003 holiday season in the big-screen version of “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” which will encompass primarily the first and third Snicket books: “The Bad Beginning” and “The Wide Window.”

Author Daniel Handler “wanted to have a role for Lemony Snicket in the script,” Paramount’s John Goldwyn says. “It was not a condition of the rights agreement, but it was one of the ways we were able to close the rights agreement. Everybody wanted the material.”

“The character of Lemony Snicket, he functions in the book as a sort of unreliable narrator that I think a lot of my readers have taken pleasure in, so it seems natural to put him in,” explains Handler.

Although Handler is known for the extravagance of his live readings, he doesn’t actually plan to play Snicket himself. “No, no, no. Goodness, no. Who am I? Sly Stallone?” However, he does seem tickled by the narcissism inherent in the predicament.

“It’s sort of strange to start to look at old movies to figure out who should play your own alter ego. I think that’s a game everybody plays in Hollywood--who would play you in the movie. It’s strange to actually have some form of that conversation taking place.”

Handler is calling from New York, where the San Francisco resident has flown to meet director Barry Sonnenfeld and producer Scott Rudin. Their last projects together were the two “Addams Family” movies, whose macabre, ghoulish tone is reminiscent of the neo-Victorian, Edward Gorey-esque world of the Baudelaire orphans, “Lemony Snicket’s” heroes.

Unlike “Harry Potter’s” J.K. Rowling, who has insisted on fealty to her creations, “I don’t feel like it has to be a carbon copy of the book,” Handler says. “I think all writers have some regret when a book is published and they always think there is something I wish I could have done differently. It’s interesting to see if they work.”

“Peter Pan”

When producer Lucy Fisher was a child, she insisted that her parents call her Wendy. Producer and former Disney Studios Chairman Joe Roth says that seeing Mary Martin in “Peter Pan” on Broadway was the transformative artistic experience of his life. “I was 6 and living in Manhattan and I’m convinced I’m in the movie business because of that day,” Roth says. “People fly and battle pirates. For me personally, it was hard to beat as a kid.”

Fisher first tried to make “Peter Pan” 27 years ago, when she bought the rights for Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s company. Roth had a stint with the material when he was at Disney Studios in the mid-’90s, and asked “Home Alone” writer John Hughes to adapt the material. “As best I know, he had updated it a little bit to a WWII setting, but he never felt comfortable completing it.”

The new $100-million incarnation, due in the 2003 holidays, will tap the resources of not only Roth’s company (Revolution), but two studios, Columbia and Universal. It stars British actor Jason Isaacs as Hook and Mr. Darling, and Jeremy Sumpter as Peter Pan.

Fisher says the new version brings back elements of the story not seen in Disney’s famous animated version, such as mermaids and “simultaneous climates--depending on whether Peter is around is how spring-like it becomes.”

“Peter Pan” author J.M. Barrie talks about how a child’s imagination is Neverland, and the ideas run into other ideas. The landscape of your dream life doesn’t have direct borders.”

“Curious George”

At the height of his glory at the newly merged Vivendi Universal, former Chairman Jean-Marie Messier touted the spunky monkey as the new conglomerate’s Mickey Mouse, an adorable mascot that could be synergized across every division and endow the corporation with just the right touch of insouciance and cuddliness.

The corporation is now in the midst of imploding, and as Universal’s Parent points out, “it’s not like we have Curious George Way and a statue of Curious George holding up the building.”

Yet that hasn’t stopped the company’s plans to turn the little chimp into a big-screen franchise, although a film based on the character is still in the early stages of development with an eye on a 2005 release.

“It’s been really hard for me,” says Grazer, who has been chipping away at the problem for a decade. “I tried to do it live-action, then mixed-media, then live action with digital effects, then I realized it might look old-fashioned.” He has commissioned numerous drafts, as well as design experiments, before settling on the apparently definitive computer-generated animation take. The latest version of the script is being worked on by Michael McCullers of “Austin Powers” fame.

“The message of the piece I find very personal,” Grazer adds. “It’s curiosity that excites me every day and keeps me alive.”

“Where the Wild Things Are”

Maurice Sendak’s book was one of the first picture books to present a realistic, imperfect child, and to examine the world from inside the angry tot’s mind.

Sendak spent a year writing the book and two years illustrating it, and part of the challenge in making the movie has been expanding the story’s intuitive, fantastical quality into a movie.

“My books are very strange,” Sendak says. “I’m talking about emotional issues and covering them with the sheerest story.”

In “Where the Wild Things Are,” Max has a tantrum, finds a boat that carries him to a far-off island, has a rumpus with the creatures there and goes home--hardly enough narrative for a film (although there has been an opera of the book).

“To invent a story that doesn’t drown the interior content is to put your finger on where the problem lies,” Sendak says. “Does he go to the island, find a pretty girl, they begin to date and share coconuts together? It could go on like that....They meet a Harry Potter-like magician who lives deep in the forest.”

The author and/or illustrator of more than 40 books sighs with the horror of it: “God, I hate wizards.”

Tom Hanks became involved after he read the book to his children, Sendak says, adding happily, “He has emancipated views.”

The author sounds heartened by the recent progress made on the new, computer-generated animation incarnation of the material, which is still without a release date. Sendak is supervising the process with his producing partner, John Carls, and the pair are not Hollywood neophytes, having already launched three successful animated TV series: “Little Bear,” “Seven Little Monsters” (both based on work by Sendak) and “George and Martha.”

One thing Sendak is sure to leave out is some of the simplistic moralizing that has been the hallmark of a generation of treacly children’s fare. “Movies or books that set out to teach children are sickening because the assumption is that they don’t know this. The book was for pleasure. People are annoyed that Max doesn’t get punished. My thought was, Why should he? He’s doing exactly what he’ll do every week until he’s 35 and goes to a therapist and his parents throw him out.”