VOYAGE OF CONQUEST

What does Alias Hook have in common with the books of Sarah J. Maas, Marissa Meyer and Neil Gaiman? They're all featured this week in an article in the glossy showbiz mag, Entertainment Weekly!

Yes, Captain Hook's voyage of conquest through pop culture continues. The occasion for the EW story is the return of the insanely popular TV series, Once Upon A Time, this Sunday night, for its fifth season.

To celebrate this event, EW writer Megan Lewis selected eight books, contemporary novels in the retold classic fairy tale genre, that should appeal to fans of various characters on the show. And since Guess Who is the most popular character on the show, Alias Hook ranks numero uno on the list!

I could not be more thrilled to share these column inches with so many other talented scribes. Not to mention being linked up with such a popular show.

Okay, I've had my issues with OUAT over the years. But I have to give the show credit for helping to redeem Hook from the ranks of pure villainy. According to readers on my Goodreads pages, lots of people picked up Alias Hook because they were envisioning Colin O'Donoghue in the role!

Anyway, my Amazon numbers spiked overnight!

Read the whole article here.

MORE DUELING HOOKS

Hey kids, what time is it? Ten points to Gryffindor if you said it's time for Captain Hook!

Sure, James M Barrie's enduring pirate captain may be 110 years old (or more, if you subscribe to my version of the character in Alias Hook, where he's been frozen in time—at age 43—since 1724). But the time has never been more right for the witty, sardonic old rogue, who's enjoying something of a mini-Renaissance right this minute.

Over on TV's Once Upon A Time, we have the handsome young leather-clad incarnation of the character played for a couple of seasons now by Colin O'Donoghue. It seems like this Captain Hook (aka Killian Jones) was brought in at the beginning of the second season chiefly as a villainous adversary to Robert Carlyle's Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold character.

But viewer response to the sexy Irishman was so positive, this Hook has since been promoted to the role of principal love interest to the show's nominal heroine, Emma Swan. But Emma's love interests have an unfortunate way of ending up dead—remember the handsome sheriff who had his traitor's heart squished (literally) by the evil queen? Remember Pinocchio?—which may be why Emma's been so standoffish.

Still, last night, with calamity looming (calamity is always looming in this show), Killian/Hook got another chance to plant a big smooch on Emma. That gurgling sound you may have heard was millions of women all over America melting over their remotes.

Meanwhile, Hook is coming back to the big screen in a big way in next summer's Pan. The movie won't be out for seven more months, but official studio portraits of the main characters were released this week.

No doubt inspired by the popularity of the OUaT character, the producers went with a younger vibe for their Hook, as played by Garrett Hedlund. In what purports to be an origin story of Peter Pan,  the boy Peter is whisked off to the Neverland, where he falls in with the notorious pirate, Blackbeard—one of whose crewmembers is the youthful James Hook. Apparently, the two of them team up to save Neverland from their lunatic boss. (Played by Hugh Jackman, from whom I'm expecting plenty of  scenery-chomping brio!)

I'm not sure what time period—if any—the movie is meant to be set in. That flintlock Hedlund is grasping looks appropriate to the Blackbeard era, although not so his clothing or his haircut. Doesn't he seem a tad neatly coifed for a pirate?

As I mentioned in a previous post, J. M. Barrie says in his novel, Peter And Wendy, that James Hook once sailed with Blackbeard, so I suppose the storyline isn't all that far-fetched. It's Hook becoming allies with that infernal boy I may not be able to swallow; but I suppose it's all in the telling.

And then, this Thursday (Dec 4), batten down the hatches for Peter Pan Live, an in-studio production of the venerable stage musical to be broadcast live to a TV screen near you.  And speaking of venerable, the intrepid Christopher Walken—iconoclast that he is—is going against the youth-vibe trend to bring seasoned menace to the role of Captain Hook.

A veteran hoofer from way back (remember him tap-dancing on the bar in Pennies From Heaven?), Walken also promises to bring a bit of the ol' soft-shoe to the deck of Hook's ship. (It's a musical, remember?)

I can't say that any of these gentlemen are exactly my vision of James Hook. But I'll be cheering them all on, thrilled that the good captain continues to, er, carve out a place for himself in popular culture!

WOODS AND WOLVES

If any further proof were needed that fairy tales are taking over our popular culture, consider this—a new trailer for the movie version of Into the Woods!

While this musical fairy tale mashup from composer Stephen Sondheim and scriptwriter James Lapine wowed Broadway in 1987, it's taken almost 30 years for the show to make it to the big screen. But now, at last, the timing seems to be right.

For one thing, Disney's live-action Once Upon a Time TV series (or, as we like to call it around my house, the mosh pit where old Disney characters go to die) continues to be a big hit.

Yes, I despair of them ever giving their Captain Hook character anything to do besides trail around in Emma's wake, pining for her.

 Still, I hear from many readers of Alias Hook how much they adore Colin O'Donoghue in the role, so I'm grateful to him and the show for helping to make the character sympathetic to the mass audience.

Anyway, it's no coincidence that the Disney company is also responsible for getting Into the Woods up on the big screen. (There must be a Faustian bargain inked in blood somewhere that no fairy tale spinoff can ever again be produced without Disney participation.)

And it's interesting that the director is Rob Marshall, famed for his film adaptation of Chicago. More recently Marshall directed the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, On Stranger Tides, which no doubt accounts for Woods securing Johnny Depp in the featured role of The Wolf.

I understand there's some distress in the blogosphere over this casting, that some fans were hoping for a wolfier, perhaps CGI version of this character in all his scary beastliness. (Although I do think it would sort of break the illusion when he bursts into song.

But wolves exist in fairy tales to symbolize the dangers of the outside (read: grown-up) world to supposedly innocent children like Red Riding Hood. And what more dangerous predator is there than Man?

Besides, look how cool Depp looks in his Zoot Suit and big, furry ears! I can't help but think of the slick, anthropomorphic wolves in the old Warner Brothers cartoons drawn by Tex Avery.

The rest of the cast is not exactly chopped liver either: Meryl Streep as the Witch, James Corden and Emily Blunt as the pivotal Baker and his Wife, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, and Chris Pine (newly discovered—by me—as an entertaining comic actor) as Cinderella's Prince, to name but a few.

Onstage, Into the Woods was a sardonic meditation on what happens after Happily Ever After, and a wistful cautionary tale to be careful what you wish for.

If you've never seen the stage production do what I did: nip off to the library and borrow the original Broadway cast production on DVD.

So when the film version opens Christmas Day, you'll be all set to marvel at how enduring, alluring, and open to endless interpretations fairy tales continue to be.

DUELING HOOKS

Hugh Jackman, rehearsing for Pan

If only this was Hugh Jackman  in swordfighting rehearsals for Alias Hook! But sadly not. If you read my post on Crossbones, you'll recall that Jackman is playing arch-villain Blackbeard in a new live-action Peter Pan movie, Pan, in production as we speak, to come out from Warner Bros. next summer.

People are finally starting to realize that Captain Hook is everybody's favorite character in the Peter Pan universe. Seriously, who else besides J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, could ever think of that bratty, heartless eternal boy as the hero? These days, we know better.

(Over on Disney's Once Upon A Time, Hook is practically the star of the whole show thanks in no small part to sexy Colin O' Donoghue in the role. But then, Disney is notorious for graverobbing its own past successes in the fairy tale realm to accommodate changing tastes. Just look at Maleficent.)

Colin O'Donoghue, Once Upon At Time

But in the upcoming Pan, it looks like the only way they can think to make a good guy out of Hook is to team him up with Pan against an even more dastardly villain—Blackbeard.

This is not an entirely unprecedented idea. Barrie tells us that James Hook was once "Blackbeard's bosun." So it's not too much of a stretch to imagine the two of them running amok in the Neverland together.

In the Pan version, the boy Peter (to be played by newcomer Levi Miller) is an orphan whisked off to Neverland. He meets James Hook as a young man in Blackbeard's crew, and they become shipmates and allies.

Garrett Hedlund is cast as Hook, most recently seen as Dean Moriarty (the Neal Cassady figure) in On The Road, and John Goodman's mysterious driver in Inside Llewyn Davies. It'll be interesting to see if he can ditch that modern hipster vibe to play Hook.

Apparently, Peter and Hook will be friends at the start of the story. But the badder Blackbeard gets (one assumes), the closer they come to an epic rift as each one has to choose what side he's on. 

Garrett Hedlund: hipster Hook?

I'm not sure if making James Hook the buddy—or even mentor—of little Peter is the best use of such a witty, sardonic, and complex character. And as to the whole idea of Hook as one of Blackbeard's crew? Well, the James Hook in my novel laughs at the crack-brained notion that, rumors aside, he would ever actually sail with Blackbeard —who was a well-known lunatic! Just sayin'...

So, not the way I would (or did) tell the story, but it's good to know Captain Hook and Peter Pan are still going strong in pop culture!

(Notice I'm not even going to mention the upcoming Peter Pan Live TV project, due in December. That's another post...)

Hey, maybe Hugh is playing Blackbeard (instead of Hook) because he's saving himself for the lead in Alias Hook! Well, a girl can dream, can't she...

HOOK-WINKED

Okay, I love Captain Hook so much I wrote a novel about him. (Alias Hook, coming soon to a bookstore near you.) But tossing the character into the chaotic mosh pit that the TV series Once Upon A Time has become hasn't done nearly enough to improve the gene pool in terms of story.

The Irish actor playing him, Colin O'Donoghue, is sexy enough. (Although if you've read your Barrie, you know that Mr. Smee, the bosun, is the Irishman; Hook is pure Etonian-bred English.) O'Donoghue would likely rise to the occasion if the writers gave him anything interesting to do.

But, no. After one brief episode that took place at least partially aboard ship, now Hook is landlocked on the Island of Lost Toys, or wherever it is where half the cast is segregated this season, wandering around with the rest of the superfluous characters—Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, Snow White, Lancelot (Lancelot? I thought these were fairy tale characters)—in search of a plot.

And—most egregiously of all—last week they introduced the Frankenstein monster, in the person (at least, the cadaver) of Regina's lost, reanimated stableboy lover. It must have been some kind of Halloween thing; the reanimation sequence was even in black-and-white, performed by a doctor called "Whale." (But if you want a truly clever homage to the classic James Whale movie, go see Frankenweenie).

The weirdest thing about the Hook subplot (and I use the term "plot" in the loosest possible sense) was the backstory establishing his enmity with Robert Carlyle's Mr. Gold. Each is responsible for depriving the other of the woman he loved, which suggests a tedious and prolonged grudge match of vengeance between the two of them if Hook ever gets out of Purgatory. And just so we get the point, Mr. Gold, in his sorcerous Dark Lord persona, is the one who cuts off Hook's hand, equating him in the storyline with—yes—the Crocodile.  (They even call him "Crocodile" in the episode.)

Carlyle remains the best (possibly only) reason to watch the show. But, seriously, give a guy a break! They've already got him playing Rumplestiltskin, the Dark Lord, Beast (in the Beauty and the Beast subplot), and now the Crocodile. How long can he be expected to carry the show all by himself? Talk about the hardest-working man in showbiz!

DISENCHANTED

I don't know about you, but it seems to me they can't bring on the Captain Hook character soon enough in the second season of TV's Once Upon A Time.

The curse was broken at the end of last season, and the suddenly un-enchanted denizens of Storybrook remember their fairy tale lives, although for some reason that escapes me at the moment, they can't go home to their fairy tale realm. But now, the scriptwriters have no idea what to do next; like the proverbial spaghetti noodle test, they're throwing everything at the wall to see if something, anything sticks.

Evil queen Regina (Lana Parrilla) is under some kind of house arrest in her mayor's mansion, out of the action. There are early indications that the writers are trying to soften her character up this season by re-introducing an even more dastardly wicked queen, the mother who made her what she is, previously seen only in flashback. This would be fatal to the show; Regina's ruthlessness is one of the series' few constant pleasures.

The other one is the great Robert Carlyle as Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold. You never know from one week to the next if he'll prove to be a good guy or a bad guy, but he always has a private agenda, some angle of self-interest, and that's what makes him so interesting. (Along with Carlyle's deliciously acrobatic and insinuating voice.) But we haven't seen enough of Mr. Gold this season, either.

Instead, the bulk of the narrative action so far falls to the designated "heroes" in the cast, and you've never seen so many shades of vanilla. At the moment, storylines are unfolding on three fronts, none of them interesting: the folks in Storybrook are trying to figure out how to get home, under the dubious leadership of Prince (yawn) Charming; angsty Emma and virtuous Snow (as in White) have tumbled though a mystic portal into some other enchanted plane, where they team up with another couple of personality-challenged females—Sleeping Beauty, and the so-far-underwhelming warrior Mulan—to battle ogres and elude Regina's poisonous mommie dearest; meanwhile, everyone's backstories continue to play out in flashbacks to the original fairy tale kingdom.

The mystery of how these stories fit together may be more trouble than it's worth solving for an increasingly disenchanted audience. (Okay, for me.) The writers must know it; the end of last week's episode teased a shot of a sailing ship, with a promise to introduce "one of the most despicable villains of all time." Hmmm...that's a bit harsh, especially if you've read my History of Captain Hook on stage, page, and screen.

Even if this Hook is still a villain, if he can hold his own against Gold and Regina, he'll be worth his weight in bullion in a show that desperately needs a breath of fresh sea air. It's promising that they have a sexy young Irishman playing the part, although the fatality rate for sexy young males on this show is pretty, er, grim.

Remember the hunky Huntsman/Sheriff? The queen squashed his heart like a bug. Mysterious stranger August/Pinocchio was last seen turning into wood (and I don't mean in a good way). And didn't Ruby/Riding Hood devour her own sweetheart during a werewolf interlude in her backstory?

If Hook is a hit on the show, I'll be waiting to see what kind of backstory they invent for him, and how it differs for the one I wrote for him in my upcoming novel, Alias Hook.  That's the great thing about a character who's been around as long as Captain Hook (107 years and counting)—he's always ripe for a new interpretation.

A HISTORY of HOOK

Evidently I'm not the only one who thinks James M. Barrie's immortal pirate captain is ripe for revival.

 Last year's hit TV series, the fairy tale mash-up Once Upon A Time, is adding a new character to its roster of villains for its second season; none other than (wait for it)—Captain Hook.

Here's a teaser trailer, oozing sinister portent.

For most of us, the "original" Captain Hook is this cartoon version from Disney's 1953 Peter Pan.

First produced for the London stage in 1904, Barrie's play about a tribe of boys who refuse to grow up in a childhood dream world called the Neverland might have gone the way of the Dodo if not for the presence of this flamboyant, crowd-pleasing pirate chief, the lovable, hissable villain who's kept generations of audiences coming back for more.

This overdressed, supercilious, cowardly comic-opera villain that we know as Captain Hook is almost—er—single-handedly responsible for the ongoing popularity of Barrie's sentimental domestic comedy.

Disney's animated Hook wrings every possible laugh out of his swordplay, pratfalls and surreal flights of fancy, along with an exaggerated cartoon visage worthy of his every scheme— hawk's beak, chin jutting like the prow of a ship, quivering Salvador Dali moustachios, wiggling eyebrows with a life of their own.

Not to mention the juicy, overripe trilling of Hans Conried's vocal performance (he was also the voice of Snidely Whiplash on the old Rocky and Bullwinkle TV show).

Another famed onscreen Hook was stage actor and music hall veteran Cyril Ritchard (right) in the Broadway musical Peter Pan, which was filmed for TV in the mid-'1950s and rebroadcast sporadically after that. This is the famous version with Mary Martin as Peter, but, it was the delightful Ritchard, dripping dry wit and fussbudgety sarcasm, who made the show so much fun.

It's been a longstanding tradition for mature women to play Peter onstage. But ever since Barrie published his novelized version of the play, Peter and Wendy, in 1911,  allowing readers to imagine Peter as a real boy, it's believed that all little girls swoon for Peter. Current discussion boards on Goodreads reveal that young female readers still can't understand why Wendy doesn't choose to stay forever young with Peter in the Neverland.

But not me. Stay in the Neverland forever with a bunch of mangy boys? No thanks. Even as a child, I thought Peter was too much like the boys I went to school with—bratty and full of himself.

I liked Hook! He had the funniest lines, and by far the coolest clothes!

Book representations tend toward a more menacing Hook. Look at this F. D. Bedford illustration from a 1912 edition of Peter and Wendy.

This Hook as more of a Medusa-headed ogre than mere villainous human.

The image of Captain Hook as mincing fop was re-established by Dustin Hoffman in the 1991 Steven Spielberg movie, Hook. Hoffman brings plenty of comic brio to the role, but this is an aging, defanged Hook fading into the sunset.

By far the darkest and sexiest screen Hook is Jason Isaacs in the 2003 live-action Peter Pan. Isaacs (below) is all menace laced with a shot of wry; he suffers children and childish pirates with elaborate, if short-fused patience. ("Silence, puling spawn!" he roars when the kids start whining, a sentiment any babysitter or parent will understand.)

It was Isaacs' Hook, cracking jokes to himself, sotto voce, that nobody else gets, who set off the spark in my imagination about how awful it must be for a functioning adult to be trapped in a world invented and run by children.


 And the more I started thinking about it in those terms, the more real and complicated and tragic the character started to feel to me. I started to think of James Hook as a character worthy of redemption. I wanted to get him out of there!

They've got a handsome young Irsishman, Colin McDonoghe, coming in to play the character in Once Upon A Time, which suggests another reinterpretation of the Classic Hook. (Not surprising in a series in which Red Riding Hood is also, herself, a shapeshifting Wolf, and the hobgoblin, Rumplestiltskin—played by the delghtful Robert Carlyle—also gets his own Beauty and the Beast love story.)

The series' second season begins September 30, and Hook is scheduled to make his first appearance in Episode Four.

But as long as Captain Hook remains a designated villain, that's not the story I'm telling in Alias Hook.

SNOW DAYS

When the going gets tough, the tough turn to — fairy tales?

Our pop culture is suddenly besotted with fairy tales. Sure, they've always been around, and always will be, as long as Disney keeps popping out new, updated, special collector's edition DVDs of its greatest hits.

But right this nanosecond, the genre is surging in popularity. The fairy tale mash-up Once Upon A Time is one of the biggest hits of the current TV season. Next week, we'll see the first of not one, but two Dueling Snow White movies due out this spring, Mirror, Mirror. The second, Snow White and the Huntsman  is due out June 1.

Why fairy tales? Why now? For one thing, they are morality tales (like Aesop's Fables, Greek mythology, and most religions) that evolved out of the collective subconscious centuries ago and deal in potent, timeless themes—love, hate, envy, oppression, betrayal, revenge.  With so much of our chaotic world and even our own lives beyond our control, we return to these comforting allegories of good vs. evil.

(Yes, I know, the original folk tales as set down by Perrault or transcribed by the Grimms are anything but comforting, but that's another blog.)

For another thing, these familiar tales we already know are in the public domain, meaning they can be endlessly tweaked, trifled with and revised to suit modern sensibilities.

Take the "It" girl of the moment, Snow White. We all remember the Disney version from 1937 (above), with her piping little soprano voice; a wet-eyed domestic dishrag, she plays mother to the dwarfs, while her song of yearning, "Some Day My Prince Will Come," launched a thousand feminist tracts decades later.

In one of the many plotlines in the tangled briar patch that is the Once Upon A Time scenario, Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin, right), banished to the forest, becomes a highway robber to survive. Which guarantees that she and her Prince Charming-to-be (Josh Dallas) will "meet cute" when she holds him up in the woods. This is meant to be a more (ahem) proactive Snow, infused with a dose of modern pluck.

(Although, in the show's parallel story, where fairy tale characters are cursed to live in a modern New England town, "Storybrook," not knowing who they are, under the thumb of the Evil Queen/Mayor  (Lana Parrilla), Snow White reverts again to good girl Mary Margaret, a schoolteacher trying to stifle her attraction to her prince, now an amnesia victim with a wife.  I enjoy this series, off and on, especially the flashbacks, but the writers depend way too much on cutesy Disney character names (Grumpy, Jiminy Cricket) in their steaming melange of fairy tale backstory.)

Similarly, in Mirror, Mirror, the story gets a grrl-power twist when Snow White (Lily Collins, below), banished to the forest, becomes the leader of the seven dwarfs, who are a gang of roistering thieves. It also stars Julia Roberts as the Evil Queen, and it's directed by Tarsem Singh, who can be a brilliant visionary (The Fall), or incredibly cheesy (Immortals). From the preview trailer, Mirror, Mirror might be both, but overall, the tone looks regrettably campy.

Snow White and the Huntsman features Kristen Stewart—in armor, yet—in a darker revisionist take on the tale. This time, the huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) sent to assassinate Snow White instead mentors her in warrior-training so she can defeat the Evil Queen (Charlize Theron). Rookie director Rupert Sanders is a completely unknown quantity (at least to me), but the visuals in the trailer look stunning.

I'm not sure if turning a goody-goody into a warrior is the best possible use of evolution.  (My ideal of a kick-ass modern heroine is still Lisbeth Salander, who outsmarts her vile opponents  with ferocious cunning and nerve.) Still, female role models have to change with the times or lose their currency, and any fairy tale heroine who does more than sit passively by her spindle, waiting for her hero, is a step in the right direction.




At least fairy tale remixes are more interesting than the cult of zombies and vampires that have monopolized pop culture for the last few years—seriously, don't we get enough of those in the GOP debates?