FAIRY EXCHANGE

Sleeping Beauty villainess tells her side of the story in Maleficent

For 40 years, feminists have complained about the sanitized fairy tales force-fed to little girls in Disney cartoons—the ones that promise a handsome prince and true love's kiss. And over the last couple of years, the Mouse House seems to be getting a clue. (Well, better late than never...) Brave featured an independent-minded princess who didn't get (or need) a prince. In last year's mega-hit Frozen, an ironic plot reversal was built around the (mistaken) notion of true love's kiss.

Times and tastes change, of course. Kick-ass heroines (the very phrase is already a cliche), in the Katniss Everdeen mode, are all the rage in the YA fantasy market—to which all little pink Disney Princess fans graduate soon enough. And it probably made a difference that the above Disney films were largely conceived, as well as co-written and co-directed, by women—Brenda Chapman and Jennifer Lee, respectively.

For Maleficent, the studio turns over scriptwriting duties to one of its most accomplished players, Linda Woolverton, who wrote (among other things) Disney's fabulous Beauty and the Beast, and its live-action Alice In Wonderland. It's Woolverton's task to blithely rewrite the vintage Disney Princess cartoon, Sleeping Beauty—or at least provide a bracketing story around events in the earlier movie that pretty much changes everything.

Not your ordinary fairy wings.

This time, the story is told from the viewpoint of the so-called evil fairy, Maleficent, formerly the designated villain. It's an audacious idea, and a nod to the trend for rehabilitated villains, a la Wicked (not to mention Alias Hook).

And while the narrative stumbles now and then, Maleficent is often a savvy and entertaining live-action revision. With the formidable Angelina Jolie in the title role, we get a character who is both deliciously wicked (when she needs to be) and surprisingly, believably tender as her side of the story plays out.

Disney's original, in all her wicked glory.

In this version, we meet Maleficent as a young fairy (Isobelle Molloy) growing up blissfully happy in the moors, a verdant haven for all manner of magical CGI critters adjacent to a kingdom of humans. For some reason never explained, Maleficent is blessed with majestic hawk-like wings as tall as she is, which enable her to tumble around joyously in the sky, but also to swoop down on anyone or anything that threatens her precious moors.

As a child, she befriends a human boy, Stefan, who strays into the Moors one day. They become close friends—until the day, years later, that he betrays her. It's not simply that his love isn't true enough, but as a grown man (now played by Sharlto Copley), driven by ambition to inherit the kingdom, he commits an act so heinous and horrifying against Maleficent, it hardens her heart and sets her on the road to villainy.

The symbolic weight of this action for female viewers cannot be overestimated, and it ground's Maleficent's psyche in something much deeper and more primal than an unhappy romance.

When her former friend becomes King Stefan, and he and his queen celebrate the birth of their daughter, Aurora, Maleficent crashes the party and delivers her famous curse: on her sixteenth birthday, Aurora will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall into a trance-like sleep from which she will never waken.

This is the "familiar" part of the story, except things don't play out the way we expect in Woolverton's clever script. Not to give away the best surprises, but Aurora, raised in secret by three fairies in a cottage in the wood, grows up a wild child, beloved by all the woodland creatures. Including, gradually, Maleficent herself—whom Aurora calls her fairy godmother.

When Aurora (now played by the dewy Elle Fanning) nears her sixteenth birthday, Maleficent actually tries to revoke her curse, but can't. Ironically, the only possible escape clause is "true love's kiss"—which Maleficent believes does not exist.

The film marks the directing debut of visual effects wizard and production designer Robert Stromberg (Oscar-winning art director on Avatar and Alice In Wonderland). The effects are sophisticated, especially the transformations of Maleficent's shape-shifting crow familiar (nicely played by Sam Riley in human form). Also cunning is the way the faces of actresses Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, and Juno Temple are morphed onto tiny winged bodies as the guardian fairies—although too much time is wasted on their slapstick Three Stoogettes routines when they switch to human size.

Something to crow about: Sam Riley and Jolie.

In an earlier scene, there's something ugly, gratuitous, and out-of-character in the savage way winged Maleficent keeps diving into the fray when an invading army attacks the moors—especially since giant bog creatures of trees, rock, and mud seem perfectly capable of defending themselves.

Short shrift is also given to the story's central motif, the death-like sleep into which Aurora falls when the curse is fulfilled. Her sleep is usually shown to cast a pall of tragedy over the realm; in some versions of the tale, the entire kingdom likewise falls asleep for a hundred years.

Here, she's only asleep for about five minutes of screen time before the apparent rescuer(s) start parading in. I love how the notion of what does (and does not) constitute "true love" is handled in this sequence; still, waking the princess from a nap doesn't have quite the same dramatic urgency.

But despite these missteps, the film's fresh ideas (including its notion of who the real Sleeping Beauty is) help this radical retake cast a certain spell.

THEY GOT ME COVERED

Ahoy, me hearties! Feast your eyes on the new Alias Hook book cover:

Special delivery from UPS last night, and, boy, was I excited to get it. Is this beyond cool, or what? I've always loved the rose thicket on the front cover, but I can't tell you how crazy I am about those giant woodcut waves on the back cover, with the ship sailing off into the stars. (A central image from the story, btw.)

Big thanks to Lisa Marie Pompilio at Thomas Dunne Books for this splendid design!

And, as always, thanks to intrepid readers Laurie King, Paula Brackston, Elizabeth Blackwell, and C. C. Humphreys for the jacket quotes—you people rock!

This is all starting to get very real. Just imagine what this will look like with a book inside it!!!

DARK VICTORY

Mixed-race gentlewoman inspires anti-slavery politics in 'Belle'

The history of slavery in the Americas did not begin and end with the American South. For centuries, the economy of the lucrative Caribbean sugar islands colonized by European powers depended on imported African slaves.

Yet slavery was abolished in the British islands 30 years before the American Civil War—in the courts, not on the battlefield. One possible reason for which is explored in Belle, an engaging, handsomely-mounted drawing room drama about a real-life young woman of color who may have had an impact on the legal campaign to end slavery in England.

Belle is the love child of two determined Anglo-African women filmmakers, scriptwriter Misan Sagay and director Amma Asante, who labored for seven years to bring the story to the screen.

Tom Wilkerson and Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Their subject is Dido Elizabeth Belle, daughter of English Naval officer Captain Sir John Lindsay, and a black slave woman, whose father had her raised in gentility by his aristocratic uncle, Lord Mansfield—the Lord Chief Justice of England.

The film begins in 1769 with the child, Dido, delivered to her new home. Matthew Goode brings his usual panache and conviction to his few brief minutes of screen time as Lindsay. Tom Wilkerson and Emily Watson are the initially uncertain Lord and Lady Mansfield.

But as Dido grows into a lovely young woman (played with grace and spirit by the beauteous Gugu Mbatha-Raw), they love her as devotedly as they do the other great-niece they are raising, fair, blonde Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon), who becomes Dido's best friend.

The real-life Dido and Elizabeth

(The cousins' real-life friendship is well documented in this lively 1779 portrait of the two young women together. The painting of this portrait figures in many of Asante's scenes.

Notice how Dido is dressed like an "exotic" in the popular style of the day, but also see how much affection the girls have for each other.)

The great Miranda Richardson (below) is on board as a scheming dowager who comes sniffing about with her two eligible sons (Tom Felton and James Norton).

Sam Reid plays a clergyman's son with legal aspirations who awakens Dido to the abolitionists' cause.

Romance is doomed when one of your suitors is Draco Malfoy

What keeps the tale from becoming too fluffy is the juxtaposition of Dido's coming-of-age with a celebrated legal case involving slavery, on which Lord Mansfield's ruling was an important legal step on the road to abolition.

While Reid's character is based on a real person, most of the film's romantic entanglements are entirely fabricated.

Yet, despite (or more likely because of) these fabrications, Belle succeeds as an effective portrait of a singular young woman understanding her own identity, and of a political era in which men of principle still dared to confront the moral issues of the day. (Read more)

MY WRITING PROCESS

Big thanks to Persia Woolley for tagging me in the ongoing My Writing Process blog hop tour thingy. She is the author of the splendid Guinevere trilogy (Child of the Northern Spring, Queen of the Summer Stars, Guinevere: The Legend in Autumn), which imagines the court of King Arthur with enough historical context to make it all deliciously plausible.

Thanks, Persia!

Here's how it works: I answer four questions about my work and (wait for it...) my writing process, and then I pass the metaphorical baton on to two more writers, who will blog about same next week. Seems harmless enough! Let's go...

What am I working on?

At the moment, I'm in the final publicity and promotion phase* for my novel, Alias Hook, coming out from Thomas Dunne Books in July, 2014. (*Translation: I'm posting to my Pinterest boards and trying not to check my Goodreads ranking every fifteen seconds!)

Alias Hook is a different take on the world of Peter Pan. It's not a rehash of the familiar play, but a somewhat subversive look at life in the Neverland as viewed from the caustic perspective of Captain James Benjamin Hook, its prisoner and victim. There is no Wendy or Tiger Lily, and Tinker Bell is, by this time, in retirement. There's only James Hook and Peter Pan, and the eternal enmity that keeps them locked forever in a pointless war that Hook can neither win, nor end.

The wild card in their power struggle is Stella Parrish, a grown woman from the other world who dreams her way to the Neverland in spite of Pan's prohibition against grown-up "ladies." In search of a fantasy of perfect childhood innocence she quickly realizes does not exist, Stella opens herself up to the diverse forces of the Neverland—the fairies at their Revels in the Fairy Dell, the secret temple of merwives beneath the Mermaid Lagoon, the society of the First Tribes—in a way Hook has never dared to. And in the pirate captain himself, she begins to see someone far more complex than the storybook villain.

Stella may be his last chance for redemption and release—if he can give up the game and grow up.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I'm not interested in retelling the same old story over again, from a slightly different viewpoint. It's more fun for me to take a setting and characters we think we know—in this case, J. M. Barrie's Neverland—explore the hidden undercurrents, reshuffle the dynamics between the characters, toss in something or someone totally outrageous, and then imagine a whole new story.

I thought the Neverland could benefit from the proverbial woman's touch—and I don't mean a dewy little Wendy, in thrall to Peter. What would a grown woman from, say, 1950 think of the place? A woman who had survived war and turmoil and heartbreak with her humor and spirit intact, who longed to regain a sense of wonder about the world, who was perhaps overly fond of fine, vintage port? How would she get on with Captain Hook? What on earth would he make of her? I wanted to find out!

In my next novel, I reimagine the Beauty and the Beast tale from the viewpoint of a third party, a young woman who falls in love with Beast as he is, and desperately tries to prevent Beauty from turning him back into a handsome prince. But that's another blog!

My workspace, where genius burns—or at least flails around...

Why do I write what I do?

As a baby-boomer, I belong to one of the most over-analyzed, over-written-about generations in the history of media. I have no interest in contributing to the vast literary navel-gazing of my g-g-g-generation; there are plenty of others telling that story.

I started out writing historical fiction because I was interested in other eras, other circumstances, other sets of rules. I wasn't writing about the movers and shakers of history—the Tudors and Borgias—but of ordinary people who might have plausibly lived in those times, who might have fallen through the cracks of the historical record, but still had extraordinary adventures.

More recently, I've been writing fantasy, which is even more liberating in terms of creating new rules, settings, and circumstances for the story a writer wants to tell. When you think about it, fantasy is a lot like historical fiction: in both genres, you're taking readers some place they have never been and where they can never actually go, perhaps with its own specific language, inhabitants, dress code, and cultural dynamics. What gives fantasy a slight edge is you can make ALL of it up!

How does my writing process work?

Vintage me, vintage Mac, transcribing those 900 pages

Sporadically. Okay, let's be serious. In the early days, I had no process; I just blathered on and on all over the page (with a #2.5 pencil, on Jiffy notebook paper) in hopes that I would eventually get somewhere. Which explains why the first draft of my first completed manuscript was 900 pages long.

Thankfully, my process has evolved since then. It all begins with that one nagging idea that takes up residence in the nether regions of my brain and won't be dislodged. (In the case of Alias Hook, it was James Hook's acerbic voice telling me in no uncertain terms what he thought about everyone and everything in the Neverland.)

Once I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm in for a long, novel-length slog, I start a Word doc, into which I start writing random scenes as they occur to me—meetings, climaxes, love scenes, comic relief. As these scenes accrue, I try to arrange them in some sort of chronology. In the meantime, I've started another doc for characters (names, who they are, what they do, how they function in the story) and plot—where I start explaining to myself the trajectory of the story. This is where I hope to discover and work through potential dramatic problems that stand between me and the finish line.

By now, I know myself well enough to realize that if I don't have the storyline pretty much figured out beforehand in the plot doc—right down to the closing scenes—I'll find myself flailing around mid-book with no clue where I'm going. Of course, it's going to take a lot more work, and a lot more docs (with names like "Inserts," "Outtakes," "Weird Stuff," "Orphan Scenes" ) before I get the narrative into some coherent shape.

But once the shape starts to make sense, I start a "Timeline" doc, where I dope out the arrangement of scenes within chapters—and get to work.

And here's the thing: it's all going to change during the actual writing, anyway. Writing is not an exact science, at least not the way I do it! But I have to have a pretty solid idea of where I'm going before I can figure out the best way to get there.

And that's about all there is to My Writing Process. Next Monday, please do stop in and visit my two tagees and read all about their writing processes.

Sailor, editor, guitarist, and Renaissance man Broos Campbell, author of the rousing Matty Graves series of seafaring historical fiction, is transitioning as we speak into the paranormal with a spooky new ghost story.

M. D. Waters lives with her family in Maryland. Her dystopian, near-future, romantic science fiction debut, Archetype, is such a sensation, it will be followed this summer by a sequel, Prototype, and a novella prequel, Antitype.

LISTEN UP!

It's official: Captain James Hook now has a voice—and a face!

Meet Ralph Lister, who will be reading the Alias Hook audiobook for Blackstone Audio. An accomplished British stage and film actor, audiobook narrator, and voice-over artist, Lister has read Darren Shan's entire Cirque du Freak series for Blackstone, the immense Gorean Saga by John Norman for Audible, and the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erickson for Brilliance—along with many, many other credits.

Release date for the Alias Hook audiobook is July 8, 2014, same as the hardcover, ebook and Kindle editions. The recording will clock in at 12 hours—unabridged!

I'm excited that they're producing the audiobook so speedily, and with such an accomplished reader. I found this sample of his voice work, reading something a bit smaller and intimate in scope, a passage from the Anne Perry mystery, Acceptable Loss.

He also looks more than ready for his close-up, should there ever be a movie version. I'm just sayin'...

TASTY

As we all know, life goes better with art. And everything goes better with chocolate!

This weekend, why not combine the two? get ready for the 7th Annual Art & Chocolate art studio tour in beautiful mid-town Live Oak.

At this popular Mother's Day Weekend event, a dozen artists in the Live Oak area throw open their doors to you, The Public, and invite you in to see what's new and exciting in their creative lives.

To sweeten the deal, free chocolate will be available at every stop on the self-guided tour!

Equally tasty artwork on display ranges from the watercolors of Amy Stark and the pastel landscapes of Lou Renner and Paul Rodrigues to the oil paintings of Maggie Renner Hellman, Aaron Johnson, and Janet Ferraro.

Germanic rote (Lyre) by Ron Cook

From abstract stone sculpture by Mike McClellan and whimsical clay work from Carol DePalma to black-and-white, infrared photography by Kevin Osborn.

Andy Orsini is showing hand-crafted fine wood furniture. And new to the event this year, Ron Cook is showing his hand-carved, medieval-inspired folk instruments and furniture.

In fact, we're lucky enough to be hosting Ron this year at our Live Oak studio, where Art Boy (aka James Aschbacher) will have some fun new mixed-media paintings on display

(That's his New Power Spot above.  What does the title mean? Ask any cat lover!)

Studios are open this weekend, May 10 and 11, from 11 am to 5 pm. Admission is free! For a map and a preview of the artists involved, drop by the Art & Chocolate website.

Then grab your mom, or the art lover of your choice, and enjoy!

Did I mention there'll be chocolate???

RANDOM ACTS OF LUNACY

Julie James and Danny Scheie: frenzied plots

Orton's crazed spirit lives in JTC's hilarious 'What the Butler Saw'

Spoiler alert: there is no butler in What the Butler Saw. But there's plenty to see and enjoy in Joe Orton's scabrously funny 1967 comedy as performed by the Jewel Theatre Company. It's a slamming-door farce in which the set's four doors repeatedly slam, identities are mistaken, switched, disguised and deconstructed, thwarted sexuality drives the plot, and anarchy runs riot over all. 

In other words, business as usual for Orton, the working-class Brit whose subversively witty comedies blazed across the London theatre scene during his brief mid-1960s career.

Yes, this production references the '60s, from the British Invasion soundtrack that greets audiences on the way to their seats, to B. Modern's mod-influenced costumes. But Orton's comic style is timeless; his tweaking of authority and cheeky disdain for hallowed traditions and bourgeois propriety would be equally at home on a 16th-Century Commedia dell'arte stage or last night's cable TV comedy series. And the excellent JTC team mines the material for every possible laugh.

Josh Saleh, Mike Ryan, Audrey Rumsby: gender-switched

This production continues JTC's fertile association with Shakespeare Santa Cruz alumni. Director Art Manke (whose credits include the wonderful The Three Musketeers) stages the piece with verve and clarity. 

Mike Ryan notches up another entertaining performance as the head of a tony private psychiatric clinic, whose aborted attempt to seduce his dewy new secretary, and his increasingly frazzled attempts to conceal this fact from his virago wife (expertly played by Julie James), lead to mayhem in Orton's frisky plot. 

Ryan and Saleh: anarchy vs. propriety

 Also on board is the hilarious Danny Scheie as another shrink, visiting the clinic on behalf of the British government. As the principal authority figure, it's his function to misinterpret evidence, misconstrue motives, and misdiagnose everyone else as a raving lunatic—and Scheie wrings the most out of every syllable of caustic observation and gleeful epiphany.

Audrey Rumsby, as the secretary, and Josh Saleh as a bellhop roped into the action are delightful as the young innocents caught up in the crazed lies and schemes of their elders; they are the ones most often stripped down to their skivvies and forced to switch clothes and genders to suit the others' frenzied plotting.

The message here is that no amount of personal aplomb or official prestige can save you from random acts of lunacy in the Orton universe. (Read more)

(The JTC production of What the Butler Saw plays through May 25 at Center Stage in Sant Cruz. Visit the JTC website for ticket info.)

Photos by Steve DiBartolomeo, WestsideStudio Image.

TRAVELS WITH HOOK

I don't know about you, but I never travel anywhere without a book. Fortunately for me, intrepid reader Kate Underwood feels the same way.

On a recent trip to London, she took along a copy of Alias Hook. (Fittingly enough, she brought the UK edition with the gold foil cover.)

And this morning, she sent me these cool pics from her excursion!

That's Kate standing next to the famous statue of Peter Pan in Hyde Park, next to the Kensington Gardens. According to her guidebook, this is the "most photographed statue in Hyde Park."

Of course, in my book, James Hook has a slightly different opinion:

He is partial to London. They have erected a statue to him there. Fancy, a public statue of Pan, the boy tyrant in his motley of leaves, like a king or a hero. While Hook is reviled, the evil pirate, the villain. There is no statue to me.

This other lovely photo speaks for itself. Afternoon tea and a good book in the Lobby Lounge a the Corinth Hotel. What could be better?

Kate also writes: "I love love love Alias Hook. I can't wait to see it on Broadway!"

From your lips to the ears of the Universe!

LOVE YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE

Despite what you may have read (probably online), the printed book is not dead. To prove it, booksellers across the state—those intrepid folks in the trenches, hand-selling books directly to you, the reading public—will throw open their doors this Saturday, May 3, for the first ever California Bookstore Day.

Event organizers have come up with lots of exclusive goodies to entice folks through the mystic portals of our favorite bookselling emporiums. For one day only, bookstores statewide are offering such limited edition items as an illustrated Neil Gaiman short story, The Sleeper and the Spindle, a signed lithograph of an illustration from Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which inspired the film Hugo), a Literary Map of California, and a signed and numbered collection of cartoonist Lisa Brown's Depressed. Repressed. Obsessed., a collection of her delicious 3-Panel Book Reviews.

(Here's Brown's take on the Twilight series. If her work looks familiar, her 3-Panel zingers appear periodically in the SF Chronicle Sunday Book Review section.)

All of these goodies and more will be available all day Saturday at Bookshop Santa Cruz—or at least until supplies run out.  Festivities begin at 9 am. with free coffee from Verve for all browsers and book lovers.

In addition, BSC will offer an exclusive, hand-printed broadside featuring a previously unpublished passage about Santa Cruz written, numbered and signed by Jonathan Franzen. A very limited number of these broadsides will be given out to anyone who buys a California Bookstore Day item, or any BSC Reader's Club member making a book purchase of $20 or more.

From 1-3 pm, there will; be face-painting, balloons and storytelling for young readers. And get ready for Literary Trivia Night, beginning at 7 pm—especially if you know the only NFL team named for a character in a poem, or can name the Patronus of every wizard in the Harry Potter series. Teams can compete for cool book prizes, with refreshments provided by Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing.

Visit the BSC website for more details.

Me, I have fond memories of working at BSC back in the '70s as an infant, straight out of UCSC. (And wondering what the heck I was gong to do with a BA in Aesthetic Studies. Answer: Nothing. I ended up going to the movies for a living instead.)

I worked in the airless, frigid textbook department in the basement, where daylight never penetrated. (Note the quaint florescent bulbs.) Sure, it was kind of like working in a mine shaft, but the precious ore we were excavating was books and ideas, in all their messy, infinite variety.

In this digital age, those of us who still love ink-and-paper books are labelled fetishists—a name I wear proudly! How can you wander among the deep stacks of shelves in a bookstore or library and not feel that primordial rustling, the heart and soul of civilization waiting to be reawakened in the pages of a book?

LOOK WHO'S DANCING

Here's one for the ladies (and gentlemen of an enlightened nature).

Three words:

Sherlock.

Loki.

Dance-off.

There I was, trolling around the Internets the other day, when I found this tasty tidbit on Tor.com. Benedict Cumberbatch  (beloved as Sherlock on PBS) and Tom Hiddleston (the delicious and sardonic Loki from the Thor films) in a video mash-up in which each busts some serious dance moves on chat shows, dance floors, sound stages, and a few other impromptu venues.

It's not like they're actually having a competition, you understand. Just a couple of guys letting off steam the way any of us might—by totally rocking out!

Here's the link.

Who wins?

Who loses?

Who cares?

Or, I should say, everyone's a winner with access to this irresistible video dance-off. Take 3 minutes out of your life and check it out. I guarantee, you'll be grinning like the Cheshire cat!

BEACHED

Art loses out in irresistible doc on unmade sci-fi epic 'Jodorowsky's Dune'


They call it "the greatest science fiction movie never made." The source material is one of the most iconic, influential, and beloved of modern sci-fi novels.

The production would have teamed up an extraordinary brain trust of creative young geniuses—designers, graphic artists, and special effects wizards destined to become cinema A-listers in subsequent projects like Star Wars, Alien, and Blade Runner—along with a couple of maverick old-school geniuses. And it would have cemented the reputation of one of the most engaging nutball visionaries ever to emerge in the annals of cinema.

If only Alejandro Jodorowsky's dazzling adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune had been made.

H. R. Giger with concept sketches.

But now we get the next best thing in Jodorowksky's Dune, an irresistible documentary by Frank Pavich that celebrates the movie that might have been. Pavich structures his film around a series of interviews with Jodorowsky himself, the Chilean-born iconoclast with roots in avant garde theater in Mexico City and Paris, whose trippy 1970 experimental film, El Topo, became the godfather of the midnight movie.

Now a dapper 84, the cosmopolitan Jodorowsky ("Jodo" to his friends) recounts his vision for Dune with exuberant relish, and a passion undimmed by time.

As charming as Jodo is, however, Pavich's film is more than talking heads. During two years of pre-production on Dune, the director amassed a vast archive of images—paintings, sketches, costume designs, storyboards—eventually bound into an enormous volume the size of several metropolitan phone books.

This treasure trove of visual material (featuring amazing work by comic book artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud, H. R. Giger, and Chris Foss, among others), its images occasionally animated onscreen, is the centerpiece of Pavich's doc.

Character and costume sketches by Moebius.

Ultimately, the projected budget of $15 million was enough to scare off potential backers in 1975. Maybe Jodo could never have translated his passion for Dune to the screen intact, given the primitive tools of the day. In which case, Pavich's film may be the greatest version of Jodorowsky's Dune that could ever possibly be. (Read more)

BREATHLESS

Well, so much for the hurry-up-and-wait phase of my career as a Real Author. This week has been nothing if not action-packed! As the Red Queen tells Alice, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. if you want to get somewhere else, you must run twice as fast!

So what has me all breathless and excited this week? On Sunday morning, I heard from my editor at Thoms Dunne Books that the audiobook rights to Alias Hook had been sold to Blackstone Audio. Yippee!

 That was great! But I also found in my inbox a note from the very high-profile and respected NYC literary agent Irene Goodman. She had just finished reading an ARC of Alias Hook, loved it, and said although she was sure I must be ably represented by now, if not, might I please keep her in mind?

Anyone who has had to suffer through my endless monologues on my attempts to interest literary agents in any of my various projects can imagine what a shock it was to have an agent of this caliber querying me!

And I thought I never got any interesting email on the weekends!

On Tuesday, the team at TDB forwarded me a very nice review of Alias Hook from Library Journal, which read, in part:

"Scintillating description and deep characterization make Jensen's Neverland a psychologically intriguing place to visit. Jensen offers a humanized take on Captain Hook that will be sure to entertain fans of the fairy tale-retelling genre."

On Wednesday, my editor sent me a fabulous jacket blurb written for Alias Hook by author Elizabeth Blackwell. Her new novel, While Beauty Slept, is a re-imagined retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. (See, I'm not the only one who comes up with these crack-brained ideas!)

Here's her blurb:

"A captivating blend of fantasy, adventure and historical fiction, Alias Hook is a fresh, utterly convincing reinterpretation of the Peter Pan story. Lisa Jensen takes a classic villain and transforms him into someone we care about and root for all the way to the emotionally stirring end. You will never look at Captain Hook the same way again!"

Thanks, Elizabeth!

And this morning, I awoke to find my mug shot grinning out at me from the cover of the SC Sentinel (okay, I was below the fold, but still...), teasing a story Wallace Baine wrote on me in his excellent new book-related column Read Or Die in The Guide.

All I would add is that my upcoming reading/signing at Bookshop Santa Cruz has been rescheduled to Wednesday, July 16. (My bad for giving Wallace outdated info.) Also, this photo of me, used in the story, was taken by the fabulous and talented Jana Marcus.

Oh, and did I mention that on Monday, the inestimable Irene Goodman called me up to offer me representation? Of course, I said "yes" in about 2.8 seconds. Sure, most authors find an agent first and THEN get a book deal, but, hey, I'm not complaining. And she's already reading my next book!

Calloo! Callay!

LENS CRAFTER

Secret photographer's talent exposed in 'Finding Vivian Maier'

Talk about a treasure hunt.

In 2007, John Maloof, a real estate agent in the Chicago area, bought some miscellaneous boxes at an estate auction across the street, hoping to find some material for a book about his neighborhood.

Disappointed not to find anything he could use for his project, Maloof had, instead, stumbled into one of the greatest discoveries in 20th Century photography—the previously unknown, but amazingly prolific work of amateur street photographer Vivian Maier.

Work that Maloof determines to expose to the light of day at last, along with the mystery shrouding the artist herself, in the fascinating doc, Finding Vivian Maier.

Intrigued at first by a stash of carefully preserved, undeveloped negatives in one of the boxes he'd bought, Maloof had only a name to go on. But when he Googled "Vivian Maier," nothing came up.

So he selected some 200 of her images to develop and posted them in a photo blog online. The response was huge.

Photography gallery owner Howard Greenberg and professional photographer Mary Ellen Mark appear in the film to testify to Maier's genius. But viewers don't need instructions to appreciate her work.

Whether her subjects are Highland Park socialites, teenagers in cars, kids at play, or winos and derelicts in inner city back alleys, Maier has a gift for gesture, expression, and composition, the telling moment, the fraught encounter. Her work with reflections—mirrors, shop windows, vending machines—is outstanding. She operated her box camera at hip level, engaging subjects with her eyes as she shot them.

But who was Vivian Maier? The portrait of Maier that emerges is compelling in its oddity.

Solitary, unmarried, without children or relations of her own, she spent the last 40 years of her life working for other families as a live-in nanny and/or housekeeper.

With food and shelter taken care of, without having to be cooped up all day in a conventional workplace, she could spend a lot more time roving the streets with her camera.

That so much of Maier's work was never even developed (much less shown) suggests it was the process, not the outcome, that was important to her. (Read more)

GAME ON

What else is new in Game of Thrones?

Don't have enough drama in your daily life? Fear not: Game of Thrones, Season 4, begins tonight!

Why should we care? Because this show has everything—faux history, fabulous costumes, immense production values, sexy men and ballsy women (tough enough to make Katniss Everdeen look like Honey Boo-Boo), absorbing plots and counterplots, one of the coolest opening credit sequences ever devised for TV, and an irresistible component of dark magic.

Even the music is addictive; the opening theme has been the default setting in my brain for over a year.

Based on the ongoing epic fantasy book series by George R. R. Martin, the story unfolds in a Britain-like mythical realm called Westeros, with seven royal houses (and a few more upstarts) vying for the Iron Throne. There's a Hadrian-like wall in the frozen North, built to keep out the Wildling tribes (read: Picts and Scots) on the other side, and hordes of exotic chieftans, warlords and armies massing across the sea in the East.

From a traveling Game of Thrones costume exhibit

But don't think for a moment that this is a Lord of the Rings-type deal with nothing but one incomprehensible battle scene after another. There's plenty of violence in the GoT universe—most of it directed at what we thought were lead characters, in stunning reversals of what we believe to be the "rules" of series TV—but very little of it occurs on the battlefield. The body count rises thanks to treachery and betrayal, fomented by a world-class cast of schemers.

Who doesn't love Tyrion, that sly rogue?

Don't laugh when I say that GoT is character-driven. If we weren't so invested in the characters—and appalled, yet fascinated at their frequent inhumanity to each other—we wouldn't keep coming back. But from the execution of nominal hero and clan patriarch Ned Stark at the end of Season 1, faithful Thronees have come to realize that no character is safe, however beloved.

And yet, it's hard not to get attached. Take the sublime Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister. A randy, frequently drunken dwarf, despised by his powerful father and underestimated by his enemies, his intelligence, acerbic one-liners, and innate moral compass (it's not his fault he was born into the reprehensible Lannister clan) make him the heart and soul (not to mention wit) of the show.

Plus, he's the only one to talk straight to the Devil-spawn boy king, Joffrey, his nephew (played to venal perfection by Jack Gleeson), reason enough to cheer Tyrion on.

Jon Snow has some 'splaining to do

Then there's the (rapidly dwindling) remainder of the Stark clan. Bastard son Jon Snow (Kit Harington), consecrated to the Night Watch, the monk-like brotherhood that guards the wall, always tries to do the right thing. But his betrayal of a Wildling woman who loved him last season will surely come back to haunt him—as well it should.

Budding little swordswoman, Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) continues her Junior Woodchuck training in the forest with her reluctant protector, The Hound (Rory McCann), until such time as she can avenge her father's death. Meanwhile, her older sister, Sansa (Sophie Turner), under permanent house arrest with the Lannisters at the royal seat, King's Landing, has just been married off to Tyrion.

We can only hope the little goose comes to realize how lucky she is!

The story arc for Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is also undergoing reconstruction. At first, the despicable "Kingslayer, and, ahem, "uncle" to the boy king, whose mother is Jamie's devious sister, Cersei (Lena Headey), the golden boy of Clan Lannister may be be on the road to redemption.

Largely due to his odyssey last season with his former captor, noble-hearted Amazonian warrior woman Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie), for whose safety and virtue Jamie ultimately risked his life and lost his hand.

The divine Diana Rigg is in here too, as somebody's elegant, sharp-tongued granny, cheerfully cracking wise and lacerating the pompous while trying to arrange a royal marriage at King's Landing.

And never count out Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), last surviving member of a deposed royal family.

Daenerys, the Dragon Whisperer

 Sure, she seems like a little blonde pushover, but she's one smart cookie. Not only did she have the sense to make a steadfast ally out of the "savage" Klingon warlord she was married off to, she's quietly amassing an army of devoted former slaves she has freed in the East while raising the three equally devoted—and growing—dragons that she has nurtured from infancy.

Of course, as in anything this epic, not every single plotline works. There's way too much torture, so much so that Thronees have a hard time remembering who's being racked by which faction. I'm sick of the witch who whips everyone into a religious frenzy. And what the heck happened to all the Direwolf pups each of the Stark offspring were given to raise in the first season? Especially Jon Snow's white wolf Ghost, who accompanied him to the wall, but now seems to have disappeared.

Nobody knows what will happen next (except those spoilsports who have already read the books).  After the infamous Red Wedding from Season 3, all we know for sure is the plot will thicken, more heads will undoubtedly roll—and those dragons are getting bigger!

SUBMERGENT

Bible meets sci-fi in Aronofsky's eco-parable 'Noah'

Nobody named "God" ever appears in Noah. Darren Aronofsky's massive drama is obviously inspired by the Bible story, but he handles it as sort of a non-denominational, philosophical disaster movie.

Noah and his family retain their familiar names, and there are passing references to Eden, but no specific geography or time frame is ever suggested, while the mostly ravaged and desolate landscape could be either pre- or post-industrial, the ancient past or the distant future.

This is the Bible as dystopian sci-fi epic.

And most of the time it works pretty well on those terms, especially in the first hour or so, as Aronofsky sets up his eco-parable about human folly and violence vs. the wonders of nature. It isn't until much later that the narrative drive springs a leak and the movie starts to flounder.

Russell Crowe delivers his usual, reliable mix of dynamic screen presence and robust physicality as Noah. He and his family are reclusive stewards of the last green area in a world beset by warrior tribes who rape, murder, slaughter animals for food, and despoil the landscape mining for precious metals.

When his grandfather, Methuselah (a twinkly Anthony Hopkins, having a hell of a good time), gives him a seed preserved from Eden, Noah plants it in barren ground, and up springs a forest, from which he understands he's supposed to build an ark to preserve a breeding pair of each species of animal during the coming flood.

There are many exhilarating scenes of clouds of birds, rivers of snakes, and herds of animals coming to the ark. All of the fauna are CGI, and look just a bit off-kilter (like the armadillo-plated goat in an early scene), suggesting prehistoric or otherworldly creatures.

Also very cool in a sci-fi way are gigantic, but soulful rock creatures called Watchers, who turn out to be fallen angels punished for meddling in human affairs. ("Marooned on Earth in these stony shells," one says mournfully.)

But, sadly, Noah loses its shape and its grip on our imagination in its final third. (Read more)

Noah's Ark: not quite watertight

STOP THE PRESSES!

The Santa Cruz alternative newspaper scene just got a lot weirder. Not necessarily better. Not necessarily worse. Just weirder.

Remember those old newspaper movies of the 1940s? Whenever a big story broke, some fast-talking editor like Cary Grant or Kirk Douglas would grab the phone and yell, "Stop the presses!" This is a moment like that for local media.

Yesterday, the news broke that Metro Newspapers, the corporate entity that operates the Santa Cruz Weekly (formerly Metro Santa Cruz), along with several other publications over the hill, has purchased its crosstown rival, Good Times, from its most recent owner, Mainstreet Media. And, no, it wasn't an April Fool's joke.

It was more like an item in "Believe It or Not."  Hit hard by the economic downturn and the decline in print media in general, The Weekly was becoming the incredible shrinking paper, while GT—despite cutbacks, downsizing, and one or two painful layoffs—still managed to operate at a healthy percentage of its old capacity. If a merger was even suspected, most observers would assume it would go in the other direction. 

So, what's the deal?

GT owners have come and gone over the years. I always refer to them as the Pros from Dover because I have no earthly clue who they are from one regime to the next. Normally it doesn't impact us much, the editorial and art departments, freelancers, and staff who go about the business of getting the paper out every week. 

Most of the incoming owners don't really want to fool around too much with the team in the trenches responsible for making the paper a successful enterprise worth buying in the first place.

Not so, this time.  In one afternoon—and a Monday at that, deadline-eve, when things are hectic enough in the office—publisher Ron Slack, editor Greg Archer, Entertainment Editor Jenna Brogan, and staff writer Joel Hersch were out the door. That's a huge chunk of the team responsible for making GT a success.

Dan Pulcrano, owner of Metro Newspapers, has a long history with the local alt-journalism scene. For the (ulp) 39 years I've been at GT (beginning when I was an infant prodigy, of course), there has basically never been a moment when our paper was not the target of some other feisty little publication—the Independent, the Phoenix, the Express, the Sun, Taste, Santa Cruz Magazine, Metro Santa Cruz. Dan Pulcrano was involved in a lot of those papers, along with Buz Bezore, Christina Waters, Geoff Dunne, Stephen Kessler, Michael Gant, Tim Eagan, Bruce Bratton, and many other luminaries on the local media scene.

These were the folks who never thought GT was alternative enough. And I have to say there have been times in this paper's checkered history when I agreed with them, when I would have gladly jumped ship and gone to play for the scrappy rival team. But not lately.

Yes, once upon a time, GT was "Lighter Than Air"—a tagline that apparently we will never, ever live down. Get over it. It's been decades since those words appeared in the masthead, or were reflected in the editorial content of the paper itself. When Ron Slack was installed in the publisher's office 13 years ago, he not only relocated to Santa Cruz and got involved in the community, he dedicated a hefty chunk of GT column inches, staff, and resorces to reporting on local news and issues, alongside the arts and entertainment coverage that had sustained the paper over the years. 

Good Times blossomed under the stewardship of Ron Slack, the tireless efforts of our fearless leader, editor Greg Archer, and the contributions of dozens of writers, artists, columnists, critics and dreamers too numerous to mention. I am extremely proud and excessively lucky to have worked with all these people. It won't be the same around the ol' newsroom without them.

No one knows at this point how this transition will play out. Incoming editor Steve Palopoli is a good guy; we used to work together at GT. I suspect that the success of this venture will depend—as always—on the heart, integrity, and sheer stamina of the folks in the trenches, the creative staff tasked with the insane, impossible, wildly exhilarating business of getting out a weekly newspaper.

For the story so far, catch up with Wallace Baine's excellent piece in the Sentinel, and this interesting news item on the purchase in the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

To relive those thrilling early days of alt-journalism in Santa Cruz, check out this vintage piece from the old Metro.