Finding Neverland Has a Lot to Answer For

In 2004 Miramax released Finding Neverland, with Johnny Depp playing a handsomer-than-real-life James M. Barrie, Kate Winslet as a more-widowed-than-real-life Sylvia Llewellyn Davies, and Freddie Highmore as one of her less-doomed-than-real-life sons.

It was a modern “prestige picture,” with a historical setting, literary roots, paeans to preserving childhood imagination, and a noble dying parent. All the odd aspects of Barrie’s relationship with the Llewellyn Davies family and of late-Victorian Britain were blurred away.

That movie made $116 million worldwide, more than four times its production budget. More important, it was nominated for seven Oscars and won one (for best score), which is what studios want in a prestige picture. Harvey Weinstein is now producing a Broadway musical based on it.

Two years later the Weinstein Company offered Miss Potter, starring Renee Zellweger as Beatrix Potter. Last year Disney (owner of Miramax) gave us Saving Mr. Banks, with Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney; the company entered that deal to protect its brand, but the result was another prestige picture that distorted literary history.

There were, to be sure, earlier biopics about British children’s-book writers, such as Dreamchild (1985) with Ian Holm as Lewis Carroll and Shadowlands (1993) with Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis. But those were about the contrasts between childhood literature and adult life, not about fantasy stories making everybody happy again.

It’s possible that Hollywood now thinks it’s run out of dead British children’s authors who are famous in the States. (Evidently E. Nesbit is not well known enough, and her solution to family troubles too worrisome.) The studios have therefore moved on to American children’s-book writers.

This week the Hollywood Reporter broke the news that New Line Cinema bought the script for Road to Oz, a biopic about L. Frank Baum. The writer, Josh Golden, has even been working with one of the Finding Neverland producers, Nellie Bellflower. (And somehow the team of Golden and Bellflower doesn’t seem like they would turn out an unflinching look at the human condition.)

The John Ritter TV movie The Dreamer of Oz (1990) already showed it’s possible to fit Baum’s life into the arc of a man prone to fantasizing who redeems himself through telling children’s stories. Oz proved its potential to generate international box-office success with Oz the Great and Powerful last year (and its potential to lay an egg with this year’s Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return). So this screenplay might actually get made.

Interestingly, New Line is part of the same Time Warner corporation that owns rights to the 1939 MGM movie. This biopic might therefore be able to use elements from that film, which Baum never saw, but which could trigger the requisite warm nostalgia from viewers who don’t know the real story.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

Over the weekend the Boston Globe ran an interview with eleven-year-old actor Aidan Gemme. He’s currently starring as Peter Llewellyn in the unfathomable stage musical adaptation of Neverland, the unhistorical movie about J. M. Barrie writing Peter Pan.

One of Gemme’s earlier Broadway jobs was alternating in the role of the Boy in Waiting for Godot. Here’s how he described preparing to play that frustrating character:

The Boy doesn’t really have a personality, and you can’t get information on him. I didn’t step into him. I just stepped out of myself.

Moorcock: “the prose of the nursery-room”

From Michael Moorcock’s essay “Epic Pooh,” as archived at Revolution SF (it was originally written in 1978, revised in 1989, and revised again to note recent authors):

The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft:

One day when the sun had come back over the forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much; on such a day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted.

Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926

It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of many forgotten British and American bestsellers, well-remembered children's books, like The Wind in the Willows, you often hear it in regional fiction addressed to a local audience, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, Mary Rose and, of course, Peter Pan).

Unlike the tone of E. Nesbit (Five Children and It etc.), Richmal Crompton (the 'William' books) Terry Pratchett or the redoubtable J.K.Rowling, it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy.

Wait a minute! Milne’s characterization of Eeyore is hilarious. But his narrative voice is indeed the voice of an adult looking back/down on childhood. Nesbit’s narrative voice, on the other hand, is an author in conspiracy with young readers.

Perhaps the “voice of the nursery-room” is one reason why some of the novels Moorcock mentions—Lord of the Rings and Watership Down among them—are treated as books for young people even though their authors conceived them as books for adults.

Anthony Horowitz: "How Depressing It Is"

A while back I linked to this complaint in the tabloid Daily Mail from Anthony Horowitz, creator of juvenile spy Alex Rider. Reading the graphic novel adapted from the movie script adapted from the original novel brought that article to my mind again today.

Horowitz claimed it was just too hard for him to create villains when he had to avoid ethnic and other stereotypes:

How depressing it is that Herod Sayle, the Lebanese businessman that Alex Rider fought in his first adventure, Stormbreaker, quietly morphed into Darrius Sayle, Californian trailer trash, by the time the film came out last summer.

In the UK edition, he's the son of a failed hairdresser, but in the American edition that had to be changed when I was accused of homophobia - because to some people hairdressing would seem a gay profession.

Over there, he's the son of a failed oral hygienist.

Horowitz's article didn't acknowledge that the original name "Herod Sayle" was a cheap pun to begin with. It left out how the character had already "morphed" from Lebanese to Egyptian in the US edition of the book, undoubtedly with his approval, so he had long compromised the original characterization.

What's more, Horowitz's whinging about losing "hairdresser" in favor of "oral hygienist" obscured how that he apparently believes boys who grow up poor in the Third World must have a "failed" father. Actual grinding poverty has no place in this view of life.

Whether Egyptian, Lebanese, or Californian, Herod/Darrius Sayle is born poor and tumbles into an elite British education. In the books, he as a young child saves rich people's lives. In the graphic novel, his mother wins a lottery. Sayle hates the bigotry and bullying at his new school so much that it motivates both his success as a computer magnate and his genocidal scheme.

Of course, anybody would hate bigotry and bullying directed at them; I've already written about Horowitz's lack of understanding and compassion on that point. His implied lesson in Stormbreaker, in all its forms, is not that the future prime minister shouldn't have bullied Sayle at school, but that Sayle shouldn't have been sent to that school in the first place; he would have been happier in the Lebanese slum/Egyptian slum/California trailer park where he began.

Just as Horowitz's characterization and plotting seems to play to bigotry, so does his Daily Mail essay. It's a standard-issue rant against the constrictions of "political correctness"--yet how in the world does that follow from the essay's start?

When it comes to children's literature, the most fun that a writer can have is creating the bad guys ... and the fact is that there's nothing kids like more than a good villain.

At the end of the day, Peter Pan is just a girl in green tights, but when Captain Hook enters the stage, the theatre comes alive to the sound of jubilant boos and hisses.

Who is it we remember from Treasure Island? Is it Jim Hawkins, the cabin boy, or the effortlessly stylish Long John Silver?

Ethnicity and "political correctness" never come up with those classic villains. Stevenson and Barrie didn't build those characters on stereotypes, and they didn't write to newspapers lamenting how much easier it would have been to do so.

In fact, the roots of Captain Hook's character rest in--irony alert!--an elite British education. In the stage play, Hook's last words are "Floreat Etona," the motto of Eton College, and Barrie later wrote a speech titled "Captain Hook at Eton." In the novel, Barrie's narrative voice whispers, "Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze." Captain Hook was an insider, not an outsider, which made him a character for the ages.

Given Horowitz's article from last year, we might wonder what he came up with as the antagonist in the newest Alex Rider adventure, Snakehead? The Telegraph reports he's the leader of an "Asian crime network" named Winston Yu:

In typical Horowitz fashion, though, he is far from being the usual two-dimensional villain. He is the son of a Chinese woman who has sent her boy to an expensive public school (Harrow) on the strength of her earnings as a hired assassin.

Yes, that's "typical Horowitz," with more than a little ethnic stereotyping at the foundation.

Graphic Novels, Some More Graphic Than Others

This will be COMICS WEEK at Oz and Ends since I’ve built up a bunch of thoughts on that topic and have nowhere else to put them.

To start, here are two links related to recent comics uniting Dorothy Gale of the Oz books, Wendy Darling from Peter Pan, and Alice from Lewis Carroll's dream adventures.

ImageText, an online journal of "interdisciplinary comics studies," has released an issue on Comics & Childhood. Among the items is a roundtable discussion of Lost Girls, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Melinda Gebbie. Contributions from moderator Philip Sandifer, Kenneth Kidd, Chris Eklund, Charles Hatfield, and Meredith Collins include sexually explicit language and topics, of course.

Hatfield concludes about Lost Girls:

Many who merely hear about it will be offended by the very idea. But, to be honest, the novel's revisionist and erotic take on Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy isn't that radical. This kind of take has already been prepared for – even in comics, where revisionist if not erotic treatments of Alice and Oz are common to the point of dullness. . . .

Unfortunately, as a novel Lost Girls strikes me as fundamentally unpersuasive. It seems to me that Moore & Gebbie have trouble getting beyond the titillating "novelty" of reinterpreting their source stories pornographically, and I can't escape the feeling that, for all its smarts, handsomeness, and high hopes, the project is a boondoggle. . . .

Yet from a novelistic viewpoint, I think Lost Girls obviously, spectacularly, fails. It fails to do something genuinely subversive with the art of pornography, that is, it fails to tell a credibly human story. Instead of such a story, it offers a baroque monument to the idea of sexual-cum-spiritual freedom – pursued naively, unrelentingly, and at exhausting length.

The other responses are more admiring of the enterprise. Everyone likes Gebbie's art.

In less high-falutin' news, the third issue of Cheshire Crossing is now available on the web. Click on the thumbnail above to go right to it. Writer-artist Andy Weir is shifting among the three heroines with every switch of a page. Interesting that in this digital medium the single page is the defining unit, as opposed to the page spread.

Dueling sequels to Peter Pan

In this corner, the Miami Herald offers an interview with its former star columnist, Dave Barry, and novelist Ridley Pearson on their second sequel to Peter Pan. Weighing in at 541 pages, it's Peter and the Shadow Thieves!

And in this corner, from Britain, the Times of London profiles Geraldine McCaughrean, author of Peter Pan in Scarlet. She knocked out all other contenders to be chosen by the Great Ormond Street Hospital to add value to its Peter Pan copyright just before it expires (barring another special act of Parliament).

But wait! The fix is in. After Barry and Pearson's Peter and the Starcatchers spent 47 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the hospital made a late deal to allow a British edition in exchange for a cut of the profits. So now their book is also legal in the UK. But not to worry, Ms. McCaughrean! It's all for the kids, right?

Meanwhile, I can swivel my chair to the right and spot Peter Pan and the Only Children, by Gilbert Adair, published in the UK in 1987. Did the hospital get a piece of that? I can't tell.

The hospital did license James V. Hart to publish Hook: The Adventures of a Notorious Youth last year. Its author also wrote the screenplay for the 1991 Steven Spielberg movie Hook, starring Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, but we shouldn't hold that against him.

Four years ago Disney, never one to let money rest in parents' wallets, released Return to Never Land, sequel to its animated Peter Pan. (This time it was personal!) And, coasting through the air on that property, the company licensed a series called "Disney Fairies" through HarperCollins, featuring the character of Tinkerbell. The first title was written by Gail Carson Levine, author of Ella Enchanted.

So Peter Pan may never have grown up, but he's sure had a lot of offspring.

My favorite recent adaptation of Peter Pan is P. J. Hogan's CGI-heavy movie version from 2003. The makers of that film understood that Peter's a bit of a monster, and that even off the stage his story's about playing roles, not just playing. The latest news from that quarter: Hogan has been tapped to direct a movie of Blue Balliett's Chasing Vermeer. Didn't I say that novel is really a fantasy?