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.

Games Acknowledgements Play

At the end of Fantasy Baseball, author Alan Gratz thanks a number of writing colleagues (including Laurel Snyder) for their support, and a number of literary estates, including those of Brian Jacques, Madeleine L’Engle, and the still-quite-alive Ingrid Law, for permitting him to use characters under copyright.

Also among the latter group is: “the estate of Ruth Spencer-Davies for letting me borrow the inimitable Nanny Mae and her feline companion Mrs. P.”

There was no Ruth Spencer-Davies.

Nanny Mae shares some characteristics with P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins and perhaps Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda (better known as the cinematic Nanny McPhee). But, whether pushed by copyright requirements or not, she appears to be Gratz’s own creation.

The conceit of Fantasy Baseball is a boy caught in a realm of make-believe characters. We readers have to believe that Nanny Mae is such a character, from a series we’ve never read or perhaps one we’ve forgotten. And the line in the acknowledgements serves that fictional purpose.

I’m running this on a Tuesday because Dorothy Gale is a major character in Fantasy Baseball, founder of the team Alex Metcalf finds himself playing for. Other characters from the Oz books also appear, including Scraps, Tik-Tok, and Jack Pumpkinhead. The threat underlying the plot is that those characters will be forgotten in our culture and disappear from the playing field.

But if Nanny Mae lives on with no other evidence for her existence on the web, then surely Jack Pumpkinhead will, too.

P. L. Travers and the Paris Review

Back when The Paris Review put its entire stash of author interviews online, I skimmed the list for favorite children’s fantasy writers, and didn’t see any.

But I missed the conversation with P. L. Travers, whence this anecdote comes:

The other day two little boys accosted me in the street and said to me, “You are the lady who wrote Mary Poppins, aren’t you?”

And I admitted it, and said, “How do you know?” And they said, “Because we sing in the choir, and the vicar told us.”

So, clearly, they had thrown off their surplices and rushed after me to catch me. So I said, “Well, do you like her?” And they both nodded vigorously. I then said, “What is it you like about her?”

And one of them said, “Well, she’s so ordinary and then…” and having said “and then” he looked around for the proper word, and couldn’t find it.

And I said, “You don’t have to say any more. That ‘and then’ says everything.”

And the other little boy said, “Yes, and I’m going to marry her when I grow up.”

And I saw the first one clench his fists and look very belligerent. I felt there might be trouble and so I said, “Well, we’ll just have to see what she thinks about it, won’t we? And in the meantime, my house is just there—come in and have a lemonade.” So they did.

Further discussion covers whether Mary Poppins stories reflect the Mother Goddess or Zen parables.