Kage Baker's "The Anvil of the World"

Kage Baker is the author of many science fiction and fantasy novels and stories.

Here she develops some casting ideas for the film version of her 2003 fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World:

I wrote The Anvil of the World as a reaction against the heavy-handed serious fantasy of imitators of Tolkien. I thought it might be interesting to feature a principal hero who is a middle-aged nobody rather than an adolescent prince-disguised-as-farmboy or an adolescent girl-who-wants-to-be-a-warrior. The book is something of a triptych, following a varied cast of characters through three adventures: on a caravan across a sparsely-settled continent, in a hotel in a great city where a murder takes place at festival time, and up a river to rescue a damsel in distress as the country hovers on the brink of war.

Smith, the fairly heroic middle-aged nobody who turns out to be pretty good at killing people, I always saw as Robbie Coltrane; though if the director (Terry Gilliam, please) were going for a less comedic angle, Russell Crowe would be a good choice. John Goodman would also work.

Lord Ermenwyr, the decadent half-demon princeling, could be played perfectly by Jason Isaacs in the makeup he wore to play Captain Hook, though he'd need to shed twenty years somehow. But he has the eyes for the character, and the ability to play a comedic role. His demoness Nursie? Angelica Huston, I think, with a deadly elegance and wit. His sorceress sister, The Ruby Incomparable, the damsel in distress in question?.... Catherine Zeta-Jones, no question. Beautiful, and statuesque enough with some CGI assistance.

We'd have to reach back in time to cast the cook Mrs. Smith: either Marie Dressler or Jennifer Patterson (of Two Fat Ladies fame). Both possessed a gravitas and wit that would work. Possibly an older Elsa Lanchester too.... All of them had that quality of a lady-with-an-unexpectedly-interesting-past.

A very young Elsa Lanchester could also have played the brainless ingenue, little Burnbright, and of modern actresses ... Emma Thompson, at age 13. Both actresses could handle the character's transition from street urchin to desperately romantic adolescent, and made it funny. The young doctor Willowspear, the object of her affections, might be played by Orlando Bloom, who is surprisingly good when being comedic and moreover has the earnestness necessary.

Lord Ermenwyr's mother, the Saint of the World, could be played by any older actress with breathtaking beauty but a certain steely quality. Cate Blanchett, years from now? Glenn Close or Sian Phillips, equally. And for her demon-lord husband, the Master of the Mountain, AKA Mr. Silverpoint, AKA Daddy ... nobody but Sean Connery.

In a world where a demon-lord can order cocktails and a live sheep delivered to his hotel room, or make an impulse purchase of a steam-powered "slaveless galley", or fight a wizardly battle in the equivalent of a tuxedo ... it seems like a good idea to work with actors who can do more than swing a sword.

Read more about Kage Baker's work, including "The Empress of Mars" (novella, 2003), which won a Sturgeon Award and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara J. King's "Evolving God"

Barbara J. King, Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary, shares some ideas about the casting for a possible movie version of her most recent book, Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion:

Were I feeling starstruck, Kanzi [now living at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa] would be the obvious choice for the ape chapter’s lead actor. Here’s a bonobo with class, style, and linguistic skills. In his life with other apes and with humans, Kanzi has shown empathy and imagination in specific ways documented by scientists. These are key behaviors related to belongingness, the emotional mattering to others at the heart of my book Evolving God. Belongingness has deep evolutionary roots — and helps to explain, I believe, the origins of religious behavior in humans.

I think I’d cast, right alongside Kanzi the celebrity, a more “typical” ape or ape family. A theme of the book is that chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas express belongingness in fascinating ways under many conditions (both in captivity and the wild). What camera wouldn’t love the gorillas my students and I have studied for six years at the National Zoo in Washington DC, or the chimpanzees of a community studied by primatologists in Tanzania or the Ivory Coast?

For the human-evolution chapters, the same principle would be at work. Our australopithecine ancestors and our cousins the Neandertals would be portrayed not just as dramatic bipedal striders (in the former case) or spear-wielding cave-bear hunters (in the latter), but also as proto-people who felt deep attachments to their family members and social partners. Over time, as in a dynamic feedback relationship their child-rearing, nurturing tendencies became more complex and their brains expanded and changed, these prehistoric hominids began to wonder about life’s mysteries (and death’s mysteries too). The circle of belongingness gradually expanded. In Neandertals and early Homo sapiens, it almost certainly included the otherworldly and the sacred, expressed through incipient spiritual practices such as burial rituals and (in our species) art ceremonies.

Photogenic, empathetic apes … artistic prehistoric cavedwellers … take note, PBS documentary-makers, ‘Evolving God the Movie’ could become a reality after all!

Kanzi "is regarded as the first ape to demonstrate real comprehension of spoken speech." Learn more about him and his interests, and judge for yourself if he has a lead actor's looks and bearing.

Read more about Barbara J. King's Evolving God at the Page 69 Test site.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bill Crider's "Murder Among the OWLS"

Bill Crider is the author of fourteen Sheriff Dan Rhodes novels -- Murder Among the OWLS is the most recent -- and that's only a slice of his literary output.

Here he shares his thoughts about who would be great for the role of Dan in the film version of the novels:

When the first Sheriff Dan Rhodes novel, Too Late to Die, was published in 1986, I was sure it would be snapped up for the movies any day. Which shows how little I knew about Hollywood and options and my chance of ever having a movie made of one of my books. At any rate, almost as soon as the book was accepted, I decided that I wanted James Garner to play Rhodes. I thought he’d be perfect, with his laid-back ways and his ironic grin.

As the years passed and Hollywood remained oblivious to the charms of the Rhodes books, I clung to the idea that someday Garner would play the role. Someone would hand him the book, and he’d a few pages and say, “Hey, this Rhodes guy is tailor-made for me. Somebody call Bill Crider’s agent right now!”

As more years passed, I finally realized that it wasn’t going to happen. And that Garner was getting a little too old for the part. Rhodes, unlike some characters in modern mysteries, doesn’t age much. Even if he did, Garner might still be too old, and he’s too banged up from playing Jim Rockford to do much running around. So that little dream is ended.

While I was waiting for some major studio to come to its senses and option the books, James Drury, who lives in the Houston area, expressed an interest in playing Rhodes. That was fine with me. The Virginian was just the kind of guy Rhodes would have been if he’d lived in the 19th century, or so I liked to think. I met with Drury a couple of times, which was fun, but the movie deal we hoped for never materialized.

Now more than twenty years have gone by since Sheriff Rhodes first appeared in print, and Murder Among the OWLS is the fourteenth book in the series. Still nobody has had the good sense to option the novels for film. My current fantasy is that Tom Selleck will happen upon a copy of one of the books, maybe even this latest one, and decide that he just has to play Dan Rhodes. He’ll think, “These Jesse Stone movies I’m doing for CBS are making the big bucks, but they’re a little dark. It’s time I lightened up, showed a little of that Magnum side of me again.”

And it’s not like there are fourteen Jesse Stone books out there. Selleck needs to be looking for a new vehicle, and Sheriff Rhodes could carry him for seven more years if he did two a year. By that time Rhodes would have been in four or five more books if St. Martin’s continues to publish them. Plenty for another few movies.

So for right now, Tom Selleck is the guy. But he’d better hurry up and option the books. If he doesn’t, he’s going to be too old for the part.

Read more about Murder Among the OWLS, and check out the Page 69 Test results for it and its most recent predecessor, A Mammoth Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Pyper's "The Wildfire Season"

The Wildfire Season is Andrew Pyper's third novel.

Here he explains who would be great for the lead role in the film version of the novel:

In casting the male lead in the movie version of my novel, The Wildfire Season, I would look for the kind of actor who is a rare commodity in today's Hollywood: a manly man. So many of the stars who top the multiplex posters of late are, to my mind, either pretty boys or old hams. And when I'm talking manliness, I'm not talking about how ripped a fellow's chest is when he takes off his t-shirt (anyone with eight hours a day to spend with a personal trainer can sculpt a washboard gut, but this is only fussy vanity, not toughness). For Miles McEwan, the protagonist of The Wildfire Season, what's required is old-fashioned masculinity, a man for whom actions speak louder than his words. Because of this, I'd be looking at a short shortlist. Clive Owen. Russell Crowe. But both of them may be a few years too grizzled for the part. That leaves Matt Damon. I feel that, over the Bourne movies and, most recently, The Departed, Mr. Damon has been growing from college boy to man who withholds so much more than he shows or tells. This is the flawed trait of being a manly man. He'd do a great job.

Read more about The Wildfire Season, and check out what Miles is up to on Page 69 of the novel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Beam's "Gracefully Insane"

Alex Beam is a columnist at the Boston Globe and author of Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital.

Is there a movie to be filmed based on this work of social history? You bet. The author explains:

My non-fiction book about the storied, celebrity-choked (Sylvia Plath, James Taylor, Ray Charles, et al) McLean mental hospital outside of Boston has attracted the usual eyeball-rolling "film interest." Most of it was of the slavish, me-too variety, with half-literate agents and producers hyperventilating at the thought of optioning the next "Girl, Interrupted," which won an Oscar for Angelina Jolie. (Susanna Kaysen's book, Girl, Interrupted takes place at McLean, where she was a patient in the 1960s.) "Serious" actors, dream of portraying mentally disturbed characters, to prove they can act.

At zero financial gain to myself (Alex -- call your agent), I optioned the story of Anne Sexton's McLean stays several times. Sexton was a gorgeous, suicidal, promiscuous, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who taught poetry to McLean patients for about a year. Unfortunately, she later ended up there as a patient. Worse yet, as they say in the trade, she ended up firing her psychiatrist; she killed herself. Mary Louise Parker and (I'm told) Jessica Lange have expressed interest in portraying Sexton.

I would prefer to see the love story of Katharine McCormick and her husband Stanley up on the screen. T.C. Boyle featured Stanley in his novel Riven Rock, but he played Stanley's plight for laughs in what is far from his best book. McCormick, one of the first women graduates of M.I.T., watched her wealthy husband devolve into catatonic despair, and tried, unsuccessfully, to save his life through psychiatry. His family, the Chicago McCormicks of combine harvester fame and fortune, sued her for custody of their son in the so-called "trial of the century", and lost. She later became an early advocate, and financial backer, of what are now called reproductive rights for women.

Would Susan Sarandon play Katharine? In a heartbeat, I wager. To play Stanley, there are any number of male actors who take themselves very seriously; Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, to name a few.

Read more about Gracefully Insane, and check out its Page 69 Test results.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anya Ulinich, "Petropolis"

I asked Anya Ulinich who should star in a film version of her new book, Petropolis.

Her response:

I can't come up with any actors. So my response will be much under 200 words. Actually, it'll consist of just two words: Todd Solondz. He is my dream screenwriter and director for Petropolis the movie. He can pick the actors, too.

Pithy.

Todd Solondz's films include Palindromes (2004), Storytelling (2001), Happiness (1998), and Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995).

Here's how Anya describes her protagonist:

Sasha Goldberg is a biracial, Jewish, socially maladjusted "child of the intelligentsia" from the Siberian town Asbestos 2. Sasha's father takes off for the U.S., leaving Sasha to navigate adolescence under the shadow of her overbearing mother. At fourteen, Sasha falls in love with an art school dropout who lives in a concrete half-pipe in the town's dump. When following her heart gets her into trouble at home, Sasha leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and, with the help of the Kupid's Korner Agency, lands in suburban Arizona. Soon, she escapes her Red Lobster- loving fiance and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

Visit the Petropolis website and check out the Page 69 Test results for the novel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Burnett's "Christopher"

Novelist-screenwriter Allison Burnett on the film version of his novel(s):

The hero of both my novels, Christopher and The House Beautiful, and of my upcoming one, Death By Sunshine, is named B.K. Troop. B.K. is a tall, bald, middle-aged, potbellied, spindly legged, bearded, grey-toothed, dandruff-flaked, chemically imbalanced, erudite, witty, gay alcoholic. Sadly, Bea Arthur is past her prime. I am left with slim pickings.

I have adapted Christopher into a screenplay myself. In my discussions with agents and producers, some names have been bandied about: Kelsey Grammar, Harvey Fierstein, Alec Baldwin, Alfred Molina, Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Jon Voight, and a brilliant Australian stage actor, unknown here, named Bille Brown. Other names have been mentioned that I rejected out of hand; namely, actors with great commercial value and talent, but who do not resemble BK: Dustin Hoffman and Ben Kingsley, to name just two. Another aspect of the discussion is should the actor be gay in real life? I tend to think it doesn’t matter. Should any of my readers have a favorite idea for an actor to play BK, I would love to hear it. We are casting now. To be precise, we are casting about for financing and finding the right actor would certainly help.

Visit Allison's official website to learn more about his books and to submit your casting ideas.

See the Page 69 treatment for The House Beautiful.

--Marshal Zeringue