Reprinted without permission
NEW YORK (Variety) - Corporate restructuring at New Line Cinema quickly took its toll on the development office Tuesday.
The studio's production president, Michael De Luca, was fired last week, and 100 of the studio's 600 employees are expected to be laid off in the wake of parent company Time Warner's merger with America Online.
New Line has reportedly shelved one of the most crowed about book projects of recent years, the Nick Hornby novel "About a Boy."
That signals a major about-face for New Line, which optioned the novel for $2.75 million three years ago, attached Hugh Grant and recently tapped Chris and Paul Weitz to direct it; the two are said to have just completed a script rewrite. If New Line dumped the book, they could take it elsewhere. But that wouldn't endear the company to Hornby's agent, Jenne Casaratto, who's currently submitting his next book, "How to Be Good," to studios.
New Line has long been one of the most vigorous players in the Gotham book market, but several projects are now in limbo there. Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs) has turned in his adaptation of Joe Lansdale's noir Texas romp, Mucho Mojo, but cameras aren't likely to roll before possible writers' and actors' strikes this summer. The status of other high-profile books, like Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," acquired for more than $2 million, and Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn," which comes with Edward Norton attached, remains unclear.
Lethem and Eggers have other irons in the fire, however. Three of Lethem's previous books are in active development in Hollywood: "Gun, With Occasional Music" is set up at Regency Enterprises, to be adapted by Hampton Fancher, who helmed "The Minus Man" and was one of the writers of "Blade Runner" -- an apt assignment given Lethem's veneration of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. Lem Dobbs has written a screenplay for Lethem's "As She Climbed Across the Table," and British writer-director-producer Matthew Jacobs is said to be attached to "Amnesia Moon."
Eggers and Lethem are also sidestepping the corporate publishing game, placing their next books with a new publishing imprint created under the flag of Eggers' lit mag, McSweeney's. The imprint will bring out Eggers' next book, a novel, sometime after April, as well as a Lethem novella, "This Shape We're In." Lethem summarizes the plot as follows: "A band of down at the heels soldiers are trying to figure out whether they're in jail, buried in an underground fallout shelter or in a spaceship hurtling through the void." Though he's quick to point out that he's a "happy camper" at Doubleday, which will issue his next full-length novel, Lethem notes that "Shape" is something that would be virtually impossible to publish in other circumstances -- "unless I nabbed the Folio spot in Harpers."
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