Hugo Cabret headed to the big screen
Dear Hollywood,
Please stop making movies out of cherished kids’ books. Just stop. There is more than enough content to go around in the entertainment world. I promise! Really, there is! You can come up with another storyline if you try hard enough. Or you can adapt a lesser-known book. But you have got to stop taking books that are magic purely by virtue of the way the story is written and trying to make them into movies. It makes my head hurt.
Sincerely,
The Toy Box Mommy
Seriously, people. I’m experiencing some hefty deja vu, here. Some books are meant to be enjoyed as books. Period. That’s part of their allure.
I guess Hollywood didn’t get my memo, though. Hugo Cabret is slated to become a feature film:
“Ice Age” helmer Chris Wedge has signed on to direct Brian Selznick’s magic-themed children’s novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” for Graham King’s GK Films, Johnny Depp’s Infinitum Nihil and Warner Bros.
“The Aviator” scribe John Logan has been tapped to pen the adaptation.
King and Infinitum Nihil’s Christi Dembrowski will produce the live-action film, which centers on an orphaned boy who secretly lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station and looks after the clocks. He gets caught up in a mystery adventure when he attempts to repair a mechanical man.
The studio is eyeing a fall start date.
I’m crushed. It’s not that I think it won’t make a good movie—it probably will—but it will be something entirely different from the experience you get in reading it, and I fear that it can’t help but somehow degrade the tale, that way. Great books should just be great books, sometimes.
I know most people disagree with me. That’s fine. Why, back in my day, we read books, and movies consisted of hand shadows made on rocks with a flashlight. Harumph.
Now, where did I put my Geritol…?