P a p e r / C u t s

The turning page and the moving image...

The creative team behind the acclaimed film Half-Nelson has picked up the rights to Ned Vizzini's YA novel, It's Kind of a Funny Story.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

"Story centers on a 15-year-old boy named Craig who, battling depression, checks himself into a psychiatric hospital but finds himself placed in the adult ward.

He has a series of colorful and dramatic relationships with a group of adults -- many of whom he finds are far crazier than he is -- and a girl his own age."

"[W]hat's terrific about the book is Craig's voice -- intimate, real, funny, ironic, and one kids will come closer to hear," promises Booklist. "This book offers hope in a package that readers will find enticing, and that's the gift it offers."

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Author/playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet has signed on to tackle an adaptation of The Diary of a Young Girl from Anne Frank.

"The film will be an amalgamation of the famed diary; the stage adaptation by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich; and Mamet's own original take on the material that could reframe the story as a young girl's rite of passage. Frank, who died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, became an icon of the Holocaust after the post-war publication of the diary that she kept during the two years that her family hid in a secret attic apartment in Amsterdam."

Mamet will also have the trade edition of his book Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews out in September.

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The life of legendary singing cowboy Hank Williams will finally make it to the big screen.

Variety reports:

"The package includes cooperation with the Hank Williams estate that gives the production use of his most memorable recordings. Also, 821 has optioned the rights to Hank Williams: The Biography, a book by Colin Escott that is being used as a resource by Abraham. Escott will be associate producer."

Who would make a good Hank Williams on film? Or should they go with a complete unknown?

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