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Eric Schlosser Talks Moviemaking
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" Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser talks about the process of turning his book into a movie, and why he doesn't want to be a director.

After his investigation into the fast-food industry and its negative impact on global culture became a huge best-seller in 2001, Schlosser was approached by a succession of filmmakers wanting to turn it into a documentary. "This was how I also saw it being filmed. But I was leery because so many of the filmmakers had corporate sponsorship ? particularly those associated with PBS, which gets a lot of money from McDonald's every year ? and I feared the message would get watered down."

The idea of a fiction-film version came from veteran producer Jeremy Thomas, who optioned the book. "And I had written plays and worked for a film company before I became a journalist, so it was not a completely outrageous suggestion to me," Schlosser said. With this concept, Schlosser sought out Linklater (Slacker, Before Sunset). "I loved his work and admired his independence from Hollywood. So when I was in Austin (Texas, his hometown) on a promotional tour, I went to him and said, 'Can you give me some advice on this?'" They became partners.

Schlosser said he was as involved as any author has ever been in the translation of his book ? on the set, overseeing the editing and promoting it on the road. But while he enjoyed the process, it didn?t leave him with filmmaking ambitions. "I don?t want to be a director. The endless delays, the waiting around for money, the not knowing if the deal is going to fall through, it's just too tough. And I learned early on in my career that I don't want to be a screenwriter. Words are just too important to me."

He said, "When the movie opens Friday, I intend to leave all this behind. I've been dealing with the dangers of fast food in one way or another for more than 10 years, and I still feel very passionate about the subject, but it's time for me to move on."

As the exclusive representative of the William Faulkner Literary Estate, producer Lee Caplin ("Ali") has had access to the vaunted Mississippi writer's letters, sketches, notes and other literary works for years. So when Jill Faulkner Summers, the novelist's daughter, found a manuscript seven years ago in the piles of material her father left behind when he died in 1962, she passed it on to Caplin. He was stunned by what she'd found: Faulkner's only un-produced, feature-length screenplay. But here's the kicker: Faulkner, the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer of "As I Lay Dying," "Light in August," and "Absalom! Absalom!," had harvested his astonishing talent to write ... a vampire film.

Faulkner had a legendarily complicated relationship with Hollywood, which he initially attempted to exploit for easy money before becoming so annoyed that he ultimately retreated to Mississippi. His distaste was well-earned: His first produced screenplay involved being asked by Irving Thalberg to transform his all-male World War I movie "Turn About" into a Joan Crawford vehicle called "Today We Live." (For a humorous snapshot of Faulkner's Hollywood years, see John Mahoney's wickedly playful homage as W.P. Mayhew, the Southern novelist turned agonized and alcohol-benumbed screenwriter in the Coen Brothers' "Barton Fink.")

Beginning in 1932, and intermittently over the next 13 years, Faulkner was a contract writer at MGM, Fox and Warner Bros. who mainly wrote screenplays for good friend and drinking buddy Howard Hawks. Their best and most notable collaborations are Faulkner's adaptations of Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" and Raymond Chandler's noir classic "The Big Sleep."

In the midst of all this, Faulkner apparently spun out a vampire saga set in an anonymous Eastern European location. Caplin plans to relocate the story to the Deep South and has a high-end computer-graphics firm on the hook to dress it up with modern effects.

The Random House imprint is unveiling an unusually avant-garde trio of TV spots to promote a popular series by one of its marquee authors, Dean Koontz. The spots, pushing Koontz's Odd Thomas titles, will each air once during C.S.I., unfolding over the course of three consecutive Thursdays: November 16, 23 and 30. The black-and-white ads, which are loosely linked, attempt to describe the Odd Thomas character (a detective who speaks to the dead). But the most striking aspect of the campaign is that it doesn't initially make clear what it's advertising. (It's not until the final spot that the book materializes: at the close of the clip, a shot of the cover is shown and the voiceover says: "Read Brother Odd, the new Odd Thomas novel by bestselling author Dean Koontz." They also plug an Odd Thomas website, where the ads, along with other promotional information, can be viewed: www.oddthomas.tv.)

As Betsy Hulsebosch, senior v-p of creative marketing at Bantam Dell, explained, this is what sets this advertising effort apart. "There's no product shot... and I don't know of any other time a book publisher has done that, and done it intentionally," she said. The episodic nature of the ads is also something Hulsebosch thinks is a first. Although she's worked on TV ads for a number of other Bantam Dell authors, including Koontz, she's never done a campaign in the style or format like this. (She also confirmed that Bantam Dell paid for the spots, not Koontz.) So will the imprint go down this road again for other authors? Hulsebosch couldn't say, noting, "Certainly we're looking forward to seeing how [the campaign] performs."

The justices let stand a lower court ruling that author Lewis Perdue didn't show that The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, was substantially similar to his 2000 book, Daughter of God.

*****

"Brown took substantial elements of Perdue's novel, appropriated them as his own, and profited greatly from doing so," said Perdue's appeal, which was rejected without comment by the high court in Washington. Brown's lawyers countered that the novels' "plots, characters, themes and total concept and feel were radically different." Perdue's suit, seeking $150 million in damages, also named the publisher of Brown's book, Bertelsmann AG's Random House unit, and the producer of the movie, Columbia Pictures, a unit of Tokyo-based Sony Corp.

Perdue claimed that Brown took plot and character details from Daughter of God. He submitted sworn statements from a linguist and a university English professor who cited specific instances of similarity. A federal judge in New York granted judgment to Brown, saying the only similarities between the books involved historical facts and abstract themes. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

This is so different from other stuff you've done, a bit science fiction, a bit fantasy-

Ferrell: It was-I mean, getting to do something like this, which is obviously a little different from a lot of the stuff I've done, in the sense that, it's just, I guess, more muted, even though it still is a comedy. It was, actually, I found it really freeing, to be able to kind of just play a character in this way, and I guess, for lack of a better term, play something as real, you know, as I've gotten to play before. And that was-you know, that was one of the things that appealed to me. The other part [was] just also being a part of this wonderful story that's so funny and different and touching and all these elements, of a completely different type of film, not only as an acting exercise for me, but also just thematically, of anything that I've gotten to do.

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