Flitting Through the Internet

Twilight

I didn't know they were making the book into a movie.  More at /Film.

Hip Hop Austen

At Romancing the Tome.

Harry Potter - what happens after

Interview with J.K. Rowling at Overdue Books.

Gone With the Wind - The Musical

Article about a possible GWTW musical, possibly starring Hugh Jackman.  However, Romancing the Tome has a comment saying that the Jackman rumor is just wishful thinking since he is involved in a workshop about making a musical from the movie Leap of Faith.  The music for "Leap of Faith" would be by Alan Menken, who is currently working on a musical version of Sister Act. And The Little Mermaid is also going to be on Broadway.

From IMDB "Sister Act" trivia:

Screenwriter Paul Rudnick wrote the original script back in 1987 and Bette Midler was supposed to be cast for the role of Dolores. After Midler had left the project, the script underwent several re-writes by screenwriters Carrie Fisher, Eleanor Bergstein, Nancy Meyers, Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr. and Robert Harling. As Rudnick did not consider the final draft of the movie as his own work, the pseudonym 'Joseph Howard' was chosen by him after his own suggestion for the writer's credit ('Screenplay by Goofy') had been rejected. 

From IMDB "Little Mermaid" trivia:

In the opening scene when King Triton arrives at the arena, you can briefly see Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck in the crowd of sea-people as mermen when he passes over them.

A few of the backgrounds used during the "Kiss the Girl" scene are taken from The Rescuers (1977).

The animators created the character of Ursula with the intention of having Bea Arthur [the friend in Mame] provide the voice. By the time Arthur was approached, she was already well into the sitcom "The Golden Girls" and declined the Disney offer.

Hugh Jackman was also considering starring in Pal Joey.  The original Broadway production of Pal Joey, in 1940, starred Gene Kelly (right).  A 1963 revival starred Bob Fosse. And a 1976 revival starred Christopher Chadman, who also played Lewis in Pippin, and later was an associate choreographer with Bob Fosse for Dancin' and Big Deal.   

Enough links?!   

HPOOTP info

Interviews:  Jason Isaacs - 1:

When he did return to the scowling world of the evil-doer, it was in the most high profile of ways in the most high profile of films; playing prominent Deatheater Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter series. While talking about this role, Isaacs turns into what can only be described as a big kid: "It's obscene that I get paid," he beams, "people should complain. I've got a four-year-old, she's got a dress-up box in her room and nothing touches Lucius Malfoy. She's got fairies and wizards and witches and superheroes, and nothing touches it. I get there and I say 'Can I have a cane with a wand inside it? Can I have a cape? Do you think I could have a belt with a snake's head on it? Do you think I can blast that wall and it blows open and I walk through it?' It's absurd a man of my age doing that stuff. And then you get there and realise you're doing scenes with Gary Oldman and Helena Bonham Carter. I look at the call sheet and they're going to be there today, I'm going to get to talk to them. Before you know it you're having lunch and sharing HP sauce. It's fantastic."

2:

Isaacs said that the fifth film will include a harrowing showdown between his character and Harry's godfather, Sirius Black. "I get to have a wand battle with Gary Oldman, possibly my favorite actor in the universe," Isaacs said. "We get to play around like two 10-year-olds. And with kind of unlimited sci-fi imagination. It's fun. We just go, 'Well, how about if I ... .' And anything you finish that sentence with, they go, 'Yeah, OK. You can do that.' So it was magnificent."

The character does not appear in the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but Isaacs said he recently had an opportunity to meet author J.K. Rowling and appealed to her to include him in the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, due this year, possibly July. "I fell to my knees and begged," he joked. "It didn't do any good. I'm sure she doesn't need plot ideas from me. But I made my point. We'll see. Like everybody else, I'm holding my breath to July to see what's in there. I just want to bust out of prison, that's all. I don't want to stay in Azkaban most of my life.

3.

Alec Hopkins who plays the young Snape:

Alec said: “Alan Rickman spent a couple of hours having a chat with me about the part and obviously that was nerve wracking; there was me as a nobody and then this famous actor.
“He’s very serious about acting but he likes to joke around. It was really nice and it surprised me - I thought a big star wou

                 

		Everyone is really nice but it’s very daunting. You don’t realise how many people there are and if you messed up you’d be so embarrassed Alec Hopkins

ld be different but he was so nice.”
Alec spent time studying previous Harry Potter films, so he could mimic Alan Rickman’s movements and gestures.
He said: “The part is pretty easy as it’s such a small scene, but because the character has been portrayed by someone before, it’s about taking someone’s characteristics and trying to copy them.
“I watched how he moved, spoke and the emotions he goes through. He also gave me some pointers about the character – how he would walk and hold himself, like keeping a straight back.”

Alan Rickman:

Article:  Warwick Davis in Prince Caspian.

Quidditch

Quidditch takes off on campuses

Inspired by J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series, Middlebury students hit the fields

That's right - at Middlebury College, students have formed a Quidditch team, modeling themselves after those described in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy series.

Middlebury sophomore Alex Benepe, the current Quidditch organizer, started the mock team while anticipating the release of the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in fall 2005.

"Anyone who's tried it loves it," Benepe said. "People have forgotten how much fun it is to go outside and just throw a ball around."

But unlike Rowling's magical characters, Middlebury students are forced to compensate for their lack of supernatural powers when playing the sport.

Students run with brooms between their legs instead of flying on them, and Middlebury sophomore Rainey Johnson serves as a human replacement for the snitch, which, in the book, is a tiny gold ball with wings.

But more-violent aspects - from broken arms to attempts to knock others off of their brooms - of Quidditch depicted in Harry Potter are more easily replicated.

"There aren't any rules about fouling, so kids usually do whatever it takes to get the ball," Benepe said, and Middlebury freshman Greta VanDeventer described once getting a "floater" while playing the game when she was accidentally stabbed in the eye with someone's thumb.
...

From The Daily Pennsylvanian.  Read the rest here.

[Hat tip to Critical Mass.]

Ursula K. LeGuin on Fantasy

Imaginary Friends - Fantasy not just for children:

To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary. Many of its great texts are poetry, and its prose often approaches poetry in density of implication and imagery. The fantastic, the marvellous, the impossible rode the mainstream of literature from the epics and romances of the Middle Ages through Ariosto and Tasso and their imitators, to Rabelais and Spenser and beyond. This is not to say that everybody approved of it. Conflict with religion and with realism always loomed. In the first great European novel, imagination and realism meet head-on, and their contest is the very stuff and argument of the book. Don Quixote is driven mad by chivalric fantasies - but what is he without his madness?

Shakespeare may have influenced English literature towards fantasy in a rather particular way. Spenser has Continental counterparts, but A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest do not. Nowhere else in Europe did folk tale, legend, medieval romance, travellers' tales and individual genius coalesce in such works of imagination as those plays. That may be one reason why the literature I am talking about is very largely an English-language phenomenon.

[Hat tip to Scholar's Blog.]