How to make every profile of you begin with the words 'thinking woman's sex symbol' in one easy step: As an undergraduate at Brown, get so obsessed with David Foster Wallace's 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men' that later, the first time you do anything that makes you any money, you go out and buy the film rights to the book. That's what John Krasinski says he did with his 'Office' pilot paycheck, and the film, which he directed, is now in postproduction. Krasinski really, really likes David Foster Wallace: "It's basically now turning into a cinematic experience where you go behind the scenes of what it's like to be a guy in David's world, which is not necessarily the real world. I'll leave that up to you. I won't say that he's the end-all, be-all on guys. But maybe he is." Sigh. Sometimes it can be very appealing when someone likes the same kind of books you like.

I wish I had heard sooner about the death of actor and director Ivan Dixon Sunday—if you recognize him, it's probably as Kinch, the black guy on Hogan's Heroes, but he also had a solid career in the 1970s and '80s directing TV dramas... and to me, he'll always be the director of two of the most interesting films of the '70s: Trouble Man and, more pertinent to our blog's bookish themes, The Spook Who Sat By the Door, a 1973 film based on a novel by Sam Greenlee. I've described it in interviews as "Shaft meets The Amateur meets The Battle of Algiers," and I'll just reiterate for you that it's one of the most amazing explicitly political films of its time, and I hope this post starts a run on Netflix. You want a rundown? Fine: The CIA, forced into affirmative action, trains an African-American recruit but doesn't let him actually do anything—and the minute he leaves the agency, he heads to Chicago to teach the inner-city gangs what he's learned about guerrilla warfare, and you had better believe it works. I am not engaging in hyperbole here; you must see this film.

Remember the rumors about a new Dune movie last fall? I wasn't convinced, but as I said at the time, "I don't work the film beat, so don't take my word for anything." And lo, Paramount went ahead and greenlit the project, with Peter Berg attached as director and co-producer with Richard Rubenstein, who produced the two Sci-Fi Channel miniseries based on the novels by Frank Herbert. As Variety notes, "The filmmakers consider its theme of finite ecological resources particularly timely."

Science fiction blog io9 picks up on another resonant theme: "If you want to read Dune as an allegory about the Middle East (and you should)," says Annalee Newitz, "the heroes are the guys who live in caves and bomb the shit out of the developed-world imperialists who've come to suck up their spice." It's radical environentalism meets Jihad vs. McWorld: Who knew? (Well, just about everyone who's read the books, really.)

Oh, yeah: The headline? It's a Dune reference—the same sort of fanboy impulse that led me to track down the cover art from the paperback edition I read when I discovered the series roughly 25 years ago.

One of my favorite nonfiction books last year was Joan Druett's Island of the Lost, a tale of two 19th-century shipwrecks on opposite ends of the same island I consider, in the words of the PW reviewer, "a fine addition to the genre of survival tales like Endurance or In the Heart of the Sea." Yesterday afternoon, Druett dropped me a line to let me know that South Pacific Pictures, the producers of Whale Rider, had acquired the film rights to the book. "It's really great because now I have a reply for all the people who write to me suggesting that it should be made into a film," she joked. I just hope they keep her on as a creative consultant, so she can make sure the production designers don't bungle the ships' riggings.

(photo from New Zealand Book Council)

Watchmen image via Warner Bros.

Earlier this week, 20th Century Fox sued Warner Bros. over who has the rights to make and release the Watchmen movie, based on the acclaimed (some say overacclaimed) graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. icv2 has the details:

"According to Fox the studio acquired all movie rights to the Watchmen property between 1986 and 1990. Though it did assign some rights to producer Lawrence Gordon's Largo International, Fox claims that it kept the right to distribute any Watchmen movie. When Largo folded, the agreement between Fox and Gordon was amended with a number of conditions, but according to Fox, Gordon was supposed to pay the studio a buy-out fee if he decided to make the film elsewhere—and Fox claims that it has never received any such fee."

Fox requested an injunction against Warner's ongoing production, currently being shot by Zack Snyder (300). Meanwhile, J.R.R. Tolkien's estate is suing New Line Cinema over the money the Tolkien Trust (which is co-managed by HarperCollins) was supposed to collect from the gross receipts on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. "The lawsuit seeks $150 million in compensatory damages," icv2 reports, along with "the termination of any further rights that New Line might have to other Tolkien work," including a two-film Hobbit project in pre-production. The article further states the Trust is contractually due 7.5 percent of the LotR trilogy's gross profits, which were somewhere on the north side of $6 billion. But, comments entertainment attorney Ezra Doner in a separate statement, "The question in a case like this is not how much did the films gross, but rather how much did New Line and its affiliates receive. In many cases, box office receipts only indirectly relate to what New Line received." (Doner also notes, drily, that many of the accounting practices the Trust is complaining about in New Line's handling of the situation are standard practice in Hollywood studios, including... 20th Century Fox, a corporate cousin to HarperCollins.)

Deborah Gregory, creator of the Cheetah Girls series of children's books, is the latest author to declare herself screwed over by Hollywood, in a profile by LA Times book reporter Josh Getlin. Gregory's novels are published by Hyperion, and the property was merchandised out the wazoo by the publisher's parent company, Walt Disney, from TV-movies and compact discs to "shoes, dolls, toothbrushes, video games, backpacks, note pads, pillows, posters, T-shirts and the like." But Gregory signed a contract in 2001 that promised her 4 percent of the net from all that merchandising, and now she's telling people she hasn't seen anything from Disney about any net. As Getlin records:

"People think I must be living in a palace, when they think of the success of the Cheetah Girls," she said, sitting quietly in the cramped studio apartment she rents in Manhattan. "But look at this place. It's a ... dump."

Gee, I wonder what "..." could be a euphemism for? Anyway, despite $125,000 in option fees, and $180,000 in advances on her sixteen books, plus whatever royalties the 2 million copies of those books sold generated, Gregory believes she deserves more from the success that Disney's had spinning her creations into merchandising gold, and she's probably right—sure, that looks like more than a quarter of a million dollars, but it's spread out over several years; before royalties, she was basically making a midlevel publishing salary. But, as just about everybody Getlin contacted for the article suggests, this is how Hollywood operates, unless you have an agent or a lawyer who won't let the studios roll right over you. (The article notes that Gregory has ditched the woman who represented her on that Disney deal.)

Which can be hard; as Jane Dystel tells Getlin, "Studios are always offering authors take-it-or-leave-it deals, and if they don't get what they want, they're prepared to walk away. They'll tell you that there are plenty of other good books out there for them to buy, and they're right." What authors need to do is prepare themselves to let the studios walk in such cases and hold out for a more equitable offer... or try Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken's alternative: "The best advice we give is that you should try to get as much of your money upfront."

UPDATE: FishbowlLA observes that Black Enterprise ran a similar story on Gregory fourteen months ago.

Yesterday's FishbowlNY references two items of interest for pop culture geeks: The Coen brothers next project looks to be an adaptation of Michael Chabon's Edgar-nominated science fiction novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union. And Alex Cox is finally returning to Repo Man, in the form of a graphic novel called Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday that comes out in March. "Basically, everybody in Waldo is a coded version of somebody in Repo Man," Cox tells Entertainment Weekly.

Friday morning at the Entertainment Weekly "PopWatch" blog, Simon Vozick-Levinson tried his best to cope with the increasing likelihood that they might make a Broadway musical out of Fight Club, the latest twist being that Trent Reznor will do the music.

Please, please, Ben Greenman: If you're still reading this blog, beat Reznor to the punch. (Unfortunately, MTV News already made both the "his name is Robert Paulson" and "a beautiful and unique snowflake" jokes I had planned here, which leaves me little more material than a peppy first act number I'd like to call "Slide.")

Earlier in the month, the film production company Sharp Entertainment announced the first project in its "strategic partnership" with HarperCollins, an adaptation of the Eli Gottlieb novel Now You See Him. This morning, at Sundance, Sharp unveiled a larger slate of acquired properties:

• Meg Cabot's Queen of Babble novels
• Jay Barbree's memoir Live From Cape Canaveral
• Thrity Umrigar's novel The Space Between Us
• Mary South's The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water
• Willy Vlautin's Northline (publishing this summer)

From mediabistro.com's FishbowlLA: The Golden Compass writer-director Chris Weitz (left) has complaints about "Hanna Rosin's hatchet job on my film" for The Atlantic, and he tells the editors exactly how he feels. "It has been an interesting experience to be accused, in the same month, of forwarding the aims of a stealth-atheist conspiracy and of selling out the secular ideals of a great work of literature," Weitz reflects (Rosin's article accused him of the latter, while professional offense-taker Bill Donahue bandied about the first charge).

FishbowlLA's Kate Coe notes that Rosin's reply acknowledges she hadn't seen the film while writing that article (though she did review it later, finding much to like though "I pity anyone who has to condense Pullman's ideas into a brief, visual form").

Meanwhile, the Oxford University Press blog has Philip Pullman's new introduction to the OUP Paradise Lost, a swell instance of a modern writer paying tribute to an inspiration. "[Milton] would be remembered still as a poet if he had been executed under the Restoration, and had never begun Paradise Lost," Pullman observes. "But in that great poem he found a theme and a metre that matched every fibre of his genius." This reminds me: I've always wondered what Stanley Fish thinks of His Dark Materials... Maybe when Oxford publishes his latest, Save the World on Your Own Time, later this year, I'll get to ask him! (This Chronicle of Higher Education article will give you an idea of how that book is going to play out.)