Thirty years after playing a young Godfather, Robert De Niro is returning to mob literature to play one of the most famous mob killers--Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran.

Martin Scorsese will direct the film about the mob killer's confession (his eighth project with De Niro), adapted from former prosecutor Charles Brandt's book, --"I Heard You Paint Houses." According to the release, the film will be directed by Martin Scorsese and scripted by Steve Zaillan, who wrote scripts for Schindler's List and American Gangster.

Brandt's literary career rests on the art of interrogation. He also wrote a novel based on some of his investigations, concluding:

"[C]onfession is one of the necessities of life, like food and shelter. It helps eliminate psychological waste from the brain."

Next year, a star-studded cast--James Franco, Alan Alda, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker and Paul Rudd--will dramatize the literary life and times of Allen Ginsberg in the biopic, Howl.

After a summer dominated by superhero blockbusters, it seems somewhat quixotic to make movie heroes out of poets and literary critics. The film also faces the daunting task of getting the Internet generation excited about a 50-year-old poem.

Intrigued, GalleyCat caught up with Howl's co-director Jeffrey Friedman. In this exclusive interview, the veteran director of the documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt wasn't worried:

"We've been surprised by the number of young people who have told us not only that they are familiar with the poem, but that it means a lot to them. A generation accustomed to being bombarded with random sensational imagery will be able to easily keep up with our animated reinterpretation of the poem--a dreamlike world of madness and monsters, burning oilfields and cosmic orgasms."

More after the jump...

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You've come a long way, baby. Bret Easton Ellis' controversial novel American Psycho--once banned and restricted by shocked readers around the world--is headed to Broadway.

Variety reports that the Johnson-Roessler production company will produce a musical version of Ellis' 1991 tale of a serial killing stockbroker (or, at least, a stockbroker with a very, very vivid imagination).

The producers pointed out that the novel was driven by a pop music soundtrack, hinting at the show's 80s-tinged inspiration. Even better, they hope to feed on the financial industry frustrations: "Now in particular it seems relevant, especially given what's happening on Wall Street," David Johnson told the paper. (Via Fimoculous)

"The universe conspires to help you when you really want something." Twenty years ago, that's what Laurence Fishburne gleaned from Paul Coelho's novel, The Alchemist. Soon, the cosmic conspiracy will produce a movie version of the bestselling book.

The author and the actor chatted about adaptation on a live radio show this week. During the interview, Fishburne recounted the film's long, strange journey towards adaptation. Even a bestselling no-brainer blockbuster idea like this one required twenty years of effort, including: trips to the Middle East, the Cannes Festival, and most importantly, the Weinstein Company's offices.

The whole show was hosted by the Authors on Air website, a podcast series that has an upcoming interview Ann Patchett and an archived chat with Neal Stephenson. The interview was organized by HarperOne, the spirituality and personal improvement imprint at HarperCollins.

Despite having died forty years ago, pulp fiction author Cornell Woolrich is back in court. This prolific writer pounded out reams of pulp fiction stories, living to see a couple works scooped up by Hollywood--most famously, the short story that inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.

In 1990, the original buyer of that short story sued the movie studio for copyright infringement, eventually winning his case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier this week, the estate of that original buyer sued another Hollywood production for infringement.

As CNN Money reports:

"The lawsuit claims [Steven] Spielberg conceived and developed the idea for 'Disturbia' from a desire 'to remake the 'Rear Window' film for a younger audience.'"

Like some anxious literary blogger, Woolrich churned out posts for a relentless industry; and then, after all that work, one particular piece inadvertently inspired a feature film and endless litigation. What does the future hold for bloggers, the pulp fiction scribblers of the 21st Century?

So you've probably seen all the fuss that's been made on the blogosphere the last few days about Aaron Sorkin getting himself a Facebook account so he can be better prepared to write the Facebook movie—which ordinarily would be of little interest to a blog that concerns itself with the book publishing industry, until Harvard alum mag 02138 declared that "the Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie is also the Ben Mezrich Facebook movie." It turns out Sony Pictures and Scott Rudin, the producers on Sorkin's picture, may have also optioned the film rights to Face Off, the book Mezrich is writing about the origins of the ubiquitious social networking software.

This has already started a flurry of news items suggesting that Sorkin's screenplay is an adaptation of Mezrich's unpublished book—which remains to be seen. It is entirely possible, after all, that Sony and Rudin simply bought the rights to Face Off as a pre-emptive measure to avoid a lawsuit from an un-optioned Mezrich over his book being a source for Sorkin's screenplay.

Either way, do they really think this thing's going to be more entertaining than the script Jon Favreau wrote for the film version of Po Bronson's novel The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest?

By the way, when I finally saw The Dark Knight yesterday afternoon, they showed a trailer for Body of Lies, but I doubt it generated much sales for David Ignatius last weekend. For one thing, the trailer barely acknowledges the novel as the film's source material, unlike the heavy emphasis placed on the comic book roots of the Watchmen movie. For another, the Body of Lies trailer is a complete mess; all I could tell afterwards is that Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio are angry at each other about something. But there was also a trailer for Blindness, based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning José Saramago, and with that pedigree displayed prominently in the context of laying out a tantalizing story with Julianne Moore in the center of things. I'd be very interested to hear how sales of Blindness did last weekend, and how they do in the weeks to come...

(You could argue that Batman fans can't be expected to care about Nobel-quality literature—a sloppy and dangerous assumption at best—but I'd expect that people who like Christopher Nolan's directing style just might be interested in a film by Fernando Meirelles, especially when the two films have equally fantastic premises.)

Can a trailer turn a 22-year-old book into one of the biggest selling books on Amazon.com?

OK, let's concede the technicality up front: The Watchmen trailer that was shown before The Dark Knight in movie theaters this weekend was promoting the forthcoming motion picture, not the graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Nevertheless, as Bully observed over the weekend, the book promptly vaulted into Amazon's top ten, and as of Sunday afternoon it was the #3 seller on the site, bested only by the new Stephenie Meyer novel and The Shack (that "surprise bestseller" about the Holy Trinity straightening out the messed-up guy). It's not hard to figure out why; in fact, the movie producers already knew—the Watchmen audience pretty much is the Dark Knight audience.

If you were going to create a promotional video for your book, where would you show it to ensure that it would be seen by your ideal reader? Now take the question further: Instead of distilling your book's message into a video, write a letter. Who would you send that letter to?

The blank page/screen is one of the most daunting obstacles an author faces. What to write? How to start? Well it looks likeThe Avocado Papers is removing that obstacle by selling opening paragraphs. Yup, that's right, they're selling "professionally crafted, ready-made ones... at the very reasonable rate of US $1.75 per word." So, your opening paragraph can set you back anywhere from $152.25 to $838.25... and that's non-exclusive.

I'm on the fence about this one. It would certainly come in handy, especially if you're thinking of participating in National Novel Writing Month in November, but most writers I know don't have that kind of scratch on hand.

Technically speaking, this Hellboy cartoon isn't a "book trailer," but an animated adaptation of a comic book that serves as prologue to The Golden Army, the movie that opens at the end of next week. But I think there's a pretty interesting takeaway for certain types of fiction writers here...

Usually, when I've talked about using the storytelling power of book trailers, it's been about making a promotional film that introduces or summarizes the plot of the novel or the central theme of the nonfiction work. This film, however, shows us another alternative: backstory.

Science fiction and fantasy authors, romance novelists, and mystery series writers—among others—might be able to create a trailer out of material that didn't make it into the final manuscript, but helped them figure out what that story was. Maybe it's an incident in a character's past that's barely hinted at, or a quick history of the political infighting within a galactic empire, or just a scene that got cut because you needed to lose 10,000 words... The point is this: As the author, you know more about your stories than your readers—but one of the ways that readers can become "True Fans" is when they feel you're sharing more with them than what's in the book. Romance writers have this principle down solid; among other things, they'll sometimes write "bonus stories" revisiting favorite characters for their online fans. But what is used as a reward can also be used as an inducement...

(spotted on io9)