More Interest In Lunar Park

Variety has a bit of Lunar Park film gossip in a story about the opening of Denzel Washington's Deja Vu. Apparently Adam Goldberg is in negotiations with Ellis to get the rights to make a Lunar Park film and Val Kilmer may end up with the lead role.

This is a bit strange, since last we heard, Palm Star had the movie rights and it looks like they still have Lunar Park as an active project.

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Lunar Park Movie Trailer

Lunar Park Teaser Trailer at YouTube!

I'm not sure how legit it is, and I don't really care - because its neat regardless. Seven more screencaps after the jump.

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Lunar Park Book Tour Troubles?

There are rumors flying that the Lunar Park paperback book tour has been cancelled. I haven't seen anything official yet, and haven't had a chance to follow-up with people who would know, so this is still a rumor at this point to me. And given that I've seen 3 variations of this rumor - exhaustion, broken foot, rehab - I'm not too inclined to believe it.

Hopefully, I'll have better information by this evening.

UPDATE: Page 6 is reporting the book tour cancellation and using the broken foot story as the reason why.

UPDATE #2: Here are a couple of images of Bret from one of his readings in California that wasn't cancelled. Clearly on crutches with a cast on the foot.

pic 1 | pic 2 | pic 3.

The pics come from here and here. You may have to copy/paste the URL of the pictures into your browser rather than clicking on them.

Lunar Park Nominated For World Fantasy Award

Couple of interesting tidbits via the SciFi channel. According to this story, Ellis has re-located back to Los Angeles to work on his previously mentioned 'sequel' to Less Than Zero.

We also find out that Lunar Park has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award. The winner will be announced at their convention in November 2006. Here are all the nominees:

Hal Duncan, Vellum (Macmillan; Del Rey)
Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park (Knopf; Macmilln)
Graham Joyce, The Limits of Enchantment (Gollancz; Atria)
Patricia A. McKillip, Od Magic (Ace)
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (Harvill; Knopf)
Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania (Tor)

It seems very odd to see Ellis listed among that group of authors.

Ellis Interview

The Morning News has an interview up with Bret by Robert Birnbaum. Robert has chatted with Bret a few times over the past couple of years, so his interview is quite different than most folks because he doesn't have to ask the obvious questions. [Thanks to Tim and Settemod for sending this in]

The only real future project nugget is Bret's response when asked about The Informers:

BEE: And that has a script and looks like it's going to go, yeah.

This would be the Nicholas Jarecki script mentioned last year, so hopefully its still progressing.

Less Than Zero Sequel Seems Likely

JAM! Books has another interview with Ellis about Lunar Park and the future. There isn't much new information in the interview, but Ellis does put some additional weight behind the idea that he's going to write a sequel of sorts to Less Than Zero.

"I have a Nicholas Sparks book in me somewhere," he laughs. "Seriously though, I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been thinking of Less than Zero, and where those characters are now. Part of me thinks it's a truly terrible idea, but unless I'm hit by a bus it looks likes it's going to be the next book."

Lunar Park, The Movie

2 weeks ago, I mentioned that Bret had talked about who would play him in the movie version of Lunar Park if it were ever made into a film. His answer, though playful, seemed serious enough at the time that it made me think it may be a real possibility of this book being made into a film.

Well, today that is apparently 1 step closer to reality as a legitimate offer has been made to Ellis for the movie rights to Lunar Park. Hopefully, more will be known within the next couple of days/weeks as to who made the offer and what type of film they are wanting to make from this novel. Hopefully, they are looking at this as a movie about Bret Easton Ellis with a horror backdrop rather than as a straight horror flick with Ellis as just another character.

Lunar Park, The Movie?

The Washington Square News has an interview with Ellis. When asked who he'd like to play the role of Bret Easton Ellis if Lunar Park were ever adapted for film, Bret had this to say:

I'd give it Jake Gyllenhaal - no, I'm kidding. They've offered it to all the actors my age. They offered it to Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp. And everyone turned it down. The only person who didn't was Benicio del Toro, who actually began running around the studios saying, "I wanna star in this."

Not sure if thats all in jest or not. I haven't heard anything about the book being optioned for film yet.

A 'Less Than Zero' Love Story?

Elizabeth Barr has a good interview with Bret in the Buffalo News. Like many of his previous interviews this year, he continues to speak ill of American Psycho.

"Patrick Bateman becoming an icon made me resentful. Of course, as a writer you resent that. That will be on my tombstone, that I created that character. And I resented the character haunting me."

And, he's still toying with the idea of re-using the characters from Less Than Zero in a future novel.

"I've always written about people my age at any given time. It's not surprising that I'm no longer interested in writing about youth culture. I don't want to hang out with 20-year-olds. I don't want to write Less than Zero again," he said.

"However, I am interested in returning to Less than Zero, " the novel that was published while he was a 21-year-old Bennington College student. "I was back in L.A. recently after a long time away, driving around, and I would think about where Blair and Clay are and that they probably have kids and that their kids would be about the age of the kids in Less Than Zero. That is something I cannot not think about.

"I don't know if it's a book yet. Part of me thinks it's a really cheesey idea - there are so many pitfalls, so many traps. It might be a love story. It's just this idea that's been haunting me."

Ellis' Name Removed From 'Loveable Teddybears'

I rather expected this to happen, but apparently the Euro Amazon site that had a new Bret Easton Ellis book due out in January had simply incorrectly associated his name with the book in question.

New Novel Arrives In January?

I'm not sure what to make of this because I can't find anything about it in English at all, but I got an email from Eric that included the following:

On the german Amazon site I found a new book that should be released in January by SOME Bret Easton Ellis. The German Title is Teddybären zum Liebhaben and can be translated as Loveable Teddybears.

So is this the new Ellis book long rumored to be autobiographical in nature? I can't image so because its only 128 pages long. I'm also confused about the price - 4.95 Euro. Thats cheaper than many of Ellis' used books sell for. Anybody have info on what this book is?

New Book Title: Big Zero

I think this is the third title for Ellis' currently unpublished but long rumored next book. Who really knows which one - if any - it'll actually end up titled as. This could just be Ellis messing with the media like he has about his sexuality. But, Big Zero is at least a realistic sounding title; much better than the Where I Have Been I Would Not Go Back that the last article I mentioned offered up. Here's the interesting stuff:

Ellis has nearly finished his latest book, Big Zero, an autobiographical novel about a Californian writer that he started five years ago. He set it aside for a while because he found himself stumbling over material involving his father, an abusive alcoholic who died in 1992, leaving behind an unexpected $10 million debt.

"There's some stuff about my dad in it that is sort of upsetting to deal with right now," he says. "I thought I'd dealt with a lot of it, but I really hadn't. I really feel the need to write about it, but it's tougher than I thought. And that's ridiculous because it makes writing seem a lot tougher than it is."

Thanks to Patrick for alerting me to this story.

Possible Title of New Ellis Book

From an interview in The Harvard Crimson way back in 1999, Ellis mentions a future autobiographical project - which was confirmed as in progress as of Oct 2002 with the title of "Where I Have Been I Would Not Go Back".

Also, reader Matt K writes in again with a link to this Tammy Bruce article (she was a major player in the feminist stink raised about the American Psycho novel), where she appears to be bragging that her protests got Glamorama censored by Ellis' publisher as well. Neither Matt or I have ever heard anything about Glamorama being censored previously, and I am of the opinion that this is just wishful thinking on the part of Ms. Bruce. Anybody know differently?

Confirming The New Novel Rumors

This certainly didn't take very long to confirm. Not 2 hours after I posted about the conflicting new Ellis novel rumors, Levi emails me a link (Thanks!) to an October 2002 interview in which Bret Easton Ellis confirms that he's currently working on an autobiographical novel: Specifically, Ellis said his upcoming novel:

"...is a very long, involved novel about a marriage and my family. It’s very autobiographical. And it has no gay content. "

Source Of New Novel Rumors

I've been getting a bit of email, and there has been a good bit of chatter on the net in general about Bret Easton Ellis' next novel. There has been nothing official announced, and really no projects have been discussed in specifics.

That said, there are rumors of a project - something autobiographical. Near as I can tell, that rumor is derived from a sentence in a 1999 BookPage interview with Ellis shortly after he had written Glamorama. Here's the passage in question:

A novel set in Washington and "tangentially related to politics" is in the planning stages, but it is a memoir addressing his late adolescence and the (sort of) halcyon days at Bennington that seems to most interest him right now.

So there's the source. It could be a memoir type project, or it could be a political novel set in Washington. The reality is that it'll probably be something entirely different - afterall, those 2 projects were what interested BEE over 4 years ago, so don't hold your breath.

Speaking of new novels - Douglas Coupland's latest book was released this week. Its entitled Hey Nostradamus!, and looks to be full of classic Coupland goodness. If you've never read a Coupland novel, you are definately missing out - All Families Are Psychotic would be a good place to start. He's definately a quirky storyteller.

Bret Easton Ellis' New Book - Blood Alley

Not really, but if you believed everything you read in newsgroups thats what you'd think. Here's the fake article in its entirety:

LONDON (AFP) - American novelist Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, said he was moved to tears as he killed off one of his key characters in his latest book "Blood Alley", due to go on sale Saturday.

In an interview for BBC television to be broadcast Thursday, Easton Ellis, 39, told how his cleaner Elaine Tubby found him in tears at his home after he had sealed the fate of the unnamed character. The character's identity will be revealed this Saturday when the eagerly-awaited book hits the shops.

"I had re-written the death, re-written it and that was it. And the person was definitely dead," Easton Ellis told BBC's Newsnight programme. "Then I killed off several more. In fact, pretty much all the characters die horrible, depressing deaths" Easton Ellis added. "Maybe we should talk about the survivors?".

Easton Ellis said that his cleaner -- also unaware of the identity of the doomed character, plus all of the others -- had suggested that he should not kill off the character if it made him that upset. "I'm not upset about the book; I've just struck the desk with my knee," Easton Ellis told his cleaner at the time.

Easton Ellis said he had "sweated blood" to write the 766-page tome but vehemently denied reports he had delivered the book late after suffering writer's block. "When I say "sweated blood", I mean there was just a lot of blood in the book," Easton Ellis said. "Blood is cool."

This was originally posted to the newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.