Becoming A Movie

We caught Becoming Jane watch with their girl friends (probably leaving their husbands free to go laugh at Jackie Chan in "Rush Hour 3" with their buddies). It was quite nicely done and like every Jane Austen inspired period piece, had one ball too many, an impossible number of empire line dresses for the protagonist's wardrobe (strangely enough, Jane's sister appears in scenes timed several months apart in the same pink dress), and an improbable reserve of witty repartee (which is the point, I suppose). Still, it's a pretty interesting addition to a slowly growing list of films that try to suggest how an authorial existence might have been crucial (in direct or unexpected ways) to the works by which we at the cinema yesterday. I think there were only about 4 men in the largely middle aged female audience. It certainly was a film that a lot of women went out to remember them. Becoming Jane isn't bad though it's a pretty unsophisticated statement about how an author's life translates into her writing. That growing list of films about authors? I'm thinking of Shakespeare in Love, far and away the most effective and amusing because it doesn't pretend at any veracity, Capote, The Hours and Sylvia. I guess Naked Lunch and Henry and June would be on the list too, though they were made somewhat earlier. What else is there?

Anyway, authors about whom films should be made (perhaps films have already been made and I just don't know about them):
Herman Melville. And there's a ready-made title in "Call me Ishmael".
Ken Kesey / Jack Kerouac
Hemmingway. (who was a popular source of film adaptations in the 40s and 50s, right?)
Chaucer.
James Joyce.
Proust.
S.R. Delany.
The Bronte Sisters. (Hah -- I half-suspected that there was already a film on them, and checking IMDb, this turned up.)
Lord Byron.
E.M. Forster (who is the single novelist whose books have been turned into film adaptations at a rate that compares to Austen but who seems to have fallen out of favor. Henry James is the other guy who was a pretty popular source for adaptations.



I guess there are only so many ways to show writers at work ...