Things in Print Thursday :: in which I am somewhat of a robot regarding literary romance.

I was going to make a list tonight of romantic couples in literature that I’ve had strong emotional reactions to – not just “oh, okay, I’m good with that,” but “oh my gosh I love you guys so so much.”  It’s Valentine’s, after all, and if there’s any time to have those sorts of discussions, it’s probably now.

But then I started making the list.  And got stuck almost immediately.  I could make a list of times I mentally shrieked “no no stop it do not want” easy, I could make a list of times I went “really guys?  Are we doing this now?” easy, I could make a list of times I went “oh, okay, I’m good with that” pretty easily.  I don’t know why it is, but I have an easier time attaching to romantic couples in visual mediums, I think.  I also just don’t have an easy time attaching to romantic couples, period (this is a ridiculous statement, because I offer so many !!! about the romantic couples I do get attached to, but just know that the ones I talk about [a lot] are comparatively fewer when you consider the overall number of couples I’ve witnessed at any point – I can watch entire shows or movies without having romantic feelings about anyone, or only really having “oh, okay, I’m good with that” feelings.  Those just aren’t the ones I discuss).

This could be because some of my favorite books, while featuring romance, are mostly about friendship.

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower, definitely: while Charlie likes Sam, it’s not really the main point of the story, and while I do and always have kind of shipped Alice/Mary Elizabeth, it’s definitely not the main point and really more of a peripheral thought than an all-consuming need.  It’s mostly about these guys all being friends and what that spells out.
• How I Paid for College, well, everyone’s sort of having sexy thoughts about everyone, but mostly the point of the story is their relationships not entirely in a romantic sense?  Like that’s mostly what I’ve taken away from it.
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics, wherein yes, there is a weird vampire-family vibe amongst the Bluebloods actually, and there is that whole mess between Blue and Charles, and let’s not even talk about the Hannah dynamics, but it’s actually mostly a crazy noir murder mystery wrapped in a story about questionable friendships.

Some of the books from my childhood featured romance, and I reacted emotionally to it, but mostly because I was busy reacting emotionally to everything in the story.

• Little Women and its sequels, wherein yeah, I probably shipped Jo/Teddy as a kid (I know I didn’t like that he ended up with Amy) but it was never a devastating thing; I reacted super-emotionally to happenings between Meg and John Brooke and between Jo and Professor Bhaer (I just feel weird using his first name) but not necessarily from a purely romantic-reaction standpoint.
• Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, wherein yeah, I was comfortable with Anne/Gilbert, but it was never an all-consuming “oh my gosh I love you guys so so much.”

I’ve read plenty of other books with romance and been okay with it.  Sometimes I read books with romance and even go “I hope this works out for you.”  But it’s rarely much more than that, and whether this is because I just haven’t read those books that give me those feelings or because I just don’t often feel inclined to have them this strongly with books, this just seems to be the case.

(I’ve basically never had a proper emotional reaction to a romance in even an adaptation of a “great romance,” case in point.)

So I guess I’m just going to be spending the rest of my Valentine’s Day listening to the Light in the Piazza album, because it is the most romantic album I can think of (and also I miss back when I felt comfortable having a crush on Matthew Morrison because he was singing in Italian) and because it’s beautiful.  (I considered a “most romantic musicals in my opinion” list too, but a lot of my favorite musicals, while featuring romance, are somewhat messed up, so it would be a pretty short list too.)

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, the couples on my list were, once I stopped thinking about books from the 1800s that I read in childhood: everyone I also put on a Valentine on Tuesday [though I tend to have fewer romance feelings regarding Dany and Doreah in the books, honestly, and this is mostly because Doreah dies earlier so there’s less time for coy glances; this is also because in the books, you don’t get to see the amazing reaction faces Doreah makes in regards to people reacting to Dany] and also Tonks/Lupin, and that somewhat because my friend and I surprise-called it approximately a book in advance for no real reason and it came true.)

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre Thursday :: one request to the casting directors of How I Paid For College on stage

Last fall, I spoke about turning one of my all-time favorite books, How I Paid for College, into a movie.  Reservations were had, to be sure.

The same reservations applied to a stage production, though I once penned part of one myself for a class (I’m not sure how successfully, as it was ridiculously theoretical).

Last month, I heard that it was being turned into a stage production.  I clapped and jumped for joy, then immediately began worrying, but today I took a closer look at the blurb: “The monologue with songs, which will require the actor to ‘play dozens of characters, command the stage alone for two hours and be able to sing musical theatre songs,’ will play the Virginia venue Dec. 7-30, according to an Equity casting notice.”

This one man to do the one man show, which Marc Acito wrote himself (well, at least I can have faith in the script – Marc Acito is a rad guy and a fun writer), well.  I have but the one request in this short post:

Please don’t cast anyone I can think of off the top of my head, guys.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: 6 of my favorite books and if they’d work as films.

6. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
This is a crapshoot.  Because the narrative is told in alternate forms, you’d need to find a way to represent that (the flashbacks, the newspaper articles, the bits of the pulp fiction story) and that would be hard without the right director and screenwriter.  It’s nonlinear, and not every creative team (or audience) can handle that.  But it could be a very pretty movie: right now I’m trying to imagine pieces of it in my head and it’s sort of like Canadian Boardwalk Empire a few years later.  If you could do it that classily and got a good cast, I’d be into it.

5 & 4. How I Paid for College and Attack of the Theatre People by Marc Acito
In this age of High School Musical and Glee, it’s easy to imagine a group of singing high schoolers as being Happy Fun Family Entertainment!!!  The characters in Acito’s two novels, who are eventually college students, are not that, and that would cut down on the marketability of the prospective movies, but that ‘s what I think would be great.  Theatre people and music people are pretty often not good clean fun.  There’s sex, there’s swearing, there’s songs that aren’t in the Top 40, there’s a joie de vivre that something trying to mass market loses.  I’d be into seeing these books as films (I heard a while ago the first was optioned, but nothing’s come of it) but only if they stayed true to the raunchiness and stuff and didn’t try to Glee up.  (Though, now that I’m thinking about it, Heather Morris would be a great Kelly.)

3. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
This book makes me use made-up words like “favoritest,” I love it so much.  It’s written very much like a movie, unfolding in a linear fashion with dramatic turns, a clear rising action/climax/falling action, not too many main characters but very well-drawn ones.  Maybe too well-drawn for a movie about high school students.  (Have you ever noticed that?  High schoolers in films tend to drift towards the land of the easy to understand.  For every multidimensional Charlie Bartlett you have three flat Disney channel original movies.)  My big worry about this one would be that the book is so long; they’d have to cut parts of it out to make the film a reasonable running time (and they probably wouldn’t Deathly Hallows it) and I just don’t know what they could take out and retain the integrity.  They’d probably try to sex it up a little, too: hangout parties with the Bluebloods would turn into softcore, artistically shot orgies of sorts, Blue and Milton would spend far too long partaking in that not-really-too-long making-out scene, Hannah would be shown having something with someone.  It could easily get corrupted, but.  Again, if it was done right, by people as neurotic and detaily as I am, it could be quality, maybe.  (HBO miniseries?)  I’ve never been able to cast most of it in my head, exactly (Lu ends up like a floaty teenage Juliet Landau, but that’s impossible; Jade I do have down, Ari Graynor, am I right?) but I trust professionals to do that.

2. Heartsick, Sweetheart, Evil at Heart, The Night Season, and …? by Chelsea Cain
(I tack on that extra …?  because it’s clearly a series that’s far from finished.  I haven’t actually read The Night Season yet, as it just came out this year and with Borders closing my hookup for new books is currently a bit paltry [and I can’t trek up to Portland just to go to Powell’s, much as I’d want to] so.)  Oh, come on, these have “movie please” written all over them.  There’s teensy subplots you could trim out if you needed to and my heroine Chelsea Cain gave permission, but they’re not too long of books, and you could easily adapt them fully.  I’d like to think that Susan Ward, the heroine of the series, could be buddies with Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy; she’s sort of that same cut of heroine, punky and quirky, albeit less directly damaged.  The relationship between Archie and Gretchen is pure cinema in its twistedness; Gretchen herself is something the world needs more of in fiction, a wicked gorgeous serial killer woman.  I’d be all for this.  My maxim of “with the right hands on deck” still applies, of course; I wouldn’t want it to become just lame CSI or something.  It’s purely well-written pulp, and that’s a rarity, in books and modern films both.

1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Coincidentally, it’s the one on this list I’d have been the most hesitant about.  But I guess we’ll find out what they do with it soon enough.  Will there be a lot of narration?  Will the letter format even be retained at all?  I’m holding my breath.

–your fangirl heroine.