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With “The King’s Speech” already longlisted for a Bafta, 2011 looks set to be a bumper year for literary adaptations.
There is a wealth of film titles coming throughout the year including “Never Let Me Go”, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and “One Day”. Older titles, “Brighton Rock”, “The Woman in Black” and new adaptations of “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” will also hit the screens.
The films are evidently a fillip to publishers of the original novels, particularly those with tie-ins, with The Lovely Bones, An Education and A Single Man three titles boosted last year.
But filming is also a boost to the local economy, especially outside London. The Welsh government’s Wales Screen Commission, which enabled filming of movies such as “Robin Hood” and the Dylan Thomas biopic “The End of Love”, attributed a boost of £11m to the local economy in 2010 to filming.
Sarah Rees, of Swansea’s Cover to Cover, noted a knock-on impact of extra visitors to the region because of publicity surrounding book adaptations. She cited an oblique boost to “Edge of Love” actor Matthew Rhys’ Patagonia title from Gomer Press and pointed out a buzz around the adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine, which was filmed in Swansea and premieres at this year’s Sundance Festival.
The Yorkshire Tourist Board describes filming as a “big part of our tourism push”, with Bradford the world’s first Unesco city of film, and parts of “The King’s Speech” filmed in the area, as well as the forthcoming “Wuthering Heights” and the BBC’s version of John Braine’s Room at the Top. The board runs film set tours around the county.
The filming of Ian McEwan’s Atonement brought hundreds of people to the area, according to Les Conway, manager of Guisborough Books, which is four miles from where Redcar beach was turned into “Dunkirk” for the film.
“We sold a lot more copies of Atonement, and to local people too. [McEwan’s backlist] also received a boost,” he said. He said a self-published author’s photobook of the filming was the biggest success, selling 50 copies at £50 each.
Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s Warhorse, some of which was shot on Dartmoor, has already sparked “a huge amount of interest,” said Pat Abrehart, manager of the Harbour Bookshop in Kingsbridge, Devon.
Further films in the works include Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Canongate), Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (Picador), true story The Monster of Florence (Virgin Books), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Penguin).