Bookplanet: they buy the book, but when do they make the movie?

'"In some ways, producers and studios are more exacting than book editors often are. In the book world, you can get by with a lot of fairly slack stuff, especially if you have written best sellers. If you are a brand name, you can write some fairly shoddy stuff, and no editors will raise a voice -- whereas by the time (the book) gets to the screen, you have had these squadrons of people checking every aspect of the plot and characters." Those squadrons have favored books as a key source of feature filmmaking since the beginning of cinema, and they frequently hire New York-based scouts to stay on top of the publishing world--from producer David O. Selznick, who optioned Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" manuscript, to Columbia Pictures, which recently purchased rights to "The Da Vinci Code" and other Dan Brown novels for a reported $6 million. Warners' belief in books as source material was justified by the Harry Potter films, the studio's most significant recent franchise. Although J.K. Rowling's Potter books came to the screen relatively quickly, literary works often take years to develop. Michael Douglas devoted much of his early career to getting Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" off the ground after his father failed to do so, and producer Wendy Finerman spent the better part of a decade struggling to mount Winston Groom's "Forrest Gump."' As for "Confederacy of Dunces, it hasn't been made after decades and millions spent on trying. Full article here. Via Maud Newton.