The Republican
Novelist shares experience turning book into film
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
By DAVID BERGENGREN
dbergengren@repub.com
AGAWAM – Northampton author Elinor Lipman has written eight highly acclaimed novels, but having actor-director Helen Hunt cook dinner for her at her Los Angeles home was a novel experience of a different sort.
“She kept referring to it as ‘your movie,'” Lipman said, referring to Hunt turning her novel “Then She Found Me” into a feature film.
The movie, scheduled for release in New York and Los Angeles on April 25, has already won praise at film festivals in Toronto and elsewhere, capturing the Audience Award for Features at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January.
Lipman – who will talk about it all on March 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the Agawam Public Library – has been enjoying the ride.
“You can write a lot of books, you can get nice reviews, a lot of nice things said, but boy, there’s nothing like a movie to pique people’s attention,” she said.
Nobody can accuse Lipman, who grew up in Lowell, of being an overnight sensation in the film business.
“Then She Found Me” was her first novel, published in 1990. It was optioned in manuscript the year before that by actor Sigorney Weaver’s production company, Goat Cay, which bought the film rights in 1993 for “six figures,” Lipman said.
Several years later, Hunt read the book and was interested in playing April, the novel’s first-person narrator. In the late 1990s, fresh off her Best Actress Oscar for “As Good As It Gets,” she bought the film rights.
Over the next 10 years, she co-wrote the screenplay and lined up financing and a cast that includes Bette Midler, Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick and novelist Salmon Rushdie.
In the novel, April, who grew up adopted, is a high school Latin teacher in Boston whose marriage is breaking up and whose birth mother, a television talk show hostess, unexpectedly shows up.
In the movie, April is a kindergarten teacher in New York City whose marriage is breaking up and who is getting involved with the single father of one of her students and whose birth mother suddenly shows up.
Hunt, who also directed the film, plays April. Broderick is her estranged husband, Firth her new love interest and Midler plays her birth mother.
“I loved it,” said novelist Mameve Medwed, of Cambridge, of the film, which she saw with her friend Lipman at a special screening in New York City in October.
“It’s so warm and heartening and charming,” said Medwed, whose latest novel, “Of Men and Their Mothers,” comes out April 22. “The acting is great. It’s fabulous.”
Praising the realism of Hunt’s portrayal of April, Medwed said of Midler’s performance as the birth mother, “You just fall out of your seat laughing.”
The March 14 event, free and open to the public, is part of the Applause Series sponsored by the Agawam Cultural Council.
