Tori Spelling: star in a biopic of Charlotte Brontë

Just joking... but Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch Blog publishes the following (very scary) thoughts:

But now I'm thinking, why should Hollywood glamour disqualify an actor from playing a nicotine-and-ink-stained literary icon? (Imagine how much better at the box office Capote and Infamous would have done if Truman Capote had been played by George Clooney or Brad Pitt instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman or Toby Jones.) So why shouldn't Tori [Spelling] star in a biopic of, say, Charlotte Brontë or Joyce Carol Oates or Eudora Welty? After all, she's got literary cred now. (Gary Susman)

Brisbane Times devotes an article to the ongoing performances of Polly Teale's Brontë in Brisbane, Australia:

Women have long faced a dilemma of numbers in the creative industries.
They usually outnumber men in the worlds of film and theatre despite meaty roles for female thespians being few and far between.
However, three Brisbane women are ready to challenge that stereotype.
Actors and friends Hannah Levien, Kathryn Marquet and Rebecca Roberts met while completing their degrees at the University of Southern Queensland and, frustrated with the status quo, decided to band together and create their own theatre company.
The product, Three Sisters Productions, aims to empower young female performers by demonstrating the stage can be theirs for the taking. (...)
Three Sisters describe as "instrumental" the influence of Sue Rider, the award-winning director, writer and actor behind the company's production of Polly Teale's Bronte.
Set in 1845, Bronte delves into the lives of Anne, Charlotte and Emily by exploring the chaotic world of madness, illness and death in which these remarkable literary sisters penned their extraordinary tales.
"It was a huge coup for us to get our hands on Bronte and use it to launch Three Sisters Productions into the Australian independent theatre scene," says Levien.
"Sue has been so supportive and guided us to rise to the challenge of the female characters.
"The Brontes are such iconic and heroic female role models."
Levien says the company are pegging their debut as a literary detective story, where the power of the imagination haunts and inspires its creators and triumphs against all odds.
"Emotions and circumstances I think we can all relate to at times," she adds.
Bronte will play at Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts from September 10 to 27. (Katherine Feeney)

The Village Voice interviews songstress Basia Bulat, a new Brontëite:

The name of a book she's read at least twice:
Oh, gosh. There's a lot of them. One book that I've read at least twice . . . Oh God, I've read so many books a million times. I've read a lot of biographies lately, but the book I've read the most has probably been Jane Eyre.” (Rob Trucks)

Fangoria reviews the recent release of Joseph L. Mankiewicz film debut Dragonwyck (1946) included on the Fox Horror Classics Vol. 2 DVD and insists on the Jane Eyre references, much to our dismay:

DRAGONWYCK is weak tea horror-wise, as it’s actually “only” an atmospheric, JANE EYRE-like 19th-century tale of a simple farm girl (Gene Tierney) attracted to her cousin (Price), the handsome but mysterious and tyrannical master of a Hudson River estate. (Tom Weaver)

Con Houlihan remembers his post-war university years in an article on The Herald (Ireland). We found this very funny anecdote:

I remember especially a spelling mistake in an essay on Wuthering Heights. "Heathcliff and his friends used to spend the nights gambolling in the big hall."

The recent Movie Map issued by the Peak District and Derbyshire is mentioned in The Birmingham Mail.

En Tarde-Garde reviews Douglas A. Martin's Branwell:

Douglas A. Martin’s Branwell is a novel that bleeds the line between novel and historical fact. It’s written in a style that traces the tragic story of Branwell Brontë and composites it through the lives of those involved, from golden child and hope of the family to drunken dissolute, all while the politics of family allegiance drift and Branwell falls further into oblivion. This hallucinatory narrative shifts back and forth, switches tense, shows us one reading only to challenge it later, and ultimately unfolds a tale embroidered of speculation, suspicion, and earnest confession, where one is never certain of the absolute truths. (Read more)

Simply Bookish briefly talks about Jane Eyre.

Categories: Branwell Brontë, Brontëites, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre