Peter Webber out of Wuthering Heights

A few days ago we posted an article on the boost Brontë adaptations have received thanks to the Twilight phenomenon. What the article didn't take into account is just how unlucky - yes, let's put it that way - they can be and how they can go on and on and on. All this to say that according to Screen Daily, director Peter Webber has abandoned Ecosse Films Wuthering Heights (the one supposedly starring Gemma Arterton and Ed Westwick).

Peter Webber is no longer attached to direct Ecosse Films’ adaptation of the classic Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. A replacement has yet to be announced.
Speaking to ScreenDaily, Webber’s agent confirmed that the Girl With The Pearl Earring director is no longer involved with the film, which is set to star Gemma Arterton and Ed Westwick as lovers Cathy and Heathcliffe.
The film is being scripted by Olivia Hetreed, who teamed up with Webber on Girl With a Pearl Earring. Ecosse Films’ Robert Bernstein is producing with HanWay Films handling worldwide sales.
Producer Timothy Burrill confirmed that Webber is still attached to direct his project, The Spider’s House, an adaptation of Paul Bowles’ novel set in Morocco, which is currently in development.
Webber signed on to the project in May this year although it was previously reported that John Maybury, who directed Francis Bacon biopic Love Is The Devil, was attached. (Sarah Cooper)

We suppose that when - and if - they find a new director, one - or both - of the actors will leave, and so on and so forth. Oh, haven't we seen it all before!

And as we mentioned Twilight above, we might as well get this out of the way already, as the Culpeper Star Exponent enumerates Stephenie Meyer's influences.

Meyer told Oprah that “Twilight” came to her in a dream one night and that she woke up one day and just started writing.
Pretty amazing, considering that Meyer had never written a thing before, although she grew up on the classics, devouring Bronte, Austen and Shakespeare like Dracula at a maiden’s neck. (Allison Brophy Campion)

Influences are also mentioned in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game review in The Telegraph India:

Great Expectations could have been the central text in this novel about writing novels; it is the symbol of David’s intense love of literature. But there is Jane Eyre too, and Dorian Gray, Bluebeard’s secret rooms and Poe’s walled-up corpses, and perhaps even an old, dead Ophelia under the water, and another — a touch of Woolf’s Orlando? — under ice. It becomes quite a game, spotting who’s next. The narrative talks to too many books as it becomes gradually weighed down with plots atomizing into countless subplots, and a growing number of gruesome corpses littering David’s trail. (Bhaswati Chakravorty)

Let's take a look at the stage as The Berkeley Daily Planet writes shortly about John O'Keefe's The Brontë Cycle:

‘THE BRONTE CYCLE’ CONTINUES
John O’Keefe’s The Bronte Cycle, Part 1 was performed Monday night by an enthusiastic Subterranean Shakespeare cast of nine, directed by Diane Jackson, in a delightful, absorbing staged reading, which creatively worked the room at the Unitarian Fellowship on Cedar at Bonita. The reading was accompanied by Hal Hughes on violin, with the playwright present. A dense yet lithe saga of the inner and outer lives of the three Bronte sisters and their brother Branwell, anointed with humor, Part 2 picks up when the sisters decide to become authors by jointly publishing their poetry. Directed by SubShakes founder Stanley Spenger, part 2 runs this Monday evening at 7 p.m. $8. 276-3817.

And yesterday - December 10th - Playbill reminisced about what happened nine years ago:

2000 Opening night of Jane Eyre, the musical based on the Bronte novel. Critics say it may have opened too late in the cycle of operatic musicals, but producers keep it running, mainly at a loss, for 209 performances through the 2001 Tony Awards. Leading lady Marla Schaffel earns a Tony nomination and a cult following, but no Tony Awards. (Robert Viagas)

The Guardian has an article in praise of film writer James Agee:

It was Agee's style that particularly impressed Auden, for combining profundity with "extraordinary wit and felicity". When Agee On Film was reissued in 2000, as part of Martin Scorsese's Modern Library series on film criticism, David Denby, writing in the introduction, made roughly the same point: no amount of dry theory could produce, for instance, the marvel of Agee's description of Orson Welles playing Rochester in Jane Eyre, "his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly". Such a phrase was "unprecedented and inimitable", Denby thought, "worth more … than 10 academic essays about 'the male gaze'". (Kate Webb)

Indeed it is a remarkable description.

Haaretz has an article on author Yael Lotan who talked about writer Loyle Hairston as follows:

Hairston was a postal worker and an ex-communist, but, Lotan adds, "It was literature above all which drew us together. We plunged into Gogol and Balzac, Dostoevsky and Dickens, Emily Bronte and Emile Zola, and forgot the rest of the world." (Neri Livneh)

The Montreal Gazette takes a look at comics for adults, R. Sikoryak's among them.

Masterpiece Comics, by R. Sikoryak (Drawn & Quarterly, 65 pages, $24.95). On first glance, this may look like a version of the cheap illustrated pulp titles that gave countless young people their entrée into the classics. Look closer, though, and what you’ll find is a subversive mash-up that makes short shrift of any attempted distinction between high and low literature.
Characters from the canon (Shakespeare, Brontë, Homer, Kafka, Camus and more) are placed in takeoffs on popular comic strips (Blondie, Mary Worth, Garfield, Ziggy et al), where they deliver their lines straight.
Visually, Sikoryak mimics the original strips so uncannily that you can almost be lulled into thinking you’re reading them, which only adds to the sparks raised by this enforced cohabitation of two very different iconographies. Laughs are scored at the expense of both sides, but counter-intuitively, Sikoryak sends you back to the originals with a fresh perspective. (Ian McGillis)

On the blogosphere, Stop and Read This explains why 'love is creepy' with the help of Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Comics, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights