Polly Teale attached to adapt Brontë biopic to the screen

Deadline Hollywood talks about the new Brontë films: the one currently being filmed (Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre) and the upcoming Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, and gives news about the current status of the Brontë biopic:

And a 3rd Bronte project is a biopic of the Bronte sisters themselves, Jane Eyre-author Charlotte and her sister Emily, who wrote Wuthering Heights. Charles Sturridge, director of TV’s Brideshead Revisited, was going to direct Angela Workman’s script. Now producers Alistair MacLean-Clark and Nick Wild have hired Polly Teale, joint artistic director of the Shared Experience theatre group, to write a new version. They’re sending it out at the end of April with the belief that the story of the family itself is more interesting than their books. (Tim Adler)

EDIT: Angela Workman clarifies the Brontë biopic projects status in a comment on the imdb thread of her Brontë adaptation:

Polly Teale is not associated with our film. The previous producers are no longer associated with this film, contrary to a news bite erroneously reported by Tim Adler on Deadline Hollywood. That information was misconstrued.

The new producers of Angela Workman's project seems to be See Saw Films. The project is listed in her Sayle Screen CV as 'in development with Iain Canning."

Polly Teale, as you will remember, wrote a theatrical adaptation of the lives of the Brontës: Brontë.

A curious initiative by Carte Noire coffee who has joined up with Classic FM and offers readings of classic novels by celebrity readers. This week Rupert Everett reads from Wuthering Heights:

Some of the UK's most desirable actors will be on the airwaves as part of a new radio campaign 'for a more seductive coffee break' by Carte Noire in partnership with Classic FM, the UK's largest national commercial radio station.
Starting on Sunday 21 March, the partnership will run for ten weeks and represents Carte Noire's first ever radio sponsorship.
Classic FM will broadcast daily advertorial features containing a short extract from novels like Wuthering Heights and Far From the Madding Crowd.
These will be read by a new celebrity every week, including Richard E Grant and Rupert Everett, and broadcast at key coffee drinking times. Carte Noire will also sponsor Classic FM's Magazine Show on Sunday evenings, when each programme will feature an interview with that week's celebrity reader.
The campaign is part of a substantial marketing investment for the brand in 2010, which includes sampling, literature festival sponsorship, competitions linked with Penguin books and brand new content on www.cartenoire.co.uk.

The Times Higher Education talks about inclusive curriculums, the new big words in political correctness:

Lancaster University’s guide, drawn up as part of a Higher Education Academy project, “Designing an Inclusive Curriculum in Higher Education”, will be published later this year and will include advice on how to use course content to “address gendered, social class, race or disability perspectives”. (...)
Another example quoted is the study of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as part of an English literature degree. An inclusive curriculum could teach novelist Jean Rhys’ critique of race as seen in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), her response to the novel, or a “disability studies critique of Mr and Mrs Rochester’s experience of disability”, the guide says. (Melanie Newman)

The wife of a political prisoner in Iran finds some consolation in Jane Eyre according to Los Angeles Times:

She lulls herself to sleep reading novels. A translation of "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte was the last one. "Novels are ways to escape from bitter loneliness and reality of daily life," she says. "It is good to forget everything for a while and relax. After all, we have long way to go."(Ramim Mosthaghim)

Vanity Fair publishes a nice article on the director Preston Sturges and about the so-called possessory credits (you know the one that says A film by...) mentions Charlotte Brontë:

But if anyone deserves this credit, it would have to be someone who has created a world in which the speech and actions and people, in which the tone and tenor of events, are as obviously the creation of one artist as a passage of Twain’s is obviously a passage of Twain’s and not of Charlotte Brontë’s, as a Renoir is never confused with a Picasso. (Douglas McGrath)

The Western Mail proposes a question we haven't thought about

Time was, too, when the heroines of romantic novels never thought about them. Who knows what size cup belonged to Jane Eyre? We read about their fine eyes, not their vital statistics. Girls who got their man in the final chapter weren’t the bobby-dazzlers. They won him by being kind and honest and reliable. Yeah, right. Is anybody in the market for that today?

More Laura Marling's episodes of Brontëiteness. This time in The Independent (Ireland):

Its follow-up opens with the brilliant Devil’s Spoke , a song that sounds like it was recorded late at night on a misty Yorkshire moor; no surprise, considering that she cites classics such Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as a big influence. It’s a by-product of being a “soppy old git”, she says. (Lauren Murphy)

EDIT: And another one in De Standaard (Belgium).

Another Brontëite (via Gordon & Caird's musical) is the actress Becky Gulsvig interviewed in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch:

What other shows do you love? (...) I loved “Jane Eyre” — I saw that five or six times when I first moved to New York. (Gabe Hartwig)

Jason Rekulak, Quirk Book's boss and the mind behind the current mash-up fever doesn't think Jane Eyre can have the same treatment. From the Sidney Morning Herald:

''And a lot of these classics have supernatural or gothic elements anyway, so we'd have to do something else to them. Jane Eyre is a pretty dark book. There's a mad woman in the attic, there's a fire and all this drama and mystery and secrets. Do you really need vampires too?''
He concedes that you might be able to do something else to Jane Eyre or Austen's Northanger Abbey but you would have to deviate from his formula of Classic X meets Monster Y. (Catherine Keenan)

As you know Sherri Browning Erwin's Jane Slayre is going to be published in the upcoming weeks, so we will see. Precisely, the author explains the origins of the project on The Goddess Blog:

I was joking around at The Whine Sisters blog about the Twilight craze and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and said, “Oh please? What next? Jane Slayre? With a vampire-killing Jane Eyre?” Har har. Fellow Whine Sister Kathleen Givens called me immediately. She told me to delete that blog entry, take it down fast, and just write it. Write the book! But, I was just kidding around, I explained. She told me I would be crazy to leave that out there for someone else to write. And when Julia London joined in, I realized that they were right and I should give it a shot.
And now here we are, with a new version of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s beloved classic, called Jane Slayre (The Literary Classic with a Blood-Sucking Twist), in which Jane, our plucky demon-slaying heroine, starts as a courageous orphan who spurns the detestable vampyre kin who raised her, and sets out on the advice of her ghostly uncle to hone her skills as the fearless slayer she’s meant to be. There are vampires, zombies, yes, even a few werewolves. And Mr. Rochester? “Reader, I buried him.” But you’ll have to read it to find out more on that.

The art reviewer of the New York Times thinks of Brontë characters looking at this painting by Thomas Gainsborough:

A more sensational back story belongs to a full-length, life-size portrait of two young ladies, Elizabeth and Mary Linley, which was painted with brushy élan by Thomas Gainsborough. (Made in 1771-72, it was probably partly repainted in 1785.) Posed against an outdoor, thickety background, the handsome, long-faced sisters in floor-length gowns could be protagonists in a Brontë novel. (Ken Johnson)

A.V. Club interviews Ciarán Hinds who mentions his role as Rochester in Jane Eyre 2007, Associated Content publishes an article titled Making a case for Jane Eyre and Friends. The author Amy Greene unveils her debt to the Brontës in the Middlesboro Daily News, Andra Sidan Klädskåpet reviews in Swedish the recent performances of Jane Eyre in Stockholm, Opening Lines reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre, Reflections of a Proud Alcoholic posts about Branwell Brontë, Paulus Torchus is reading Jane Eyre and Il Funambulo (in Italian) posts about it, The Squeee continues exploring little known adaptations of Jane Eyre. Now, Jane Eyre 1950 a radio adaptation with Vincent Price and Donna Reed. La Terrasse posts an interesting review of Agnes Grey.

And finally, the best April Fool's Day joke on the net. Discover on Tor.com how Lady Gaga is leaving the music for the mash-up literature as she is preparing her very own Wuthering Frights:

Lady Gaga announced today at a Famecon press conference that she is moving beyond the dance floor and into the literary world’s hottest pop trend, monster lit. Wuthering Frights is Lady Gaga’s mash-up of Emily Brontë’s bad romance on the moors and will be out from Tor July 30, just in time for Brontë’s birthday.
“Listen,” the Grammy-winning diva said about Frights, “It’s a complete re-modernization. Instead of moors we have dance floors, and believe me when I tell you the shadows and ghosts in the LES club scene are just as heavy as they were in nineteenth century England.” (Read more)

The article is signed by Sillas Bell from Haworth, Florida.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Books, Humour, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Sequels, Theatre, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights