Word: gaiman
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Like all good fairy tales, this one starts with Claudia Schiffer. Once upon a time a fireplace fell on Schiffer's foot. She was pregnant at the time. "When a marble fireplace falls on your foot," Neil Gaiman explains, "and you're 7½ months pregnant, you stop going places. You sit around, and you read." Schiffer read Gaiman's novel Stardust and told her husband that it was the best book she'd ever read. Schiffer's husband is the director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake). And thus it was that Gaiman finally made his big Hollywood movie...
...pretty much time. Gaiman has been an icon in the world of comics and fantasy fandom for almost 20 years. He's notorious for having sold more ideas to Hollywood, without any of them actually getting made, than almost any other living person. Now, all at once, the year of Gaiman is finally upon us. Stardust opens Aug. 10, starring Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro. Beowulf, written by Gaiman and directed by Robert Zemeckis, is coming in November. Next year Dakota Fanning will star in Coraline, based on Gaiman's children's book. Is he about...
...Gaiman, 46, certainly looks famous. He's quirkily handsome--he's the hot guy whom the girls never noticed in high school because he was a mathlete--with suspiciously good hair and a black leather jacket. He lives near Minneapolis, but he grew up in Portchester, England. "My biggest problem with Harry Potter is that I went to an English public school and hated it," he says. (By "public school," the English mean what Americans mean by private school.) "I would have rather lived under the stairs." When he was 17, Gaiman wrote his own novel about English schools...
...Gaiman broke out in 1988 with a comic book about a brooding dream god who haunts humanity's ugly collective unconscious. With its melancholy tone and startling literary intelligence, The Sandman was a landmark in the artistic development of comics, and it won Gaiman the passionate loyalty of a vast army of nerds and goths. Stardust, published 10 years later, is the story of a pleasant young man who crosses into a magical world in pursuit of a fallen star, which he has promised to retrieve for the pretty but rather demanding girl he loves. It's a fairy tale...
...fact that Stardust is finally getting made says more about how Hollywood has changed than how Gaiman has. After The Lord of the Rings, Narnia and Harry Potter, not to mention 300, fantasy is a proven commodity. But the big studios may have a more difficult time domesticating Gaiman than they have with his colleagues. Stardust is tough to market--it's a category-breaking mix of comedy, romance, drama and action--and like many truly nerdy genre works, it's full of unhip, unironized emotion. "It's not like a comedy like Shrek that's making...