I’ve read enough bad or lackluster anthologies over the years to know it’s not something you can just slap together. It takes real editorial vision and guidance to put together a solid collection of work, whether you’re talking about new material or older reprints.

Which is my roundabout way of saying just how impressed I am with Ivan Brunetti’s two Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories. I had already known Brunetti was a first-rate cartoonist (Schizo, Misery Loves Comedy), but these books, taken together, show him to have a considerable sensitivity and thoughtfulness towards the medium, not just in his choices, but in their arrangement and layout.

While the first volume provided a strong art-comics overview for the uninitiated, the sequel casts a somewhat wider, though no less fascinating net. I was pleased, for example, to discover there were a few artists new to me, while the stories I was familiar came with a slightly new perspective due to their juxtoposition with other works.

I talked to Brunetti recently over the phone about the new collections, the challenges of putting together these anthologies in general, and the chance that we’ll see a new issue of Schizo in 2009 (sadly, probably not likely).

Q: What made you decide to do a second volume?

A: Besides insanity? At the time I put together the first book, my list of stuff I wanted to put in there got so huge I had 800 pages at one point. Actually the first book was supposed to be no more than 300 pages but I convinced Yale to let me do 400. And at some point I was thinking “500 pages would be good.”

Anyway, they couldn’t go more than 400 because it would have made the book go into another price range. After the first book was done I was thinking it would be good if I could put all that other stuff in another volume. I kind of swore I would never do this again cause it’s a lot of work, putting together an anthology, but it was kind of nagging at me and I felt like the first volume needed this companion to complete some of the ideas that started in the first book. It was my idea and Yale pretty much agreed to it before they knew what the sales were going to be on the first one. I think there was an indication it was going to do OK, especially for an academic press book. So my editor pretty much convinced the Yale editorial board to approve the second book and together I think they form a complete unit.

Q: I was going to say that I assumed the first one did reasonably well to justify a second.

A: For an academic press it was good. They were pleased with it. I actually don’t know what the sales really are because there are all these people returning books and stuff. Probably it will be a while. I can assume it did OK because they wouldn’t have approved the second one if the first one had all the indications of tanking.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about the selection process? It sounds like you already had an idea of what you wanted in, but how did that differ from the first volume if at all?

A: I feel like the first volume established the center. In the second I had more leeway to move to the left of center and put some stuff in there that was maybe a little more aggressively experimental and also just exploring different sides of comics. There’s a section on collage. That’s kind of the metaphor for the whole book. It’s one aspect of comics that’s not often explored. They always get compared to film and animation and things like that. I wanted to compare it to something else. You could compare it to collage. You could compare it to sculpture in a way too. It was just another way of looking at them. I tried to pick things that illustrated that.

In the first book there was a tribute to Charles Schulz and I wanted to do this tribute to Harvey Kurtzman as well, so I got to do this tribute in the second one. I also wanted to put in newer artists that haven’t been around as long as some of the old-timers and just mix it up a little more. With the first book I felt some responsibility to mostly stick with things that have been around awhile and we’ve had a chance to chew them over. I think half the contributors of the second one were not in the first one. I also, with the people that I put in both volumes, I tried to explore a different avenue of their work wherever I could.

Q: Could you give me an example of that?

A: One example would be Art Spiegelman. In the first one he’s represented with Maus and an essay on Schulz. In the second one there’s one of his most experimental strips, The Malpractice Suite, which invented art comics in a way. It was a real turning point in the history of art comics and using collage. In the first volume the selections I had by Chris Ware were a little bit different. There wasn’t much of his humor strips. I wanted to put some of those in the second one.

Q: It seems like the trick of any anthology is knowing what to put where, the sequencing. The new book — and the first one — has a real nice flow from one story to the next. Can you tell me about the decision-making process involved in knowing what goes where?

A: It’s really wide open. One interesting thing is when you put a story next to another story it sort of changes both stories. I talk about that in the introduction. The way you put colors next to each other and you realize they’re not really absolute, they’re relative to everything else. I think I explore that a little bit more in the second one. In the first one, there are a lot of visual connections between stories, but it almost felt like I was putting together one long story. It was one continuous narrative.

The second one feels more like putting together a collage where you’re looking for visual rhymes. There’s also thematic and literary rhymes as well from story to story but I was really looking for more subtle visual connections from one piece to the next so that the stories connected that way so it was a little more unexpected what you’d see next. Maybe one panel at the end one story might suggest another panel at the beginning of another story by somebody else. Maybe that’s why it feels a little more unpredictable.

Q: Another trick in an anthology like this is the format, in that you’ve got a lot of comics that came out in a variety of formats — ie large, small, etc. Can you talk about that challenge and how you tried to solve the problem?

A: If something wasn’t going to fit the format, I just figured it wasn’t going to do it any service. In the first book there were these really large pages by Gary Panter and I put them across the spread to show that those stories are more visual than narrative driven even though it’s like an adaptation of a narrative poem.

With this one, there were some strips that had to be reformatted. The Tim Hensley strip was originally done as two squares and it was just too expensive to do a gatefold. Originally I wanted to have two pages that folded in and the fold out to be two squares. But that would have broke the bank and made the book more expensive. I just work with the artist to come up with another solution for presenting that work. There were the two pages from [Brian Chippendale's] Ninja were obviously printed much larger. They lose a little bit of power but I tried to retain that spread some of the themes of the book anyway. You’re trying to stay true to what you’re taking in some way, even though they’re getting modified in size.

And they you have things where its small and you’re ganging them up many pages per page. That’s sort of changing things a little bit too, but I thought if I blew up the pages really big or left a lot of empty space I wasn’t using the pages of the book. I tried to make it really dense as possible. It probably needs a little breathing room. I tried to put a few stories that were more sparse and more space but I think both books tend to err more toward being really dense. I just want people to get their money’s worth.

Q: You talked about working with the artists. How much if any input did any of the artist have as far as selecting material or the format? And were there artists whose work you wanted but said no for whatever reason?

A: I don’t want to name names but there was somebody who didn’t want to be in a comics anthology and there were people who were ambivalent about comics in general. Then there were things that were prohibitively expensive and just impossible to track down the rights on. It’s really hard to get a hold of Marvel Comics. I would have loved to have stuff by Jack Kirby in there. You can’t even find who to contact to get those rights, plus they would have been so expensive. The recent Best American comics —

Q: — wanted to get in Paul Pope —

A: Yeah and DC wouldn’t even want it reprinted. There were those kinds of issues to consider. Also we had to work within a budget for permissions. The sad thing about that is the living cartoonists get the least money. The dead cartoonists do the best because they have estates and lawyers. Although even there, there were a few exceptions where they said “Oh sure, you can use it for free,” but most people wanted money. It was all over the place.

As far as working with specific artists, with everyone I had chosen a particular story that I wanted to put in the book and I think 90-95 percent were fine with it. It was a very small percentage of people that maybe wanted to run something else. Sometimes they’d give you a suggestion. Other times they’d leave it up to you and you’d suggest something else. I had a thing about the context of the book and how things would flow. And sometimes that meant re-ordering things a little bit because you put in a different story it doesn’t flow quite the same way. Things like that.

But for the most part, especially with the second one, I think most people trusted me cause they had seen the first one. Sometimes people had specific concerns like they were going to reprint their own stories or were having a book come out and they didn’t want to dilute the stories by having them appear in too many places. I understood that. We made some compromises. But that’s really a small, maybe 5 percent of the book was affected by that. For the most part, I got what I wanted.

Q: You’ve talked about this before, but I’m going to ask you again anyway: Is there an overriding aesthetic theme? Is there anything that connects all these stories together?

A: Yeah but I don’t think about that before I do it. I first go with what interests me. I make a list of all those [stories] and I had scans and printouts of them and I just started putting them next to each other and seeing what kind of different visual flows you would get. What both books are about is meant to be reflections of the creative process. I talk about that in both introductions. The first one is about the development of an idea, from a mark to a doodle to a panel to a series of panels to a page and then multi-pages.

In the second one it’s more about the unpredictable aspect of putting images together. Ultimately you cannot use a recipe or a formula. It’s a very intuitive process. When you draw one panel it starts to suggest another panel and it will either feel right or not feel right. There’s different directions you can take and there’s different kinds of stories and different kinds of moods and tones to a comic. I was trying to explore that aspect of it.

In a way it seems like comics have been dissected a lot more and it’s almost turning into a mannerism. Like there’s some method to doing it. That kind of bothers me. When I think of all the artists that I like they defy the rules in a weird way. After I’ve been teaching comics for awhile and I’ll say something like “this is the best way to do something” or give a critique and tell people how to improve their work. But then I look at a lot of the artists I like they’ll break some of the same rules. Rules are helpful to get started, but they should never be absolute. Whatever works is what works.

In the second one I didn’t want people to exactly know what I was doing from story to story. It’s more satisfying if you read it a few times and start to see connections between different parts of the book. Not just one story and the next, but different sections. there’s little clumps and repeating motifs. It was almost like you see more of the process in the second book. it feels a little less overwrought. It’s left a bit more raw as far as what that intuitive process is like.

This is a hard sell (laughs). I think people are looking to these books as though I’m establishing a canon. I am not in any power to do that. No one individual can do that. It’s going to take 50 to 100 years for people to judge all these anthologies coming out a little more objectively. I’m putting my two cents in there and I might be totally wrong. Maybe my approach to all of this is totally insane. I don’t know.

For me it was more important that the books felt like making comics. That when you read them you got a sense of how comics are created. I was really just trying to translate the sense of excitement I had when I got into comics. A lot of the stuff I put in there is stuff I’ve held dear to my heart for 20 years or more. It made me want to be a cartoonist. I was just trying to give that same feeling to people reading it. Maybe they don’t necessarily want to become cartoonists but they get an appreciation for it. I wanted that to come across. That was more important to me. That makes the case that comics are interesting and a worthwhile pursuit more than me sitting down and give the theory of everything.

I don’t like pigeonholing stories. Even saying “that’s a humor story and that’s a serious story.” Or “That’s an autobiogrpahical and that’s fictional” which are the very basic divisions people might make. I feel those are much more in flux. You look at a story and it’s really just a matter of your perspective. I think the best stories straddle both. Whatever dichotomy you come up with or divisions or categories, the best stories straddle many of those categories. Again, if you put them next to other stories, it brings out something that is unexpected. It’s like putting two sheets of colored paper next to each other. One of the colors if it’s more dominant might bring out its compliment in the color that’s not dominant. It starts to effect everything around it.

Those were the ideas that were interesting to me as I was putting it together. It was not “I’m the arbiter of taste and here’s the people I’ve chosen.” There was no way. There are too many comics. I had to narrow it down to what I was going to put in a year and a half ago and since then there’s been all kinds of new stuff. What’s nice is you can’t keep up anymore.

These books are not like a complete and final representation of everything that’s interesting in comics. There are many more new things. I hope someone else will take up the task of doing more anthologies that have a strong singular editorial vision, even if it’s a crazy editorial vision. That’s what I was throwing in there. It’s a very singular viewpoint. They’re almost like autobiography. They probably reveal a lot about me, whether I was trying to do that or not.

Q: I think people tend to see canons as set in stone which I think is kind of silly. I tend to look at them as flexible things — a constant, ongoing discussion.

A: Sure. If you think about a seminal painter like Vermeer. It took him 250 years to be appreciated. And it was other artists noticing stuff like that. It wasn’t academics.

Q: Yeah, and painters and artists always fall in and out of favor. Older artists are rediscovered. That kind of thing happens all the time.

A: I think other artists are usually on the vanguard of appreciating the aesthetics more than those that don’t practice them because somebody that is making paintings is going to see things that somebody who isn’t won’t see. Not to say that the other person maybe has more objectivity and distance. Maybe their view is more valuable. It takes both. It takes somebody far removed and somebody really into it. And again, after a certain number of decades we can all step back and look at things a little more objectively.

In the latest New Yorker there was an interesting article about the guy who forged those Vermeer paintings. There was a line in there that stood out for me that it takes 40 years for people to really see forgeries, because usually forgeries reveal a lot about the times in which they’re created. Somebody mapped this out. It takes 40 years for people to be removed enough from these things to actually see them as mannerisms and affectations.

It’s going to take some time and distance for everyone to see this more clearly. Then maybe we’ll have a canon. Then the question is how many people are in it? How many levels do you have? I’m sure it will get whittled down, if there’s still paper. It will be like, five cartoonists that were interesting. The rest of us will just disappear.

Q: It’s hard to say cause there’s so many subjective factors. Beyond just pure aesthetics, it’s whatever the succeeding generation deems as important, which is constantly in flux. There’s issues of “is that person’s work available?” Someone like Fletcher Hanks, who if it weren’t for Paul Karasik and a few other people tracking him down —

A: Raw magazine was the first.

Q: That’s true. You’re right.

A: Was it 25 years ago or so? It started there and look how long it took for it to have a book. Now it’s almost like he’s become part of the pantheon in a weird way.

Q: He’s sort of a folk hero.

A: Thirty years ago I think Jerry Moriarty was the only person collecting that stuff. It was one guy who noticed it — an artist — who noticed it being interesting and collected it. Nobody else cared.

Q: Do you have a specific audience in mind when you’re putting these books together?

A: Probably the main audience is people that are not familiar with this stuff. If someone’s an aficionado they probably have most if not all of the things I put in these books. The books were never meant to showcase commissioned work, new work. We only had a budget to reprint work. Everything [in there] is already in existence. Just right off the bat, that’s what the books are. They’re collections of things that are already out there. There are collectors and people that appreciate the form and have been interested in it for a long time and they have these books already.

For those people, I think they might still be interesting books in the sense that you can give them to somebody as a handy compendium. “Well here’s some interesting comics, even if you don’t agree with all my choices.” I hope at least they’re all interesting. Even if someone wants to debate particular pages in there. I think that’s helpful.

Also I tried to put them in an order and arrangement that would be interesting even to people that are familiar with the stories, because again, there’s an art to putting them together as well. Maybe they’ll get some enjoyment on that level too.

Otherwise I think it really is for people that even if they’re familiar with some of the things, a lot of the stuff in these books is not familiar to them. I just thought, “Let’s imagine a person with an open mind and likes to read and has some visual appreciation.” My hope is that they’d find them interesting and would want to investigate all these artists more, or even if it’s just a few or one. Introduce them to something they wouldn’t have otherwise known about. That’s a success right there. If I had been 19 years old and found books like these it would have been interesting to me. Just thinking about somebody that is just looking into this world of comics and give them something where they have all these different avenues they can explore. Just introducing them to it basically.

You have to stay true to each artist you’re putting in there of course. You want to stay loyal and faithful to what they’re trying to do. At the same time you’re putting a collection together so the stories have to relate to each other and that’s very separate from the way these artists created their stories. It’s just balancing all these things out. It’s an intuitive process.

Q: You do have a few surprises in this volume though, like the Eugene Teal and Elinore Norflus strips, which I’d never seen before.

A: They were both in early issues of Weirdo, so we can thank Robert Crumb’s eagle eye and sensitivity for noticing those things and putting them out there for the first time. Those strips have always stuck with me. I just wanted to showcase them. I was actually not able to find any contact information for Elinore Norflus. If she’s listening out there, there’s a check waiting for you. Robert Crumb had copyright to Weirdo, so he pretty much gave permission and said you’ll take responsibility for it. When he actually wrote back to me he said “You’re the only other person that’s ever shown interest in Elinore Norflus.”

There’s something so raw and unmediated about those pages. I got under my skin. It violates every “rule” of what you’re supposed to do in comics. She’s kind of the real deal. It’s not someone pretending to be naive. I thought it had a real power because of it, whether people liked it or not. When I first saw it I didn’t know what to make of it either, but it stuck with me.

The same with the Eugene Teal comic. There was just something about it. I could never get that image of the frog riding a horse out of my mind. It burned itself forever into my brain. That strip almost works as a traditional comic. It’s paced like an old Sunday comic. But there’s something really off-kilter about it. I’ve met other cartoonists that have that pinned to their studio wall. John Hankiewicz, one of the artists in the book, had that at his drawing table. It’s interesting how many artists really felt attached to that strip. I count myself amongst them and so I thought, “You know, this really should be in there.”

It might have been a harder sell in the first book. I think people were definitely expecting more. Something canon-building. And I have that in the back of my mind, that everyone was going to scrutinize every single page. I felt like I had more freedom with the second one. But they’re all things that I like and stand behind.

Q: Why was it important to include the Harvey Kurtzman tribute? How does he relate to the other artists in the book?

A: I think he really had more to do with the previous generation that worked within the satirical tradition. Not so much on the surface with a lot of the newer cartoonists but to me that tradition is an important part of comics. The cynical, iconoclastic tradition. I wouldn’t put Schulz into that category necessarily. But those are two artists that I hold in high esteem. So I’m just going with my gut instinct on it.

At the same time Kurtzman relates things back to surreal and abstract humor strips that came before him. I put some of those in the book. And then he leads to the underground. He’s kind of this bridge between the absurd humor and iconoclastic humor that was in the Sunday comics before him and the underground artists of the 60s. Mad was really a big part of why the 60s underground happened. Without those we wouldn’t have the 80s alternative comics.

Q: It does seem like you can draw a direct line from Kurtman to Kevin Huizenga if you wanted to.

A: That would take more of a little term paper to write. I really just wanted again to pay tribute to two artists that really affected my approach.

The other thing about Kurtzman is his work looks like it’s really spontaneous and dashed-off at times, but I’ve seen some originals by him and there’s so much work into it to make it look that way. It’s an interesting aspect of comics. In a way it’s very desirable to have that look, but it takes so much control to actually make that happen. It’s almost like zen calligraphy or something like that. You’re trying to make it look one way but the only way to get there is through discipline, even though it looks like the person made it magically happen. His pages really spring to life. But there’s such a process to make that happen.

Also there’s that collage element to his work, putting everything but the kitchen sink in his stuff and mixing the styles, sometimes in the same story. There’s an early Mad where the style keeps changing page to page. He’s playing with these ideas of formally breaking down the medium. I think that’s another aspect at his continued — you’re seeing that with Kevin Huizenga, doing it in a less humorous vein, maybe more serious, but there’s that idea of taking comics apart a little bit and screwing them back together in a weird way so you get interesting combinations and effects. I think there was a lot of that in Mad.

Q: Looking over the contents list, most of the stuff you’ve included are by cartoonists — people who write and draw. There’s no real collaborative works here.

A: There’s two. The most obvious one is Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar.

Yeah in general I tend to prefer that singular vision and even if two people are working together it’s almost like a seamless thing. But that’s another area of aspect of comics that was not explored in those books and maybe someone can do a book of interesting collaborations. That would be an interesting book. It’s not like I’m editing these books to have the final word. I’d love for people to do a book that’s the total opposite of what I was trying to do and see how that turns out. That might be just as interesting or more interesting in its own right.

It’s not like there’s one way to look at comics. There are many ways of looking at comics. These books are meant to open up a dialogue. That’s fine if people want to argue about what’s in there. I hope people go beyond arguing and actually make something too. There’s anthologies of new work coming out even now that are pushing all these boundaries as well so at some point someone’s going to go through all that stuff and collect it and it might take awhile. There’s just so much new stuff now I think it will be awhile before the smoke clears and we can look at what we have.

Q: It is staggering right now to try and cover what’s out.

A: Sure. I went to the comic store and [realized] I don’t have enough money to keep up with what’s coming out right now.

Q: And that’s not counting manga.

A: Yeah, that’s a whole other world. It’s interesting. Now there’s more Japanese comics being reprinted but they’re not the things you would necessarily expect. There’s a lot of unusual manga, against the grain stuff we’re seeing printed in English for the first time. It’s exciting too because it’s this whole other world we’re unfamiliar with except for maybe a few people.

Q: Were there any anthologies that inspired you when you were putting these books together?

A: These anthologies I’m doing would not have existed without Raw and Weirdo. A lot of the stuff in there is from Raw and Weirdo.

Definitely the McSweeney’s that Chris Ware edited. Again, that’s a very intuitive put-together book. Chris Ware would say he was just using Raw as a model for that. He got there first. He got to do the hardcover book that put the stuff out there. It was a little different because for McSweeney’s he let the artist choose what they wanted to run. If they wanted a new strip or something old. In my case it was looking for everything that was already printed somewhere. It’s a different kind of editing process.

Something like Kramer’s Ergot too. It kind of made comics exciting again. I didn’t always completely love everything in there, but it opened my world up to a lot of stuff I hadn’t looked at closely before. Now that a few years have gone by since the fourth issue, it’s interesting to look back on that. It was my first exposure to many of those artists.

Q: Have you seen the new one yet?

A: I haven’t. I have a page in there. It’s the most boring page in the book.

It’s great that they tried to do that format. It’s like a once in a lifetime project.

Q: You do a lot of teaching about comics. Did any of that inform the editing of these books?

A: Sure. When I started teaching I had to make up some hand-outs just to illustrate things about comics. I always found myself xeroxing more and more stuff, going through my collection and finding things I though would appeal to students and also illustrate something about the form or the medium. In the process of doing that I think I was subconsciously organizing an anthology. The first time I taught it was just an adult education course. It was just trying to find things to get people interested in comics even if they weren’t familiar with what I was showing them. I think I’m still trying to do that with the books. I think there is a direct relationship with that.

Q: Is this something you see continuing? Will there be a volume three?

A: I don’t think so, unless they want someone else to keep doing it. In my mind these two books went together and they form a set. A third one, I’d have to rethink it and start over in a way. I’d have to have a whole different set of parameters. Both books were focused on North America, and there’s the rest of the world. If you open it up to the rest of the world, you have a whole different kind of book. I think that would be an interesting book for someone to do. Not have any American comics in it. I’m just not going to be able to do that.

I haven’t had any time to draw myself over the last few years. I think I’ve drawn one page of comics in the last few years now. I feel like I’ve removed myself from this form that I was trying to examine. I don’t like feeling detached from it. I just want to regroup and maybe get back into drawing myself. I dunno. Maybe I’ve completely lost my ability at this point. Maybe it’s like an athlete that hasn’t worked out for three years. All of the sudden your muscles have atrophied. Your arms are ready to slough off. I just want to get back into comics and making comics. We’ll see how that goes. I have my doubts. I might be a “former cartoonist.”

I’m glad I did these anthologies. It will probably be the only things I’ve done that will last beyond my lifetime. I’m pretty sure that that’s going to be the case, but that’s fine. I’m glad I did that. Hopefully it’ll be interesting to people 100 years from now when there’s no oxygen left. I’ve lost the thread of the conversation.

Q: You actually answered my next question, which was when will we see Schizo 5?

A: Well it took seven years to do the fourth issue and it might take seven years to do the fifth one. I don’t know. I might get back into the swing of things. I just started teaching full time two months ago and it’s been completely overwhelming. I’m teaching courses I never taught before like Basic Drawing and Introduction to 2-Dimensional Design. The really fundamental courses. I did not study art. I took three art classes in my entire life. So I don’t know what I’m doing. Week to week I’m improvising and things are working and not working. It’s taken over my life to try to get these courses organized into something I can whip into shape for next semester but it’s taken so much preparation every week. That’s been taking up a lot of energy but I’m hoping at some point I can pull in the reins and then I’ll have some time to get back to drawing. Because I do miss it. The less you do it the more it gets like science-fiction. Imagining yourself drawing seems as realistic as going to Mars. It’s this insurmountable thing. This hurdle you cannot jump over. It’s a much harder art form than a lot of people give credit. It takes a lot of planning and discipline and focus.

A few days ago The Movie Blog (as represented by Ann Ora) had a chance to sit down and chat with Twilight Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg about the film, the challenges that come along with adapting such a popular novel and how she approached it.

The Movie Blog: You were given the daunting task of condensing Twilight, a 600+ page book, into a 110 page screenplay, while at the same time trying to handle the expectations of the huge fan base that Twilight has gathered. Was it intimidating? What principles did you use in deciding what to cut out?

Melissa: In terms of “was it intimidating,” I was not all that aware of the fan base. The minute I became aware of it, I stopped looking because I knew that it would become intimidating. So I purposefully kept myself in the dark because I wanted to be in a place of being able to tell the story and translate the story without the outside influences of the fans. And just to be able to tell the best story possible.

The most important thing [principle] was to stay true to the characters’ emotional arts. There are going to be scenes that are either compilations of a couple of different scenes of the book or missing scenes, but the important thing is if the soul of the book is there and if you go away feeling the same way you feel when you read the book. That’s what my objective was - to keep the soul of the project.

The Movie Blog: Besides introducing the villains early on in the screenplay version, there were virtually no differences I was able to catch. and I guess that’s a good thing. Were there any significant changes you included in the script?

Melissa: That was my absolute objective, if you felt the same. There were actually a lot of adjustments, but again, it’s really about “Did you have the same experience? Am I taking you along for the same emotional ride that Stephenie did?” That was the objective for both Catherine [Hardwicke] and I - to make sure that nothing fell out.

In the middle of the book, there are several chapters that have got question and answer dialogue, which is all very compelling when you are reading, but to see two people sitting and talking for long periods of time is not very entertaining. One of the biggest challenges of condensing the book is that you want to be able to hear that mythology. It was a matter of picking and choosing the specific parts of dialogue and dispersing it through several scenes. As well as having other scenes where that information can come across that isn’t just two people sitting at a table talking.

The other thing that was different was, for example, with Bella’s discovery that Edward is a vampire. In the book, the way he is revealed as a vampire is through a conversation that rolls out over the course of several chapters. It’s the conversation Bella has with him [Edward] in the car that she approaches the idea. What we did was to condense all that and have that a real turning point in the movie, making it more of a confrontation. It was really about hyping up certain moments in the book, condensing long passages, while keeping it true to the book because you are still getting that emotional moment.

The Movie Blog: I did notice a lot of instances in the film where much of the conversation that occurs between characters, such as those between Bella and Edward, were illustrated not by dialogue, but through musical montages. Is that how you wanted to portray a lot of the lengthy dialogue from the book?

Melissa: As a writer, you have to recreate scenes to leave space for the actors to act and the director to direct. You always try to let something be portrayed visually as opposed to verbally.

The Movie Blog: What was the hardest scene(s) for you to cut?

Melissa: There were a few things, but ultimately when I saw the film it was hard to remember what those were. I have to say that I didn’t miss any of those scenes on screen.

The Movie Blog: Did you consult with Stephenie Meyer when writing the screenplay?

Melissa: Yes. Initially, I was very protective of my creative process. I was intimidated by her celebrity and sort of afraid, on some level that I would be overshadowed and my own creative voice would get drowned out. When I met her I realized that was completely unfounded. She is a very down to Earth, grounded and kind person, who was open to collaboration. She ended up being really valuable in terms of giving me insight into the development of the characters.

I approached Twilight the point of view of a reader and I really wanted to adapt the book without any outside influences and to have it be, in some ways, pure. So, when I say “Yeah, I collaborated with Stephenie,” I’m talking everyday, every line. It was like having a writing partner.

The Movie Blog: Was there a character in the book that you could not get a grasp of?

Melissa: Bella’s character was quite interesting. Initially, when I read the book, my first thought was that we should just shoot the entire film in Forks and forget about the parts of the book that are set in Arizona. It was Catherine who expressed how important it was to keep the scenes that were set to shoot in Arizona because it was such a significant part of the book. We then met with Stephenie and she spoke to us about being a normal girl in Phoenix, a land where there was a great deal of money and artificial beauty. She discussed how even an attractive girl would feel out of place in such an environment. Stephenie also touched on Bella’s relationship with her mother, Rene. She illustrated the idea that Rene is the only person that Bella would risk her life for because Rene can’t even take care of herself. Therefore, going back to Arizona to save her and risk her life for her made much more sense to me after Stephenie emphasized that point.

The Movie Blog: The Movie Blog is developing a post on the top 100 film adaptations of a novel. What would be your favorite film adaptation of a novel?

Melissa: I thought The World According to Garth was really well done. I’m also a big John Irving fan, so I would add Cider House Rules. The most recent one I saw was Brokeback Mountain, which is probably one of the best adaptations I’ve ever seen. If you’ve ever read the short story, it’s just so beautiful and spare. They had the opposite challenge that I did, turning 30 pages into a screenplay. It was a true lesson in how to adapt a book into a screenplay.

The Movie Blog: What’s next for you? Will you be involved with the next film, New Moon?

Melissa: We’re talking about it, but nothing has been decided in regard to me being involved in the Twilight saga. I can’t really say much more than that.

A prominent Iranian blogger, nicknamed the Blogfather for spawning Iran's spectacular blogging revolution, has been arrested in Tehran and accused of spying for Israel.

Hossein Derakhshan, who was last based in London after spending several years in Canada, returned to live in his homeland a few weeks ago.

Like Gizmodo? Go and nominate us for the 2008 weblog awards. Our suggestion is to stick us in any category you think we belong, such as Best Technology Blog, Best Blog, Best Online Community (if you like the folks you hang out with), Best Major Blog and whatever else you come up with. We talk about Law, Culture and LGBT topics, right? Right? Hurry, because the deadline is Friday, and we don't want lateness to get in the way like that time we tried to get nominated prom queen. [Weblog Awards]

AP - It was bad enough when Dan Lyons stopped sharing his musings about the technology scene in a hilarious satire of what Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs would be like as a blogger.

It was reported this morning that Iranian-Canadian blogger and activist Hossein Derakshan, known as the "Godfather of the Iranian blogosphere", was arrested in Tehran and charged with spying for Israel. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

Derakhshan, whom I was fortunate to meet this past June, is an exceptional blogger and controversial figure for his support of the Iranian regime. In 2006, he visited Israel to meet with bloggers, in the hopes of painting a different picture of Israelis to his Iranian followers and breaking taboos. Unfortunately, a visit to Israel would rule out any future visits to Iran, as the two countries are bitter enemies with no diplomatic ties.

And yet, Derakhshan, who goes by "Hoder" (a portmanteau of his first and last names), returned to Iran last month for an extended stay and recently shared on his Facebook page that he was looking to reunite with old friends. Although dates have not yet been confirmed, he was arrested sometime within the past two weeks.

Online activists are abuzz with the news: Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices Advocacy was the first to break the story in English, spreading the news to major media outlets. Nart Villeneuve, best known for his work with the OpenNet Initiative and the Information Warfare Monitor, blogged about the news this morning, urging activists to support calls for Derakhshan's release, regardless of disagreement with his beliefs.

Nasser Weddady, Civil Rights Outreach Director of the American Islamic Congress states, "Blogging is the ultimate frontline of the freedom of expression, Hoder was Iran's blogging pioneer, we will work tirelessly to secure his release." Weddady was a driving force in the letter-writing campaign to release Iranian artists and women's rights advocate Esha Momeni, and intends to provide similar support for Derakhshan. A Facebook group backed by Reporters Without Borders and calling for the release of Derakhsan has been created as well.

Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy.com.

Tim Ferriss’ relationships with bloggers helped him reach the New York Times bestseller list with his book, The Four Hour Work Week. I recently called Tim to ask him how to market to bloggers. Here’s what he taught me:

Start before you need something

“I reached out to certain bloggers as far as a year in advance of the book being published,” Tim told me. By building his connections ahead of time, he never had to start a relationship with a blogger by asking for a favor.

Meet bloggers in person

Tim started building his relationships face to face. “The least crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person,” Tim said. “Email is the most difficult, the most crowded… I’m a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don’t even see because my assistant declines them.”

Don’t be a promoter

Nobody wants to get to know a guy who does nothing but promote himself. “Your job is to convince them of the messenger, not the message,” he told me. “Don’t try to push your message until you establish yourself as someone they’re willing to listen to.”

Don’t join the crowd

Top bloggers can be mobbed at events. Instead of joining the crowds, Tim got to know the people behind the top bloggers. The first time he met Robert Scoble, Tim said, “You know what man, everyone wants to talk to you. I don’t have a really good question for you, so I’m not going to hassle you.” And he got to know Robert’s wife and coworkers instead.

Be part of something bigger

Instead of pitching his book, Tim talked to bloggers about a trend that his book related to: outsourcing as a way to save time. When he called them, he’d say, “Here’s a concept or phenomenon that I think would be fun to talk about with your readers.” He told me that bloggers would often give him credit for the idea, and when they mentioned the name Tim Ferriss, they “inevitably linked to my page or my Amazon book page.”

Do you know any other tips for promoting to bloggers? Add them to the comments.

Andrew Warner’s last internet company was a big stinking failure and he had to shut it down. To keep from having a company collapse again, he’s interviewing as many Internet successes as he can. You can hear his interviews on Mixergy.

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Today is BlogDay. Your Top 5 Undiscovered Blogs?

Yes, we do indeed have an opportunity to point to our politicians and laugh once again. As will be the ghost of Bastiat.

Ol' Adam gets a mention over here. Slightly odd choice of quote though, what happened to the "propensity to truck and barter"?

It's always immensely satisfying to read a bit of Polly bashing.

An interesting point perhaps showing that Ricardian Equivalence doesn't in fact equate.

Will wonders never cease? A churchman who grasps economic points?

Well, why didn't economists spot what was happening?

And finally, arrogant, abstruse, over-technical, long, unsnappy, demanding, confusing, complicated, excessively lengthy, long-winded, but don't worry, that's Just Willem.

San Francisco-based blogging startup Six Apart has announced they will be giving away free accounts on their TypePad blogging system for professional bloggers and journalists who recently lost their jobs as well as those who fear the axe is coming. Cleverly dubbed the "Journalist Bailout Program," the service includes one free blog, a place in the Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, a as well as other tools and advice on driving traffic to your site, all courtesy of Six Apart.

Sponsor

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program

The program launched over the weekend through via this lighthearted post over on TypePad.com which reminds you that "Tumblr...will not pay your bills." According to the company, they've already seen hundreds of journalists signing up to participate.

As detailed in the TypePad blog post, the bailout program includes the following, a dollar value of at least $150 per year (the price of the TypePad service alone), if not more :

A free TypePad Pro blog account, the same service that powers many big-name media blogs. It includes professional support so Six Apart will answer any questions you have.

The blog is enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are display ads that pay a more than Google text ads, and bloggers get to keep the revenue.

Six Apart will promote the new site on Blogs.com, a directory of the best in blogs. Blogs.com will be a way for all of the bloggers peers in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote and share traffic for their independent sites.

Lots more. Six Apart can also introduce you to their VIP program to help drive traffic to the site, help connect blogs to LinkedIn profiles, make it easy to manage your comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote posts to your Facebook friends

There are no rules on how the blog must be used. Journalists can use the blog showcase their best work, launch something new, or hang onto the site, you know, "just in case."

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

We're in the midst of a great upheaval. The internet is impacting the business models of so many established ventures. Newspapers and magazines aren't the only industries affected by any means. The internet has left nothing untouched, whether music, video, news, sports, communication, marketing, advertsing and more, those wishing to stave off its force of change are simply trying to outswim a tidal wave.

What's better for those being impacted is to be prepared and thinking ahead for the future - what is Plan B? As we mentioned earlier this week, not everyone sees the death of the journalism ahead - media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for example, sees opportunity.

And if you think successful journalism can only come on the platform of old media, you're wrong. Look around. So many journalists are now getting into blogging, but one of our newest favs that proves the potential success of the model is TechFlash, home to John Cook and Todd Bishop, both of whom left their respected papers and struck out on their own to deliver quality tech news in readable format without all the bias, backstabbing, and petty quarrels the tech "blogosphere" seems to get itself involved in from time to time.

Journalists may also want to keep in mind Arianna Huffington's recent, but vague, promise to begin funding investigative journalism through her incredibly successful The Huffington Post site, one of the most recognizable and read blogs out there.

So journalists, get your platforms ready...there's no better time than now and no better price than free.

Note: Six Apart's Movable Type weblogging platform is what powers our blog here at ReadWriteWeb.

Discuss

Austin Chau and I are here on the Yahoo campus for the Yahoo BrowserPlus release party. I'm going to blog the event as it happens here (Disclosure: I work for Google with the Open Web Advocacy and Gears teams).

First, Ernest Delgado, Canvas whiz here at Yahoo, sent me a cool demo showing a prototype he and Michael Johnston made of Yahoo Maps and Flickr integrating with Yahoo BrowserPlus using the native gyroscope on Macs. You just hit the side of the laptop, for example, in order to jump to the next Flickr picture, or tip your laptop to zoom around a Yahoo Map:

Eric Miraglia is opening the release party up with a nice Introduction to YUI:

* Starts with some really nice demos of things you can create in the browser using YUI.
* Underlying technologies driving browsers are very complicated.
* About 7 knowledge areas needed for web development -- each is different than the standard, with bugs and specialized expert knowledge. You get about 672 different permutations of things needed for you to know and test on.
* YUI focused on "A-grade browser support".
* Good to target toolkits like YUI, since it helps you be future-compatible when new browsers appear like iPhone and Google Chrome
* Goal of YUI: Have a sophisticated widget like a rich text editor work cross-browser using just a snippet small snippet of code.
* Also want things to be automatically accessible.
* Progressive enhancement should be easy and possible, showing a cool demo of hierarchical menus still being readable on Lynx, a version of Firefox with no JavaScript, and then a full IE with CSS and JavaScript on.
* YUI is ala carte, file sizes are small, between 15 and 30K for any given component (including gziped)
* Deployed at Yahoo for three years, on every major property, 400 million users/browsers consuming YUI every month. In properties like Flickr and on the front page, well tested.
* YUI in lots of places: iGoogle, Wall Street Journal, Mozilla, LinkedIn, Southwest.com, Obama website, more
* ~1,000,000 external downloads

Now Lloyd Hilaiel is getting up to present on Yahoo BrowserPlus, the focus of today's event:

* The teams motivations: people get browsers -- browsers could be so much more -- plugins aren't working! Takes too long for new innovations to propagate (5-7 years)!
* Non-goals: no fixing web UI, no web outside the web (like AIR or Mozilla Prism), no improving JavaScript (that's the domain of YUI, JQuery, Dojo, etc.)
* YES to new web features with low overhead. Low overhead: low intellectual overhead, low overhead to implement and get it into widespread production
* Plugins have strengths (scriptable, cross-browser), but they have problems... installing them sucks, writing them is hard, sharing doesn't happen, updating is clumsy, securing them is hard
* BrowserPlus enables in-browser desktop applications
* Abstraction layer over web plugins. Implements all the stuff common to web plugs, decreasing cost of development and helping end users with management and installation
* User install core platform just once
* Page requests distinct services it wants to use, if not installed user is prompted to accept services and they are installed on the fly
* Demo of Flickr uploader working in browser using Yahoo BrowserPlus - drag and drop into browser of images, even folders for recursive uploading, 100% leveraging client-side functionality, multiple file selection.
* Demo of a BrowserPlus marble maze game using the Mac's motion sensor that exposes a single function that gives the laptop's x and y position and acceleration. Idea is that you can expose simple functions for custom hardware -- rest of app can just use web technologies.
* Demo where you can drop a file into a page and then work with the files contents, service coming out soon. Took just one day for them to create. Imagine dragging and dropping vCards or iCal files for example for a web-based calendering system.
* Demo showing desktop notifications
* Services installed on demand, no more monolithic plugins -- instead smaller services, installation seemless, no browser restarts
* Authoring of new services currently restricted to Yahoo and partners
* BrowserPlus will be Open Source! Goal is to have Service API and services open source by end of year, everything else by mid next year.
* Need to figure out how to protect end-users while removing Yahoo from the loop of handling serving up the services
* Yahoo roles: consumer of the platform and the project maintainer (bug fixes, feature requested, service adoption)

After a short break the team (Lloyd Hilaiel, Steve Spencer, David Grigsby, and Gordon Durand) did a deep dive on the Yahoo BrowserPlus architecture, security model, user-facing interaction, how web developers interact with it, and how to create your own services. There is some really impressive engineering in here; they've tackled some hard problems. There's lots of great material they went over, too much to summarize here. You can download the presentations from here in Keynote format.

Here's a snippet of using BrowserPlus from some JavaScript:

Desktop notifications:

Drop-in uploading widget:

Check out the full developer docs that went live for more details.

Services are either binary shared libraries (.so or .dll) or Ruby script! The Ruby interpreter itself is a Yahoo BrowserPlus service that other services can use (services can be composed together and can work with each other, similar to how Unix utilities work with piping).

Hey guys. For tonight’s show we’re going to be using the UStream video service while the technical issues with Live Video get worked out. Doug used UStream for his earlier show and it worked great, so we should be free of technical problems tonight.

SEND IN YOUR QUESTIONS FOR TONIGHT’S SHOW TO themoviebloguncut@gmail.com

See you at 8pm EST (5pm PST)

These video clips are from CNBC analyst Paul Kedrosky who is in Malaysia for Global Entrepreneurship Week. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Paul Kedrosky talks with Global Entrepreneurship Week host Dash Dhakshinamoorthy, from Warisan Global, about the

What it does

Presented by Glam Media, the giant media network that covers the women market and which has a consolidated presence in more than 500 sites and weblogs, Glam Apps stand as a new way for webmaster and bloggers to punch up their traffic figures.

These apps include celebrity photos, slideshows and videos alongside polls and chats that can be easily implemented. Moreover, sharing buttons are included together with video commenting in order to foster user interaction and build up online interest.

Adding any of the featured apps is quite easy, too. You simply browse through the available list until you find one that catches your fancy, and then configure it to suit your site or weblog. Once this has been taken care of, you simple embed the provided code on your website or blog.

A nice touch is that anybody can suggest new apps to be developed through the existing Glam Apps Wishlist. This way, you can start making a revenue-generating idea of your own a tangible reality.


In their own words

“Glam Apps help bloggers and site owners add new features and grow their traffic and revenue.”

Why it might be a killer

Bloggers and webmasters alike will appreciate the chance to increase their traffic figures and generate a higher revenue in the process.

Some questions

How difficult is it to configure any of the featured apps?

Link: http://apps.glam.com
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/apps-glam-com-power-up-your-blog-or-your-site

 

Can G1 hackers access the G1's multitouch capabilities? One blogger says yes and provides how-to and log proofs of concept

Read More...

We all have Facebook status updates we'd like to take back or 3am emails we shouldn't have sent, but for Courtney Love, the bar for internet humiliation is considerably higher. Luckily, our girl...

An uncluttered free RSS reader. Claim your blog, follow your favorite blogs, save your favorite posts, and find new blogs to read. URL: Bloglovin.

Fans of How I Met Your Mother are accustomed to big laughs.

In a couple months, they'll soon be treated to big boobs, as well.

Indeed, Kim Kardashian (along with Kendra Wilkinson, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt) will guest star on a January episode of the sitcom.

Might an upcoming cameo turn Kim Kardashian into a sitcom star?

We'll let the busty reality TV star explain her experience shooting the appearance, courtesy of a recent blog entry:

Everyone on the set was extremely kind and so fun to work with! Bob Saget, who is the show's narrator, and cast member Jason Segel were there as well as my own mother, who everyone got to meet. Ha!

I played the role of...(wait for it)... myself!  In the scene I am on the cover of a weekly magazine and I come to life! So, I had to film it all on a green screen!

I can't wait to see the show! I really had a great time and hope this opens up other opportunities for me in the acting world.

A shocking new discovery in the field of health care. Really, why didn't anyone think of this before?

A revealing case of do as I say rather than do as I do.

Not everything is looking rosy over in the Obama camp. Too many lawyers for a start, always a bad sign.

Netsmith has some experience of Russia and this explanation of the situation seems spot on.

More on the perils of bailouts.

And why we shouldn't be bailing out the auto companies.

And finally, Brown explains the economy.

Brooke White posted a video blog while she was in New York City on her MySpace TV channel. The 'American Idol' season seven finalist was there to do "some music stuff" and writing some songs, adding...

Fresh off a Hawaiian vacation and a "business" trip to South Beach (where he happened to run into step-sis Kim Kardashian), Brody Jenner is talking all about it on his new, official blog. Yes, so you can keep track of all things Brody Jenner at all times.

In addition to updating you on his whereabouts, Brody can't help but gush about his new girlfriend, Jayde Nicole, who he calls "beautiful inside and out."

Hey, you really can't blame the guy, cheesy as he's being lately. If you were lucky enough to see Jayde Nicole naked, there would be many a post written.

Here are some shots of Jayde and Brody from his site ...