JacketFlap connects you to the work of more than 200,000 authors, illustrators, publishers and other creators of books for Children and Young Adults. The site is updated daily with information about every book, author, illustrator, and publisher in the children's / young adult book industry. Members include published authors and illustrators, librarians, agents, editors, publicists, booksellers, publishers and fans. Join now (it's free).
Login or Register for free to create your own customized page of blog posts from your favorite blogs. You can also add blogs by clicking the "Add to MyJacketFlap" links next to the blog name in each post.
Blog Posts by Tag
In the past 7 days
Blog Posts by Date
Click days in this calendar to see posts by day or month
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: jodie foster, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 5 of 5
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: jodie foster in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
Return to Nim’s Island comes to the big screen in Australia five years to the day after Nim’s Island; five and a half years after Nim at Sea was published, ten years after the initial contact from the film producer Paula Mazur, thirteen years after the book Nim’s Island was published, and more years than I care to work out since the first draft was written when I was nine.
So, maybe time for a quick overview:
The childhood story, Spring Island, was inspired by seeing a tiny, uninhabitable island off the coast of Vancouver Island. Being infatuated with Anne of Green Gables at the time, I wrote about a little girl running away from an orphanage; she’s joined by a boy running away from his orphanage, and together they head off to live on an island.
Years later, I was working on a book of letters between a girl on an island and a famous adventure author with a very boring life. After many false starts I remembered that story and channeled the feelings of that nine-year old writer who wanted to be independent and resourceful – and finally, the story changed its form and Nim’s Island came to life.
It was published in Australia in 1999, in the USA and Canada in 2001, and in six other countries in 2001-2. In 2003, after it was listed in Los Angeles Times best books for 2002, the Hollywood producer Paula Mazur picked it up in her local library for her eight year old son. Two weeks later she emailed to ask me for the film rights. She pitched it to several studios, had interest from four, and by the end of the year we had closed a deal with Walden Media.
The feature film of Nim’s Island was released around the world in 2008, starring Abigail Breslin as Nim, Jodie Foster as the author Alex Rover, and Gerard Butler in the dual roles of Nim’s father Jack and Alex Rover’s fictitious hero.
Nim at Sea, the sequel to the book, was published in Australia in 2007, the USA & Canada in 2008, and slightly later in another 16 countries. By then the first book had been published in 24 languages.
Return to Nim’s Island, the sequel to the film and based loosely on Nim at Sea stars Bindi Irwin as Nim, Matthew Lillard as Jack, Toby Wallace as Edmund, and John Waters as the evil poacher. It will debut on the Hallmark Channel in the USA on March 17 with the DVD released in Walmart the following day, and on cinemas across Australia on April 4. I’ll post international distribution news as I hear it.
The Nim Stories, featuring Nim's Island and Nim at Sea in one book, will be released in Australia and New Zealand on April 1.
The very first episode of Cosmos should have hooked anybody:
“We will encounter galaxies and suns and planets, life and consciousness coming into being, evolving and perishing. Worlds of ice and stars of diamond, atoms as massive as suns and universes smaller than atoms … The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it, we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen out toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return.”
Here was a scientist who was also a poet – a slightly cheesy poet maybe, but definitely a great communicator of “awesome” ideas.
Cosmos was a TV series first transmitted in the UK at the start of the 1980s. Sagan’s definition was “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be” so it had quite a wide remit. In the show, the American professor traversed the Cosmos in his “spaceship of the imagination”, a dandelion seed that he would blow on – the next moment he was inside, hair streaming in a non-existent breeze, hands waving over multi-coloured controls while he quoted from the Encyclopedia Gallactica. In this remarkable vessel Sagan traversed the universe, past and present. Readers of Johnny Mackintosh should recognize elements of this description and understand that Emperor Bram Khari bears a striking resemblance to the cosmologist from Cornell.
I always felt meeting Sagan was a highlight of my time at Cambridge University. He came to give a talk on the new theory of nuclear winter, the idea of which had come out of studying volcanoes on Mars. Afterwards I spoke to him and he signed by (battered) copy of Cosmos that I’d taken along.
When Brian Cox first started doing his Wonders of the Solar System TV programme I was determined not to like it because I thought nothing could compete with Cosmos, but I quickly changed my mind when I saw how superbly put together Wonders was – not another dumbed down trite computer-graphics-laden programme but something of real substance, and I could see Sagan’s influence shining through. I first met Cox at the Royal Society and we talked about our shared love of Cosmos. Later, in the second series of Wonders, I found it funny to see that the Manchester and CERN professor had carried his battered copy of Cosmos on location and referred to the photograph of the Anasazi rock painting, possibly depicting the supernova of 1054, that he’d first seen on this wonderful TV series from the 1980s.
Sagan didn’t only write and present nonfiction – though we should remember his fact was often far more extraordinary than most made-up traveller’s tales. If you ever saw the Jodie Foster movie
On my way home from Vancouver I detoured to Brisbane for the launch of the MS Readathon in Queensland. I met a lovely bunch of kids, but more importantly, an inspiring bunch of kids - the top fund raisers for last year. Some had personal connections with Multiple Sclerosis; more had learned about it through their involvement with the Readathon. But they'd all fundraised and read with extraordinary dedication.
Congratulations to all of them - and good luck to everyone reading for the Readathon this year. Here's a link to the Community Service Announcement I recorded with Jodie Foster at Sea World the day of the Australian premier.
“Z-bot to Hana. This is a Gamepowa Video Alert. Transmitting.”
“Errrr.. Report, Z-bot?”
“Data located by secondary criteria directive from Ranko Yorozu, ninth grade student. Keywords ‘tough girls’ returned two versions of Nim’s Island movie trailers. Standing by with secondary transmission.”
“Yeah uhhh.. heh heh heh… I told Z-bot to find some games for tough girls.”
“Yeah Ranko used my communicator to talk to Z-bot and I said I like adventure movies too!”
“Looks like a cool movie. Let’s go with it.”
“Yay!”
“Hana computers set to continuous-scan. Transmit when ready, Z-bot.”
from the NY Public Library’s Spencer Collection and the children's book PAUL
From School Library Journal, 1994:
Paul has written a song, but his parents are too busy to listen. So, he decides to search out his "magic grandmother" and sing it for her. Wearing his magic hat, he meets a flying pig, a blue-eyed caterpillar, a policeperson, the North wind, a singing cat, and four wolves, all of whom help the boy to find the woman and to bring this stilted, contrived story to its merciful end.
Return to Nim’s Island comes to the big screen in Australia five years to the day after Nim’s Island; five and a half years after Nim at Sea was published, ten years after the initial contact from the film producer Paula Mazur, thirteen years after the book Nim’s Island was published, and more years than I care to work out since the first draft was written when I was nine. 
The childhood story, Spring Island, was inspired by seeing a tiny, uninhabitable island off the coast of Vancouver Island. Being infatuated with Anne of Green Gables at the time, I wrote about a little girl running away from an orphanage; she’s joined by a boy running away from his orphanage, and together they head off to live on an island. 
Nim at Sea, the sequel to the book, was published in Australia in 2007, the USA & Canada in 2008, and slightly later in another 16 countries. By then the first book had been published in 24 languages. 
Return to Nim’s Island, the sequel to the film and based loosely on Nim at Sea stars Bindi Irwin as Nim, Matthew Lillard as Jack, Toby Wallace as Edmund, and John Waters as the evil poacher. It will debut on the Hallmark Channel in the USA on March 17 with the DVD released in Walmart the following day, and on cinemas across Australia on April 4. I’ll post international distribution news as I hear it..jpeg?picon=3323)
