Film and screenwriting

See also: Neil Gaiman bibliography#Film and television

Gaiman wrote the 1996 BBC dark fantasy television series Neverwhere. He cowrote the screenplay for the movie MirrorMask with his old friend Dave McKean for McKean to direct. In addition, he wrote the localized English language script to the anime movie Princess Mononoke, based on a translation of the Japanese script.

He cowrote the script for Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf with Roger Avary, a collaboration that has proved productive for both writers.^[36] Gaiman has expressed interest in collaborating on a film adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh.^[37]

He was the only person other than J. Michael Straczynski to write a Babylon 5 script in the last three seasons, contributing the season five episode "Day of the Dead".

Gaiman has also written at least three drafts of a screenplay adaptation of Nicholson Baker's novel The Fermata for director Robert Zemeckis,^[38][39] although the project was stalled while Zemeckis made The Polar Express and the Gaiman-Roger Avary written Beowulf film.

Neil Gaiman was featured in the History Channel documentary Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked.

Several of Gaiman's original works have been optioned or greenlighted for film adaptation, most notably Stardust, which premiered in August 2007 and stars Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Claire Danes, directed by Matthew Vaughn. A stop-motion version of Coraline was released on 6 February 2009, with Henry Selick directing and Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher in the leading voice-actor roles.^[40]

In 2007, Gaiman announced that after ten years in development, the feature film of Death: The High Cost of Living would finally begin production with a screenplay by Gaiman that he would direct for Warner Independent. Don Murphy and Susan Montford are the producers, and Guillermo del Toro is the film's executive producer.^[41][42]

Seeing Ear Theatre performed two of Gaiman's audio theatre plays, "Snow, Glass, Apples", Gaiman's retelling of Snow White and "Murder Mysteries", a story of heaven before the Fall in which the first crime is committed. Both audio plays were published in the collection Smoke and Mirrors in 1998.^{[citation needed]}

Gaiman's 2009 Newbery Medal winning book The Graveyard Book will be made into a movie, with Neil Jordan being announced as the director during Gaiman's appearance on The Today Show, 27 January 2009.^{[citation needed]}

Gaiman wrote an episode of the long-running science fiction series Doctor Who, broadcast in 2011 during Matt Smith's second series as the Doctor.^[43][44] Shooting began in August 2010 for this story, whose original title was "The House of Nothing"^[45] but has been retitled as "The Doctor's Wife.^[46] In 2011, it was announced that Gaiman would be writing the script to a new film version of Journey to the West.^[47][48]

Blog and Twitter

In February 2001, when Gaiman had completed writing American Gods, his publishers set up a promotional web site featuring a weblog in which Gaiman described the day-to-day process of revising, publishing, and promoting the novel. After the novel was published, the web site evolved into a more general Official Neil Gaiman Website.^[49]

Gaiman generally posts to the blog describing the day-to-day process of being Neil Gaiman and writing, revising, publishing, or promoting whatever the current project is. He also posts reader emails and answers questions, which gives him unusually direct and immediate interaction with fans. One of his answers on why he writes the blog is "because writing is, like death, a lonely business."^[50]

The original American Gods blog was extracted for publication in the NESFA Press collection of Gaiman miscellany, Adventures in the Dream Trade.^[51]

To celebrate the 7th anniversary of the blog, the novel American Gods was provided free of charge online for a month.^[52]

Gaiman is an active user of the social networking site Twitter with over 1.6 million followers as of January 2012, using the username @neilhimself.^[53] Gaiman also runs a Tumblr account on which he primarily answers fan questions.^[54]

Personal life

Home and family

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer (Vienna 2011)

Gaiman lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.^[55][56][57] and has lived there since 1992. Gaiman moved there to be close to the family of his then-wife, Mary McGrath, with whom he has three children: Michael, Holly, and Madeleine.^[2][58]

Gaiman is married to songwriter and performer Amanda Palmer. The couple publicly announced that they were dating in June 2009,^[59][60] announced their engagement on Twitter on 1 January 2010,^[61] and confirmed their engagement on their respective websites two weeks later.^[62][63] On 16 November 2010, Amanda Palmer hosted a non-legally binding flash mob wedding for Gaiman's birthday in New Orleans.^[64] They were legally married on 2 January 2011.^[65] The wedding took place in the parlour of writers Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon.^[66]

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 609