Summertime and the living is easy. The kids on my block are out of school, loud as fuck and have claimed bottle-breaking as their newfound pastime. I have a feeling that people in my building and in the building across the street are just waiting for someone to yell “Shut the fuck up!” to these kids after 2am in order to feel encouraged themselves, freed up to follow suit. Nobody wants to call the cops, as evidenced by the fact that you’ll occasionally hear people mutter, “I don’t wanna call the cops” to someone on the phone or walking through the building during the daytime. At night some folks walk by, exasperatedly trying to tell the kids that they’re gonna bring the cops if they keep acting like fools. “Y’all are making this block hot,” etcetera.

In 1994, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote his first novel The Virgin Suicides. At some point soon thereafter, Sofia Coppola, daughter of Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola, picked up the novel, read it, fell in love with it and set about writing a screenplay adaptation of it. It became her first film.

Coppola earns mega-brownie points for sticking so closely to the book. This is one of the very few films that not only resembles the book but actually is the book. Yes, she changed some minor details so that the film flowed better--I think authors assume their readers have the virtue of patience if merely from the fact that the reader chose to pick up a book rather than turn the TV on, but sometimes that just isn’t true and thankfully Coppola realizes this--but she stuck pretty damn close to the book. She even manages to capture the feel of the book…so hopeful in the beginning, so dank and depressing in the end. Kudos, Sofia. I can now almost forgive your family for the The Godfather: Part III. Almost.

Producer Adele Romanski checks in about the status of pre-production for David Mitchell's feature debut The Myth of the American Sleepover.

"Pre-production for The Myth of the American Sleepover began with a nap.

We arrived in Michigan after a grueling 49-hour road trip with enough time to squeeze in a power nap before we had to audition an actress who was leaving for Germany the following day.

We had not intended such an abusive drive from Los Angeles to Detroit, but the combination of desert winds and curving mountain roads had delayed us and we were committed to being in Detroit to read the actress once more before she left the country for a month. To make up time we drove nearly nonstop. We rested for only a couple of hours each night, the first night staying at a La Quinta in Rifle, Colorado, the second night at a Holiday Inn Express in Rock Island, Illinois. At not in…"

It’s always an interesting journey when a novel becomes a film. This month, we’ll take a look at the book turned film Party Monster.

"Tom Stoppard says “If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice,” and thus books become films.

"Books are an entirely different art form from both films and screenplays, and yet it is a fairly common practice to make a film out of a pre-existing book. Most people agree that “the book is better than the movie,” on the basis that you can get all sorts of details that a one and a half to two hour film can’t possibly contain. And yet, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Either way, books are adapted into screenplays for films all the time, sometimes being changed to the point of being barely recognizable, and at other times following the book closely."