| The End also a beginning Conclusion of Unfortunate Events doesn't mean end of Snicket or Handler Oct. 13, 2006. 07:07 AM
All across Greater Toronto today, once school lets out, voracious readers aged 10 and up — "and up" here means youngsters well into their 30s — will head straight to their local bookstore. While this may sound like a grand thing in our digital age, these young consumers will be set on purchasing a particularly dreadful book, one they will take home and briefly shelve beside 12 other similarly sad and miserable books, before they pull it back down and disappear into its pages until called for supper. The little book that goes on sale today is titled The End (HarperCollins, $16.99). It is also known among awaiting fans as Book the Thirteenth, as in the 13th and final instalment in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events — which would easily be the most successful Kid Lit franchise of all time, if it weren't for that Harry kid on his flying broom at Hogwart's. This has made Lemony Snicket a household name, while leaving its actual creator, the San Francisco author Daniel Handler, feeling "bittersweet" at the series' completion — but sounding nothing like that during a phone chat this week from New York, where he was preparing for today's launch with musical collaborator Stephin Merritt and series illustrator Brett Helquist. According to its fortunate publisher, the series now has 50 million copies in print. A paperback release of the full series, redesigned to mimic those penny novels of yore, is set for May. There are two other books, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Biography and this fall's confection, The Beatrice Letters. Both provide extra clues to the many tantalizing secrets, allusions, sundry hints and broad winks, literary and otherwise, that have made A Series of Unfortunate Events a busy blogosphere guessing game. There's a 13-song musical CD this week, created by the prolific and eclectic Merritt (of Magnetic Fields fame) titled The Tragic Treasury: Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events. Plus there's a certain film starring Jim Carrey that also grossed more than $100 million. All this in little more than seven years, since The Bad Beginning in 1999 brought the three Baudelaire orphans and the evil Count Olaf into a black-humoured world akin to that of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl, two of Handler's own favourites. Handler is now filthy rich at 36 but at best a mid-list author for his own three adult novels. A fourth is in the works, to be published as early as next year. It's about pirates, or at least a romantic longing to live the pirate life. "It is my hope that it will be long enough away so that everyone has forgotten all about A Series of Unfortunate Events, and managed to recuperate and get some of their happiness back before another book drops into their laps," he says. Alas, his only Canadian event is in Vancouver, but not because he has anything against us. He's rather fond of a country that warmed to the Snicket books much earlier than America. The fact that the series' editor is Torontonian Susan Rich doesn't hurt — and might explain some of the Canadian place names scattered through the books. "Canada is so cold and desolate that I think you just really get it," Handler applauds. Obviously, trading witticisms with Handler is an intimidating proposition. So we invited 14-year-old Leaside High School student Maggie Laidlaw to assist, having met her last year when she waited first in line for hours before Handler's most recent Toronto appearance. But Maggie betrayed us, expressing contempt at our professed hope that Snicket might have fooled us with a happy ending for the Baudelaires in The End. "I would have to agree with Ms Laidlaw," intoned Handler. "I would think that you are quite foolish ... in addition to forcing young women into the presence of dreadful books." Indeed, The End ends, as Handler puts it, as "ambiguously" as the series began. How do you top some 50 million books in print? In Handler's case, you don't retire with your illustrator wife and 3-year-old son. You keep working. There's that next novel to complete, plus all manner of writing for film, the Internet and other projects such as a music video he's directing in Vancouver. It appears the elusive Lemony Snicket can't slow down either: "The life of a rhetorical analyst is never done." There's The Composer Is Dead, a kind of Peter and the Wolf piece "for narrator and orchestra" that "Snicket" recorded in July with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Next May will bring another Snicket title. Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid is billed as Snicket snippets taken from "personal papers, conversations at dinner parties and anarchist rallies." Trust Maggie to tease out the news that more full-blown Snicket novels might be ahead: "I already find your interest on such topics to be quite unhealthy. But I do admit that Mr. Snicket has expressed interest in some other cases that may have some overlap with the Baudelaires. But I don't think you should read them and so I think you should forget that I ever said that." From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14322118/site/newsweek/ Series: Lemony's Last Laugh Aug. 21-28, 2006 issue - Young readers, already worried about Harry Potter, now face a new threat. Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler, 36) says at least two characters will die in his 13th and final "A Series of Unfortunate Events" book, "The End." The fate of the Baudelaire orphans and their nemesis, Count Olaf, will be revealed when 2.5 million copies go on sale at 12:01 a.m. on the appropriately unlucky day of Friday, Oct. 13. The first dozen "Unfortunate" books have sold more than 50 million copies. Booksellers applaud the timing. Mary McCarthy of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee hates to see the series end, but says "certainly 13 is the way to go." In a Potter-less year, "this will fill sort of a void," says Becky Anderson, owner of Anderson's Bookshops in Illinois. On Oct. 13, her stores will hold trivia contests with "unfortunate prizes" like moldy cheese and socks with holes. And Barnes & Noble will raffle off 797 autographed copies (one at each of its stores). "The books have a Dickensian charm," says Josalyn Moran, B&N's VP of children's books. Readers' lives "are a piece of cake compared to the poor orphans." On Sept. 5, HarperCollins is releasing "The Beatrice Letters," a related book with clues to how the "Un-fortunate" series will end. Paramount/Nickelodeon has the rights to more movies. As for "The End," the book's editor, Susan Rich, promises that it delivers an "unhappily ever after" finish. —Karen Springen From http://salonmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/mp3s/2006/june/miller_handler.mp3 An audio interview. From http://www.thebookseller.com/?pid=2&did=19761 01 June 2006 |
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Forbidding warnings of deeply unhappy content are not the usual stuff of marketing campaigns, but in the case of Lemony Snicket, sales have thrived on the back of a campaign warning readers against so much as opening the books.
UK sales across the 12 Lemony Snicket titles published to date in A Series of Unfortunate Events have reached some five million, says publisher Egmont, with each new title helping to boost backlist sales.
Now the man behind the series, author Daniel Handler, is to make a fleeting visit to the UK to help promote the very last in the series, Book The 13th, called The End, which is published in October.
The contents of The End remain as deep a secret as ever pre-publication, but we can, no doubt, expect more of the doom-laden plots that have plagued the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans ever since their parents died in a fire in book one, The Bad Beginning.
Since that tragedy, the unhappy twists of fate that have dogged the orphans have been narrated by a shadowy figure called Lemony Snicket, which has also been the persona adopted by author Daniel Handler as his "public face".
Will the Baudelaires' ending be a happy one, or should we expect the worst from The End? Handler is giving little away, either now or, apparently, in the book. He says: "The end of the story is ambiguous. I'm not sure if you could call it a happy ending or not--'happy' is a comparative term.
"I can't tell you too much about what happens in the book, but there are some strange occurrences. Seaweed is used as a wig--that may be the first time in the history of literature, although my research is lackadaisical. There is an enormous storm at sea, a herd of wild sheep, and a sledge is used in an inappropriate manner.
"Lemony Snicket is going to hang around after the series ends--he might get interested in other cases. But what I have learned over the last few years is never to plan too much ahead. What's the point? I could get run over by a London bus!
"I have written books for adults, and Lemony Snicket was my first for children. I have been told that my adult books are quite 'dark', but don't think of myself as a dark person--I don't skulk around in a cape or anything--but if you want something to be interesting, more often than not it turns out to be dark. When I was a child, I didn't read much, but the books I liked were full of melodramatic occurrences, and the books I liked least were the ones where the children all got along and ended up playing a sport together.
"With Lemony Snicket, I wanted to write a series of 13 books in which nothing happy happened, although my US publisher, HarperCollins, always made it clear that it might not want to publish all 13. They signed me up for four and only published two to start with. So it is with some relief that the 13th book makes the schedule at all, but I am also sad because I've enjoyed it. And although I have finished this series now, as I have said, Mr Snicket may go on to look for other cases.
"I tend to have strong narrators in my adult books, and the Lemony Snicket character came upon me for the children's books. There was this rumour flying around that booksellers in America were taking bets on who Lemony Snicket really was. I think they thought I was Ian McEwan--it must have been deeply disappointing for them to meet me.
"I ended up being a professional writer, like most other people I know, because I stuck at it. I did years and years of menial jobs to support my writing. I was once an administrative assistant to a man dying in hospital. I sat in his office and worked on my novel, and every now and again the phone would ring and I would break the news [of his illness] to the callers, and then carry on writing. Now that was depressing.
"I plan to keep writing for children and adults. My problem isn't the search for ideas but how to whittle the ideas down. I'm doing some research for an adult novel now, about pirates.
"But if no one pays any more attention to me again as a writer, well, that will be exactly what I predicted all along."
The End (Egmont, October, price tbc, 0064410161)
Caroline Horn
From: http://www.westword.com/issues/2005-10-20/calendar/urban.html
Persnickety
Fortune smiles on Lemony Snicket's unfortunate event.
By Drew Bixby Susan Froyd Jared Jacang Maher
Article Published Oct 20, 2005
Though most everyone who cares knows perfectly well that Daniel Handler is Lemony Snicket, the prolific author of the popular A Series of Unfortunate Events books for kids, he still tries to pretend that he and Snicket aren't one and the same. But no matter how bad a face he puts on it, children are too smart for all that. And with the release of The Penultimate Peril: Book the Twelfth, they want answers.
To that end, Handler admitted this much about the book in a reluctant interview: "It's ten pages longer than the eleventh. The kind of person who rips the Band-Aid off will probably prefer the shorter book. But the person who takes the Band-Aid off slowly will like the longer book. Either way, they'll be very distressed."
But it's really Book the Thirteenth, the last installment, that will have everyone in a tizzy. Asked to elaborate on the series' possible denouement, Handler says little. When pressed, he adds: "Book thirteen marks the return of a reptile previously gone missing."
Whatever. Find out as much as he'll tell tonight at A Big Unfortunate Event, a discussion and book signing hosted by the Tattered Cover Book Store. Handler appears at 6 p.m. at the Temple Events Center, 1595 Pearl Street; admission is $13 for book-signing tickets (a copy of the book is included) and $5 for companion tickets, at the door. -- Susan Froyd
FROM: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050601/law025.html?.v=13
Press Release Source: HarperCollins Children's Books
Warning: Lemony Snicket to Release 12th Book in A Series of Unfortunate Events on October 18, 2005
Wednesday June 1, 7:00 am ET
Book Reportedly So Startling Author Refuses to Reveal Title
LOS ANGELES, June 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Please stop what you are doing, especially if what you are doing is reading this press release. It has just been discovered that Lemony Snicket has completed Book the Twelfth in A Series of Unfortunate Events, the depressing and mysterious chronicles of three unlucky orphans who are plagued by villainy, conspiracy, and itchy clothing.
The book is currently scheduled to go on sale Tuesday, October 18, 2005, with an initial 2.5 million print run, and reports suggest that this will be Mr. Snicket's most dreadful volume yet. It's so terrible that the author himself refuses to reveal the book's title, fearing that it will cause panic, chaos, or both. In fact, executives at HarperCollins Children's Books, which is publishing the book, have been instructed to refer to it only by its ISBN number, 0-06-441015-3. Fans who insist on knowing more can visit www.thenamelessnovel.com, where they can participate in an uneasy investigation that may eventually reveal the missing title. In response to prying questions from a public relations firm, HarperCollins issued the following statement. "Please remain calm. We believe that Mr. Snicket's books cannot possibly get worse, although we have been wrong in the past. However, in the interests of safety, we ask that terrible villains, small pets, and extremely nervous young persons refrain from looking forward to 0-06-441015-3." Little else is known about Book the Twelfth except that Count Olaf is still evil and the Baudelaire orphans do not win a contest.
Like unrefrigerated butter or fungus, Lemony Snicket's popularity continues to spread. His books, which feature illustrations by Brett Helquist, have inexplicably already spent more than a combined 762 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers List and sold more than 35 million copies worldwide. In December 2004, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, and Nickelodeon Movies released a major motion picture based on the first three books in A Series of Unfortunate Events, starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep. It was a dismal success, grossing more than $100 million in a matter of weeks. A DVD of the film was released in April 2005.
A Series of Unfortunate Events has shocked and engrossed millions of readers worldwide since the release of the first book in 1999. Each of the books in the series -- including The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, The Wide Window, The Miserable Mill, The Austere Academy, The Ersatz Elevator, The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, The Carnivorous Carnival, The Slippery Slope, The Grim Grotto and Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography -- has been a national best-seller.
Literary and irreverent, hilarious and deftly crafted, A Series of Unfortunate Events offers an exquisitely dark comedy in the tradition of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl. Lemony Snicket's uproariously unhappy books continue to win readers everywhere, despite the author's continued warnings.
Lemony Snicket published his first book in 1999 and has not had a good night's sleep since. Once the recipient of several distinguished awards, he is now an escapee of several indistinguishable prisons. You can visit him online at www.lemonysnicket.com.
Brett Helquist was born in Gonado, AZ, grew up in Orem, UT, and now lives in Brooklyn. He earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Brigham Young University and has been illustrating ever since. He studied hard to become an illustrator, but can't help wondering if he might have chosen to be something safer, like a pirate or a skydiver.
HarperCollins Children's Books is one of the leading publishers of children's books. Respected worldwide for its tradition of publishing quality, award-winning books for young readers, HarperCollins is home to many children's classics -- Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, Goodnight Moon, Where the Sidewalk Ends and Where the Wild Things Are; and popular series -- A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Princess Diaries. HarperCollins Children's Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers, one of the leading English language publishers in the world and a subsidiary of News Corporation (NYSE: NWS - News, NWS.A - News; ASX: NCP - News, NCPDP - News). Headquartered in New York, HarperCollins has publishing groups in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia. You can visit HarperCollins Children's Books on the Internet at http://www.harperchildrens.com.
(NOTE FROM WEBMASTER: AS OF JUNE 21, 2005, www.thenamelessnovel.com IS NOT UP.)
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Warning: Lemony Snicket to Release 12th Book in A Series of Unfortunate Events on October 18, 2005
LOS ANGELES, June 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Please stop what you are doing, especially if what you are doing is reading this press release. It has just been discovered that Lemony Snicket has completed Book the Twelfth in A Series of Unfortunate Events, the depressing and mysterious chronicles of three unlucky orphans who are plagued by villainy, conspiracy, and itchy clothing.
In response to prying questions from a public relations firm, HarperCollins issued the following statement. "Please remain calm. We believe that Mr. Snicket's books cannot possibly get worse, although we have been wrong in the past. However, in the interests of safety, we ask that terrible villains, small pets, and extremely nervous young persons refrain from looking forward to 0-06-441015-3." Little else is known about Book the Twelfth except that Count Olaf is still evil and the Baudelaire orphans do not win a contest. Like unrefrigerated butter or fungus, Lemony Snicket's popularity continues to spread. His books, which feature illustrations by Brett Helquist, have inexplicably already spent more than a combined 762 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers List and sold more than 35 million copies worldwide. In December 2004, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, and Nickelodeon Movies released a major motion picture based on the first three books in A Series of Unfortunate Events, starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep. It was a dismal success, grossing more than $100 million in a matter of weeks. A DVD of the film was released in April 2005. A Series of Unfortunate Events has shocked and engrossed millions of readers worldwide since the release of the first book in 1999. Each of the books in the series -- including The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, The Wide Window, The Miserable Mill, The Austere Academy, The Ersatz Elevator, The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, The Carnivorous Carnival, The Slippery Slope, The Grim Grotto and Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography -- has been a national best-seller. Literary and irreverent, hilarious and deftly crafted, A Series of Unfortunate Events offers an exquisitely dark comedy in the tradition of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl. Lemony Snicket's uproariously unhappy books continue to win readers everywhere, despite the author's continued warnings. Lemony Snicket published his first book in 1999 and has not had a good night's sleep since. Once the recipient of several distinguished awards, he is now an escapee of several indistinguishable prisons. You can visit him online at www.lemonysnicket.com. Brett Helquist was born in Gonado, AZ, grew up in Orem, UT, and now lives in Brooklyn. He earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Brigham Young University and has been illustrating ever since. He studied hard to become an illustrator, but can't help wondering if he might have chosen to be something safer, like a pirate or a skydiver. HarperCollins Children's Books is one of the leading publishers of children's books. Respected worldwide for its tradition of publishing quality, award-winning books for young readers, HarperCollins is home to many children's classics -- Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, Goodnight Moon, Where the Sidewalk Ends and Where the Wild Things Are; and popular series -- A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Princess Diaries. HarperCollins Children's Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers, one of the leading English language publishers in the world and a subsidiary of News Corporation (NYSE: NWS - News, NWS.A - News; ASX: NCP - News, NCPDP - News). Headquartered in New York, HarperCollins has publishing groups in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia. You can visit HarperCollins Children's Books on the Internet at http://www.harperchildrens.com. (NOTE FROM WEBMASTER: AS OF JUNE 21, 2005, www.thenamelessnovel.com IS NOT UP.) | ||||||||||||||
FROM: http://www.empireonline.co.uk/site/futurefilms/News.asp?FID=9813&NID=16217&ISN=1
"Director Talks Lemony Snicket"
Exclusive: we speak to Brad Silberling
Here at Empire, we think that it's a sign of maturity to admit that one of the films we are most looking forward to between now and Christmas is something which might be termed, well, a kid's film. We've read the Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books, and spoken to director Brad Silberling, and we are sufficiently secure in our maturity to say that we think this film is going to be rather special.
We spoke to Brad Silberling recently and he told us a little about the difficulties he faced in bringing the film to the big screen. "Oh, well, if you want to be a masochist come direct this movie! I knew from day one how long this film was going to take. You had a couple of fantastic but still minor children, meaning that the work hours are restricted – and then of course you have the infants."
"It's one thing to read about [toddler] Sunny Baudelaire in the books but you realise what you love about her character is that she is not treated like an infant, she is really an equal. You had to really honour that. You have all that on top of having a terrific movie star, but movie stars have their perks, which are restrictive in terms of how long they work each day. So it was a scheduling nightmare but worth it in the end…I am already forgetting some of the pain!"
With that in mind, we would like to draw your attention to a new poster for the film, posted on ComingSoon.net. For our money, it's rather fab, neatly capturing the plight of the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans, as well as the theatrical and villainous leanings of the evil Count Olaf (Jim Carrey).
As if that weren't enough, the official site has also been redesigned, with oodles of new clips and pictures for the discerning fan, and there is new material on Count Olaf's evil website here.
FROM: http://www.empireonline.co.uk/site/futurefilms/News.asp?FID=9813&NID=15587&ISN=1
"Thompson On Trelawney"
Exclusive: Emma Thompson on Potter, Lemony Snicket and Nanny McPhee 
One of the best things about the Harry Potter franchise is surely the fact that the perfect people have been cast in every role, no matter how much screen time they get. Continuing this tradition, Emma Thompson's role as Divination Professor Sybil Trelawney in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban should see the batty seer come to life with all the quirks and neuroses ascribed to her literary counterpart faithfully replicated on screen.
" She was so much fun to play," Thompson told us. "I decided that, since she was someone who saw into the future, she had to be someone who couldn’t see anything at all in the present. Like where she was going, her clothing, anything. I decided to dress her slightly differently, and had wonderful co-operation from my director and designer and everything."
However, Potter is not the only children’s film on Emma’s slate. She is also playing the title role in Nanny McPhee, her self-penned adaptation of the Nurse Matilda series by Christina Brand. Thompson plays a governess who uses magic to quell seven extremely naughty children, with Colin Firth in talks to play their father. Shooting starts on 1 April in London – surely the perfect date for any film with an element of comedy.
Thompson also scotched the rumours connecting her to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. This adaptation of the dreadful adventures of the wretched Baudelaire orphans stars Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep, and should be the sort of children’s film Tim Burton would make if he were a manic depressive. Thompson, however will not be joining that particular children's tale .
"They did ask me about the Judge, but I said that I don’t think I can do that, because I’m just doing my own kid’s film. People would get confused because I’ve just done Harry Potter, and children get fed up too."
FROM: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/18/CM116426.DTL
Fortunate Events
Winds, vertiginous views and snakes converge in Lemony Snicket's neck of the woods
Sunday, May 18, 2003
Lemony Snicket lives on the windiest block in San Francisco.
The mysterious author doesn't mind a haunting wind. It helps the creativity.
But he does mind drop-in fans, so he'll only identify it as near the five points where Masonic, Buena Vista, Roosevelt, Upper Terrace and Ashbury Terrace come together. It is also uphill from the intersection of States and Levant. Try finding that one.
Lemony Snicket is the name on "A Series of Unfortunate Events" that bedevil orphans. Daniel Handler is the name on the royalty checks for 7 million books sold. That is how he and his wife, Lisa Brown, advanced from a rental in the Richmond flats to a 1907 Victorian atop a steep hill.
"I don't plan on getting any higher than this," says Handler, who moved in a year ago and celebrated by writing "The Slippery Slope," the 10th book in a planned series of 13.
Starting at 8:30 a.m., he moves back and forth, switching screens from the shy Snicket, hatching calamity for kids, to the friendly Handler, 33, writer of novels and screenplays for adults. At 3 p.m., both personas bundle up and go for a walk.
"One thing I like about this neighborhood is it's still half rentals. The other night there was a party until 5 in the morning two houses down from me," he says, standing on his front steps with the wind whipping the palm fronds - though it fails to budge his bristle-cut.
He doesn't doubt his block's "windiest" appellation, but he has doubts "about how that could even be measured, let alone verified."
Five points is a borderland. Down the north side is Cole Valley and the Haight, and down the south side is Corona Heights and the Castro. "Ashbury Heights always seems really pretentious," he says, trying out common handles. "So usually I tell people that I live near Buena Vista Park. That makes them think I'm sneaking off for anonymous sex in the middle of the night."
By day, Buena Vista is "the park where I fake my walk for TV cameras," representing newsmagazine shows.
His real walk is down Buena Vista East, which cuts around the base of the park, and back up Park Hills, maybe with a detour to the Randall Museum, where he used to go as a bug-obsessed brain growing up on the other side of Twin Peaks.
Then as now, he lives in the shadow of Sutro Tower, relying on it to receive channels 2, 4, 5, 7 and the exotic UHF channels 20 and 44.
"We don't have cable, so we're like the last people on Earth to actually use the TV tower," says Handler, who is more likely to use the VCR. "My wife and I both work at home, so we're completely out of conversation by the end of the day. So either we have to have a puppet show or watch a movie."
Once they tried a backyard barbecue, but the wind caused a "50-foot wall of flame," he says, while noticing a Weber on the porch of an optimist at 412 Buena Vista East.
He points out a senior center "where Jimmy Stewart is put in the loony bin in 'Vertigo,' " he says. "Barbara Bel Geddes, the other woman, comes here." But movie buffs don't, nor does anybody else. He counts 10 striped parking slots, all vacant. "It's almost worth a photograph," he says.
Near the corner of Buena Vista and Park Hills is an illegal unit Handler rented when just home from Wesleyan College in Connecticut. It was here that he started writing cranky letters to the editors of local papers and signing them "Lemony Snicket," not knowing he'd created a name that might be second only to Harry Potter in popularity for modern kids' books.
He makes a hairpin right up Park Hills, which connects to Roosevelt, and at the top makes a hard left back down Museum Way, passing Corona Heights Park.
"There's this big dog social thing here," he says. "I want to get a dog so I can be part of it."
The Randall Museum is a 1951 flattop at the bottom of the red rock hill. The old gravel driveway was recently landscaped into a great lawn. A new observation deck opens the panoramic view of downtown and the East Bay.
He signs "Snicket" in the registry and walks in "just to make sure it's all going right." One thing is wrong: The giant stuffed grizzly bear was removed from the lobby 10 years ago.
"I miss it," he says. But the shiny black crows, ravens and magpies are still there cawing. Some call Randall "the snake museum," and Snicket had his problems with them in "The Reptile Room."
"There's a murder in the reptile room in the book," he whispers, casing the joint for snakes and shifty characters. But there are only two behind glass - a thin green garter and a thick tan gopher - and a few moms with kids.
"It looks like a pretty quiet day in the reptile room," he concludes, and heads back home into the wind.
FROM:
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-film.html?2004-12/08/12.00.film
(SLIGHTLY EDITED FOR CONTENT)
Carrey: Lemony Not Too Dark
Jim Carrey, who stars in the upcoming family fantasy film Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, told SCI FI Wire that he doesn't think the grim tale is too dark for children. "I loved creepy fun when I was a kid," Carrey told reporters in a news conference. "It depends. I wouldn't bring your 4-year-old, maybe, but I think it is more than entertainment. It is entertaining, and it's funny, but at the same time—as the books did, I hope the movie does as well—it taps into something that's going on with young kids and teenagers, where even though we have two parents, sometimes, they're busy. And we all feel like we're on our own in the world. The kids do."
Based on the series of best-selling children's books by Daniel Handler, Lemony Snicket tells the story of the orphaned Baudelaire children, whose parents perish in a mysterious fire. A relative, the evil Count Olaf (Carrey), takes the children in, but only long enough to try to kill them and claim their inheritance. The film, like the books, features children in peril, as well as several unpleasant situations and deaths.
"There's a moment where Count Olaf slaps one of the kids, and there was a controversy over whether to have that in the movie or not," Carrey said. "And I said, 'You know what? Bambi dies, dudes. Bambi dies.' In most really great ... movies that connect with people, there's some kind of tragedy involved and some kind of pain involved, and there's a strange kind of balance that we're striking here. I'm not sure if it's been done this way before. Although I want to be entertaining, the bottom line is Olaf is...not a nice person. I think he has to be that way. I said to them early on, I want him to laugh, but at the same time, the danger has to be real, or we have nothing. The movie is meaningless without real danger." Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events opens Dec. 17.
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Fortune smiles on the elusive Mr. Lemony Snicket
• A Guide to the Unfortunate World of Lemony Snicket By LISA LEFF
Associated Press
THE ELUSIVE MR. SNICKET Lemony Snicket’s family has roots in a part of the country which is now under water, and his childhood was spent in the relative splendor of the Snicket Villa, which has since become a factory, a fortress and a pharmacy and is now, alas, someone else's villa. To the untrained eye, Mr. Snicket's hometown would not appear to be filled with secrets. Untrained eyes have been wrong before.
In the aftermath of a scandal (we know not what scandal), Mr. Snicket was stripped of several awards by the reigning authorities, including Honorable Mention, the Grey Ribbon and First Runner Up. Mr. Snicket found himself in exile.
He has spent the last several eras researching the travails of the Baudelaire orphans. This project, being published serially by HarperCollins, takes him to the scenes of numerous crimes, often during the off-season. Eternally pursued and insatiably inquisitive, a hermit and a nomad, Mr. Snicket wishes you nothing but the best.
Due to the worldwide web of conspiracy which surrounds him, Mr. Snicket often communicates with the general public through his representative, Daniel Handler, an author living in San Francisco.
Mr. Snicket's investigations usually prevent him from being anywhere near any electronic equipment or postal paraphernalia; however, if you feel you must send word to him, you can write him at:
Mr. Snicket, HarperCollins Children's Books, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.
Special to The Eagle Q&A WITH MR. SNICKET Question: Does it get harder to write each new book in the series?
Answer: Yes, because after each page I need to lay my head on the table and weep for about 10 minutes. The books are getting longer and longer, so that means there is a lot more weeping.
Q: Are the Baudelaires anything like you in real life?
A: Well, I once had to wear an itchy sweater. People have been mean to me at school. I think everyone will have some part of their lives that will remind them of these children.
Q: How many books are you planning to write in the series and why did you write the books?
A: There will be 13 books in the series unless something terrible happens to the author. That could happen at any moment. I think there are lots and lots of cheerful books on shelves, and it is good to have a balance, with cheerful books and miserable books.
Q: What is your favorite book?
A: My all-time favorite book is “The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily” (by Dino Buzzati). Have you ever heard of that book? I also like a book called “Matilda” (by Roald Dahl). I like any book that has really wicked people and something terrible happens to those wicked people. That is my idea of a good time.
Q: Who is your favorite character in your books?
A: I tend to like the really minor characters. I like the character of Bruce who appears in “The Reptile Room,” and then comes back in the 12th book. The more minor the character, the more interesting I find them.
Q: How old were you when you started writing?
A: Very young. As soon as I could write, I started writing things down. I liked writing down people’s conversations.
Q: Do you have a special spot in your house where you like to write?
A: There is a room where I like to do most of my writing. And there is a room next to that room where there is an enormous chair that I like to sit and read the books I have written.
Q: What inspired you to make Count Olaf so mean and heartless?
A: He is inspired by other mean and heartless people I have known.
Q: In “The Grim Grotto,” whatever happened to Capt. Widdershins?
A: I don’t think you want to know. Do you know the expression curiosity killed the cat? I don’t think I should answer that question because I would hate for anything awful to happen to you.
Q: Do you have any idea what you are going to name the next book in the series?
A: Yes.
Newsday
SAN FRANCISCO — Lemony Snicket is running late. Or is he?
Even in a city as eccentric as San Francisco, it’s easy to spot the author of “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Who else but the creator of this best-selling children’s series known for its dark humor would wear a heavy black suit and oversized faux-velvet sunglasses when it’s 80 degrees outside?
But as often happens in his books about a trio of exceptionally unlucky and plucky orphans, nothing is quite what it seems with Snicket. The man offering profuse apologies for his tardiness, as well as observations on the fickleness of Hollywood and the nature of good and evil, is not the storyteller with the mouth-puckering moniker, but his impresario, novelist Daniel Handler.
“Both of us pride ourselves on being on time,” says Handler, 34, a wry smile rippling across his full, clean-shaven face.
It turns out that the pseudonymous writer with $25 million in worldwide sales answers e-mails and does occasional radio interviews, but never shows up in public. So while the 11th installment in Snicket’s saga, “The Grim Grotto,” has topped national best seller lists since it hit bookstores last October, and an all-star movie based on the first three volumes is scheduled to open across the nation Friday, Lemony Snicket won’t be part of any publicity tour.
“Mr. Snicket would have a lot more good excuses for being late due to the workings of his enemies, whereas I have nothing to blame but my own stupidity,” Handler explains, employing a schtick he’s perfected at author events where kids want to know why some guy they’ve never heard of is autographing their book.
The same deft balancing act between fact and fantasy, tradition and high camp, tragedy and comedy helps explain the huge success of the series, says Brian Monahan, a children’s book buyer for Barnes & Noble.
The stories have both an appealing forbidden quality — each starts with a disclaimer warning readers why their time would be better spent on something else — and toss off vocabulary lessons with a wink and nudge. Readers of “The Grim Grotto,” for example, are told that “passive” means “accepting what is happening without doing anything about it” followed by a Snicket soliloquy on the torture of shopping for new shoes.
“One of the great things about these books is they don’t talk down to children,” Monahan says. “He has faith in his audience to go with the stories and enjoy them even though they don’t have a happy ending.”
Handler disapproves of children’s authors who get overly preachy, but says that maintaining good manners in the face of adversity is something of an obsession for both him and his nom de plume.
The orphaned siblings at the center of each tale, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, remain unfailingly polite despite the obstacles set before them by feckless or evil adults.
“An overall theme of the Snicket books, I guess, is that your behavior has no bearing on what will happen to you,” he says. “So behaving well is its own reward rather than a far too common lesson in children’s literature, which is if you behave well, you’ll be rewarded. That’s not something I see happening a lot.”
In an interview, Handler comes off as a lot more funny than morose, despite his relentlessly disastrous plots. Yes, he’s deep into book No. 12 (13 are planned in all).
Yes, he was replaced as screenwriter of the movie after slogging through eight drafts. The movie stars Jude Law as narrator Lemony Snicket and Jim Carrey as recurring villain Count Olaf.
The author insists that he’s not bitter about his exit from the Hollywood crew turning his brainchild into a holiday hit.
The way he tells it, a “changing of the guard” replaced the producer, director and ultimately him as well. He says he was offered a screenwriting credit, but declined.
“For me, making a good film is a more mysterious process than writing a good novel. I’m not convinced that if authors always had absolute control over films made from their books that movies would be better necessarily,” he says.
He hasn’t seen the finished product, but says he was tickled by the sets and the cast.
“Some of it differs vastly from the book and some of it is very faithful,” he says. “It’s very strange to walk into a former airplane factory and see they have built a lake inside just because you sat down a few years ago and wrote a story about a lake.”
Handler has come a long way from his days as a freelance writer when, at the urging of a friend who worked as a children’s book editor, he spun a proposal for three “Unfortunate Events” books from the pages of a gothic adult novel he’d never finished.
The success that followed publication of the first volume about the Baudelaires in 1999 “revolutionized” his literary life.
These days, when he’s not channeling Lemony Snicket or writing adult fiction, he works on whatever alt-hip project interests him, whether it’s collaborating on a movie soundtrack with instrumentalist Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields or conducting interviews for The Believer, a monthly “cultural review” published by pal Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s collective.
“I never thought I would be on any best seller list, let alone have a handful of books on it at the same time,” Handler says between sips of cappuccino at a cafe he’s frequented since he was a teenager. “I find myself turning down opportunities I can’t believe I turn down simply because I’m too busy.”
Behind the blue lenses of his eye-catching sunglasses, Handler wears a look of perpetual amusement, as if he knows a delicious secret the rest of the world isn’t quite hip enough to get. Even with the odd Addams Family attire, he has a face that might be called “boyish,” if he didn’t disapprove of such age-driven stereotypes.
“The reason I don’t see much difference between writing for children and writing for adults is I don’t see much difference in general between children and adults,” he says.
Handler is just as likely to eschew conventional thinking — in this case the accepted protocol that interview subjects answer questions posed to them — when he is asked to demystify perplexing aspects of his books. For example, how has it fallen to Lemony Snicket to chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire orphans?
“There is an ideological link between Lemony Snicket and the Baudelaires. They seem to be noble people surrounded by a web of intrigue and deceit,” Handler says. “Mr. Snicket has more or less become their official bibliographer by bringing their stories to light, their Boswell as it were.”
Handler is slightly less enigmatic on the subject of his resume. His childhood in San Francisco as the son of an accountant and an academe wasn’t “newsworthy unfortunate at all,” he says, adding that “when you are a child, whatever misery happens in your own life is miserable.”
His life now is more of a half-full proposition — Handler notes for the record that he is happily married and the father of a 1-year-old son.
“I don’t find it a hardship to write these books. I don’t wish I were writing the first one now, but I don’t wish I were writing the 13th,” he says. “I don’t wish to imply I have an anxiety-free life. It’s a challenge to try to tell an interesting story each time.”
Handler’s editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books, Susan Rich, says she and the author aren’t eager to damage the “integrity” of the series by keeping it going beyond its scheduled life expectancy. As it is, “Unfortunate Events” has far exceeded their expectations.
“Part of what makes this series so exquisite is it is 13 books long and therefore has a narrative arc that has taken 13 books to traverse,” Rich said. “Certainly 13 books by the same author is a lot of books for a 10-year-old to have read.”
So will Lemony Snicket bow to popular pressure and give the poor Baudelaires a happy ending at the conclusion of No. 13?
“Happy is a comparative term,” Handler says, flashing another opaque grin.
“So the ending that is on the horizon will be happier than some, but less happy than others.”
FROM: http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79327&ran=202096
Meet the real Lemony Snicket
By MAL VINCENT, The Virginian-Pilot
© December 15, 2004
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Lemony Snicket precedes his entrance with a note that encourages people not to see the movie based on his series of stories about the woes of the three Baudelaire orphans. He’s begged children – who have made his “Series of Unfortunate Events” books best sellers – to “please read something else.”
They don’t listen. His books have sold more than 27 million copies worldwide and have been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 600 weeks. All this despite the fact that neither his books nor the movie – opening Friday – end with the words “and they lived happily ever after.’’ So who is this Lemony Snicket? He’s a round-looking chap who enters the room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as if he’s afraid someone is going to strike him in the face for his effrontery. He’s a bit too plump to pass for a football player, but his boyish face looks much younger than his 34 years. (Of course, he claims to be age 10 and, if so, he looks old.)
His real name is Daniel Handler, a husband and father who lives in San Francisco and spends most of his time claiming not to be Lemony Snicket. No one is convinced. Snicket is the titular author of the movie’s three books. Therefore, Handler is Snicket. Snicket is Handler.
“You are an alleged journalist?” Handler/Snicket asks, offsetting his initial shyness with defensive aggression.
Plunging into the interview game, we ask him when he first got the idea for the Baudelaire orphans and their efforts to outwit the evil Count Olaf. “I first conceived them in 1998 when all we had to worry about was the adultery of the president of the United States. I thought we needed something else. I had written several adult books, all of which were ignored, and I had written several movie scripts, which remain untouched. I was, you might say, quite a failure and somewhat enjoying it. Then I began to think what I would like to read if I was 10 years old, and I came up with the orphans pursued by a rather dense adult villain, whom they always best. As it turns out, a number of 10-year-olds agreed with me.’’
His success is, in fact, quite phenomenal. His books were the first to knock the “Harry Potter’’ series off the top of the New York Times’ children’s best-seller list. The Snicket books have been translated into 39 languages. Critics compare Handler’s prose to A.A. Milne and E.B. White.
“I never really had nightmares before I started writing these books, but I induced nightmares for the occasion. They are quite easy to conjure, if you try. Children, I theorized, were sick of what was right for them. Orphans, from Charles Dickens to Bambi, Cinderella and the Nemo of 'Finding Nemo’ are always major characters. The truth is that children love to dream about what it would be like to escape from their parents. And, in my stories, the orphans always best the villain. It’s just that other adults don’t recognize it.
“The only interesting stories are the ones in which something terrible is about to happen. Who would care about Goldilocks if she were just wandering happily through the woods? You need the big, bad wolf.’’
Still, he didn’t think anyone would publish it. He sent it to Harper Collins with a note reading, “You’ll love this. The parents die on the first page.”
Handler says his own childhood was not as dark as that of his threatened orphans, although his father did die when he was 6.
“I learned at an early age that evil should be exposed. That helped. I suppose my earliest ambition was to be a wise man who lived on top of a mountain, and people come to ask him all manner of questions.’’
Instead, he became a writer. His two adult books, “The Basic Eight’’ and “Watch Your Mouth,’’ are relatively unknown. Well, “totally unknown,’’ he says.
He began writing the Snicket books when he was employed as “a kind of clerk for a man who was dying in the hospital. I went to his office every day and answered the telephone to tell them he wasn’t there and then to inform them he wasn’t expected back. Then, I’d go back to writing my book. After a while, people increasingly stopped calling, leaving me more and more time to write.’’
At his first public appearance to publicize his first book, he informed the audience – which included many children – that Lemony Snicket had been taken ill and could not be there.
He was there to speak on his behalf and sign the books.
“The children immediately knew I was lying, but it is an empowering thing to them when they catch adults lying. They’ve always suspected that they are liars anyway. The more absurd my stories are, the more they like them because they feel superior to the author. That’s fine with me.’’
Brad Silberling, director of “A Series of Unfortunate Events,’’ points out that “Daniel was on the set every day and was a valuable asset. We have heard horror stories about the Harry Potter woman who won’t allow a sentence to be changed and holds the rights to the books as a threat, but Daniel is a different being. He didn’t care what we changed. Of course, we were intent on keeping the original, but he gave us a loose rein. He’d keep saying, 'I have no idea what he, she or it would look like. I just wrote it. You have to see it.’”
Handler shrugs about the casting of Jim Carrey as Count Olaf.
“He’s a great comedian. I might have cast James Mason in the role, but, then, James Mason is dead, so there you go.’’ Oscar winner Meryl Streep plays Aunt Josephine.
“I thought the woman must have gone crazy,” Handler said. “Meryl Streep? But then I met her, and she explained by simply saying that her children had read the books and insisted that she take the job.’’
In the books and movie, Snicket narrates the stories. Handler thinks this is the key to reassuring children that they need not be scared. When Jude Law was hired as the voice of Snicket, Handler admits that he felt “flattered, in an absurd kind of way.’’
His next book, the 12th in the 13-book series, will be out in the fall. The 13th book, he says, will have a twist.
“Some people have already figured it out. I’ll give you a clue. It involves Beatrice. In fact, that clue is in the books everywhere. It’s all right if everyone figures it out. I didn’t write these books in order to be subtle.’’
FROM: http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/news/story/0,6260,695806,00.html
Daniel Handler, also known as Lemony Snicket
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One of the best things about the Harry Potter franchise is surely the fact that the perfect people have been cast in every role, no matter how much screen time they get. Continuing this tradition, Emma Thompson's role as Divination Professor Sybil Trelawney in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban should see the batty seer come to life with all the quirks and neuroses ascribed to her literary counterpart faithfully replicated on screen. " She was so much fun to play," Thompson told us. "I decided that, since she was someone who saw into the future, she had to be someone who couldn’t see anything at all in the present. Like where she was going, her clothing, anything. I decided to dress her slightly differently, and had wonderful co-operation from my director and designer and everything."
However, Potter is not the only children’s film on Emma’s slate. She is also playing the title role in Nanny McPhee, her self-penned adaptation of the Nurse Matilda series by Christina Brand. Thompson plays a governess who uses magic to quell seven extremely naughty children, with Colin Firth in talks to play their father. Shooting starts on 1 April in London – surely the perfect date for any film with an element of comedy.
Thompson also scotched the rumours connecting her to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. This adaptation of the dreadful adventures of the wretched Baudelaire orphans stars Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep, and should be the sort of children’s film Tim Burton would make if he were a manic depressive. Thompson, however will not be joining that particular children's tale .
"They did ask me about the Judge, but I said that I don’t think I can do that, because I’m just doing my own kid’s film. People would get confused because I’ve just done Harry Potter, and children get fed up too."
Winds, vertiginous views and snakes converge in Lemony Snicket's neck of the woods
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-film.html?2004-12/08/12.00.film
• A Guide to the Unfortunate World of Lemony Snicket
By LISA LEFF
Associated Press
| THE ELUSIVE MR. SNICKET |
| Lemony Snicket’s family has roots in a part of the country which is now under water, and his childhood was spent in the relative splendor of the Snicket Villa, which has since become a factory, a fortress and a pharmacy and is now, alas, someone else's villa. To the untrained eye, Mr. Snicket's hometown would not appear to be filled with secrets. Untrained eyes have been wrong before. |
| Special to The Eagle |
| Q&A WITH MR. SNICKET |
| Question: Does it get harder to write each new book in the series? |
| Newsday |
SAN FRANCISCO — Lemony Snicket is running late. Or is he?
Even in a city as eccentric as San Francisco, it’s easy to spot the author of “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Who else but the creator of this best-selling children’s series known for its dark humor would wear a heavy black suit and oversized faux-velvet sunglasses when it’s 80 degrees outside?
But as often happens in his books about a trio of exceptionally unlucky and plucky orphans, nothing is quite what it seems with Snicket. The man offering profuse apologies for his tardiness, as well as observations on the fickleness of Hollywood and the nature of good and evil, is not the storyteller with the mouth-puckering moniker, but his impresario, novelist Daniel Handler.
“Both of us pride ourselves on being on time,” says Handler, 34, a wry smile rippling across his full, clean-shaven face.
It turns out that the pseudonymous writer with $25 million in worldwide sales answers e-mails and does occasional radio interviews, but never shows up in public. So while the 11th installment in Snicket’s saga, “The Grim Grotto,” has topped national best seller lists since it hit bookstores last October, and an all-star movie based on the first three volumes is scheduled to open across the nation Friday, Lemony Snicket won’t be part of any publicity tour.
“Mr. Snicket would have a lot more good excuses for being late due to the workings of his enemies, whereas I have nothing to blame but my own stupidity,” Handler explains, employing a schtick he’s perfected at author events where kids want to know why some guy they’ve never heard of is autographing their book.
The same deft balancing act between fact and fantasy, tradition and high camp, tragedy and comedy helps explain the huge success of the series, says Brian Monahan, a children’s book buyer for Barnes & Noble.
The stories have both an appealing forbidden quality — each starts with a disclaimer warning readers why their time would be better spent on something else — and toss off vocabulary lessons with a wink and nudge. Readers of “The Grim Grotto,” for example, are told that “passive” means “accepting what is happening without doing anything about it” followed by a Snicket soliloquy on the torture of shopping for new shoes.
“One of the great things about these books is they don’t talk down to children,” Monahan says. “He has faith in his audience to go with the stories and enjoy them even though they don’t have a happy ending.”
Handler disapproves of children’s authors who get overly preachy, but says that maintaining good manners in the face of adversity is something of an obsession for both him and his nom de plume.
The orphaned siblings at the center of each tale, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, remain unfailingly polite despite the obstacles set before them by feckless or evil adults.
“An overall theme of the Snicket books, I guess, is that your behavior has no bearing on what will happen to you,” he says. “So behaving well is its own reward rather than a far too common lesson in children’s literature, which is if you behave well, you’ll be rewarded. That’s not something I see happening a lot.”
In an interview, Handler comes off as a lot more funny than morose, despite his relentlessly disastrous plots. Yes, he’s deep into book No. 12 (13 are planned in all).
Yes, he was replaced as screenwriter of the movie after slogging through eight drafts. The movie stars Jude Law as narrator Lemony Snicket and Jim Carrey as recurring villain Count Olaf.
The author insists that he’s not bitter about his exit from the Hollywood crew turning his brainchild into a holiday hit.
The way he tells it, a “changing of the guard” replaced the producer, director and ultimately him as well. He says he was offered a screenwriting credit, but declined.
“For me, making a good film is a more mysterious process than writing a good novel. I’m not convinced that if authors always had absolute control over films made from their books that movies would be better necessarily,” he says.
He hasn’t seen the finished product, but says he was tickled by the sets and the cast.
“Some of it differs vastly from the book and some of it is very faithful,” he says. “It’s very strange to walk into a former airplane factory and see they have built a lake inside just because you sat down a few years ago and wrote a story about a lake.”
Handler has come a long way from his days as a freelance writer when, at the urging of a friend who worked as a children’s book editor, he spun a proposal for three “Unfortunate Events” books from the pages of a gothic adult novel he’d never finished.
The success that followed publication of the first volume about the Baudelaires in 1999 “revolutionized” his literary life.
These days, when he’s not channeling Lemony Snicket or writing adult fiction, he works on whatever alt-hip project interests him, whether it’s collaborating on a movie soundtrack with instrumentalist Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields or conducting interviews for The Believer, a monthly “cultural review” published by pal Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s collective.
“I never thought I would be on any best seller list, let alone have a handful of books on it at the same time,” Handler says between sips of cappuccino at a cafe he’s frequented since he was a teenager. “I find myself turning down opportunities I can’t believe I turn down simply because I’m too busy.”
Behind the blue lenses of his eye-catching sunglasses, Handler wears a look of perpetual amusement, as if he knows a delicious secret the rest of the world isn’t quite hip enough to get. Even with the odd Addams Family attire, he has a face that might be called “boyish,” if he didn’t disapprove of such age-driven stereotypes.
“The reason I don’t see much difference between writing for children and writing for adults is I don’t see much difference in general between children and adults,” he says.
Handler is just as likely to eschew conventional thinking — in this case the accepted protocol that interview subjects answer questions posed to them — when he is asked to demystify perplexing aspects of his books. For example, how has it fallen to Lemony Snicket to chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire orphans?
“There is an ideological link between Lemony Snicket and the Baudelaires. They seem to be noble people surrounded by a web of intrigue and deceit,” Handler says. “Mr. Snicket has more or less become their official bibliographer by bringing their stories to light, their Boswell as it were.”
Handler is slightly less enigmatic on the subject of his resume. His childhood in San Francisco as the son of an accountant and an academe wasn’t “newsworthy unfortunate at all,” he says, adding that “when you are a child, whatever misery happens in your own life is miserable.”
His life now is more of a half-full proposition — Handler notes for the record that he is happily married and the father of a 1-year-old son.
“I don’t find it a hardship to write these books. I don’t wish I were writing the first one now, but I don’t wish I were writing the 13th,” he says. “I don’t wish to imply I have an anxiety-free life. It’s a challenge to try to tell an interesting story each time.”
Handler’s editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books, Susan Rich, says she and the author aren’t eager to damage the “integrity” of the series by keeping it going beyond its scheduled life expectancy. As it is, “Unfortunate Events” has far exceeded their expectations.
“Part of what makes this series so exquisite is it is 13 books long and therefore has a narrative arc that has taken 13 books to traverse,” Rich said. “Certainly 13 books by the same author is a lot of books for a 10-year-old to have read.”
So will Lemony Snicket bow to popular pressure and give the poor Baudelaires a happy ending at the conclusion of No. 13?
“Happy is a comparative term,” Handler says, flashing another opaque grin.
“So the ending that is on the horizon will be happier than some, but less happy than others.”
FROM: http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79327&ran=202096
Meet the real Lemony Snicket
He’s begged children – who have made his “Series of Unfortunate Events” books best sellers – to “please read something else.” They don’t listen. His books have sold more than 27 million copies worldwide and have been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 600 weeks. All this despite the fact that neither his books nor the movie – opening Friday – end with the words “and they lived happily ever after.’’ So who is this Lemony Snicket? He’s a round-looking chap who enters the room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as if he’s afraid someone is going to strike him in the face for his effrontery. He’s a bit too plump to pass for a football player, but his boyish face looks much younger than his 34 years. (Of course, he claims to be age 10 and, if so, he looks old.) “You are an alleged journalist?” Handler/Snicket asks, offsetting his initial shyness with defensive aggression. Plunging into the interview game, we ask him when he first got the idea for the Baudelaire orphans and their efforts to outwit the evil Count Olaf. “I first conceived them in 1998 when all we had to worry about was the adultery of the president of the United States. I thought we needed something else. I had written several adult books, all of which were ignored, and I had written several movie scripts, which remain untouched. I was, you might say, quite a failure and somewhat enjoying it. Then I began to think what I would like to read if I was 10 years old, and I came up with the orphans pursued by a rather dense adult villain, whom they always best. As it turns out, a number of 10-year-olds agreed with me.’’ His success is, in fact, quite phenomenal. His books were the first to knock the “Harry Potter’’ series off the top of the New York Times’ children’s best-seller list. The Snicket books have been translated into 39 languages. Critics compare Handler’s prose to A.A. Milne and E.B. White. “I never really had nightmares before I started writing these books, but I induced nightmares for the occasion. They are quite easy to conjure, if you try. Children, I theorized, were sick of what was right for them. Orphans, from Charles Dickens to Bambi, Cinderella and the Nemo of 'Finding Nemo’ are always major characters. The truth is that children love to dream about what it would be like to escape from their parents. And, in my stories, the orphans always best the villain. It’s just that other adults don’t recognize it. “The only interesting stories are the ones in which something terrible is about to happen. Who would care about Goldilocks if she were just wandering happily through the woods? You need the big, bad wolf.’’ Still, he didn’t think anyone would publish it. He sent it to Harper Collins with a note reading, “You’ll love this. The parents die on the first page.” Handler says his own childhood was not as dark as that of his threatened orphans, although his father did die when he was 6. “I learned at an early age that evil should be exposed. That helped. I suppose my earliest ambition was to be a wise man who lived on top of a mountain, and people come to ask him all manner of questions.’’ Instead, he became a writer. His two adult books, “The Basic Eight’’ and “Watch Your Mouth,’’ are relatively unknown. Well, “totally unknown,’’ he says. He began writing the Snicket books when he was employed as “a kind of clerk for a man who was dying in the hospital. I went to his office every day and answered the telephone to tell them he wasn’t there and then to inform them he wasn’t expected back. Then, I’d go back to writing my book. After a while, people increasingly stopped calling, leaving me more and more time to write.’’ At his first public appearance to publicize his first book, he informed the audience – which included many children – that Lemony Snicket had been taken ill and could not be there. He was there to speak on his behalf and sign the books. “The children immediately knew I was lying, but it is an empowering thing to them when they catch adults lying. They’ve always suspected that they are liars anyway. The more absurd my stories are, the more they like them because they feel superior to the author. That’s fine with me.’’ Brad Silberling, director of “A Series of Unfortunate Events,’’ points out that “Daniel was on the set every day and was a valuable asset. We have heard horror stories about the Harry Potter woman who won’t allow a sentence to be changed and holds the rights to the books as a threat, but Daniel is a different being. He didn’t care what we changed. Of course, we were intent on keeping the original, but he gave us a loose rein. He’d keep saying, 'I have no idea what he, she or it would look like. I just wrote it. You have to see it.’” Handler shrugs about the casting of Jim Carrey as Count Olaf. “He’s a great comedian. I might have cast James Mason in the role, but, then, James Mason is dead, so there you go.’’ Oscar winner Meryl Streep plays Aunt Josephine. “I thought the woman must have gone crazy,” Handler said. “Meryl Streep? But then I met her, and she explained by simply saying that her children had read the books and insisted that she take the job.’’ In the books and movie, Snicket narrates the stories. Handler thinks this is the key to reassuring children that they need not be scared. When Jude Law was hired as the voice of Snicket, Handler admits that he felt “flattered, in an absurd kind of way.’’ His next book, the 12th in the 13-book series, will be out in the fall. The 13th book, he says, will have a twist. “Some people have already figured it out. I’ll give you a clue. It involves Beatrice. In fact, that clue is in the books everywhere. It’s all right if everyone figures it out. I didn’t write these books in order to be subtle.’’ FROM: http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/news/story/0,6260,695806,00.html By MAL VINCENT, The Virginian-Pilot
© December 15, 2004
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Lemony Snicket precedes his entrance with a note that encourages people not to see the movie based on his series of stories about the woes of the three Baudelaire orphans. His real name is Daniel Handler, a husband and father who lives in San Francisco and spends most of his time claiming not to be Lemony Snicket. No one is convinced. Snicket is the titular author of the movie’s three books. Therefore, Handler is Snicket. Snicket is Handler.
Daniel Handler, also known as Lemony Snicket
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