Excerpts

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe The Official Illustrated Movie Companion Chapter One In the Beginning It takes nothing short of a miracle to make a movie. There are a vast number of moving targets that have to line up in order to get a film going -- the scheduling, the budget, the multitudes of people involved, the rights, the studio, the cast, the director, the vision. It takes an even bigger miracle to make a good movie. This is the story of that miracle. From my point of view, like millions of other children, the story begins in the library. My mother took my sister and me to the library once a week like clockwork, and each week I'd come home with a new book to explore. At first it was Dr. Seuss or the like--picture books, mostly. Then one day my mother handed me a book with more words than pictures. I looked down at the title: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . It was the first book I read that topped a hundred pages, and I was hooked on the story from page one. Narnia, a seemingly endless land where magic prevailed and the good guys vanquished the forces of evil, was a part of me from that moment on. I started dreaming about it then, and to be honest, I've never stopped. It wasn't uncommon for Mom to find me checking the back walls of pantries, linen closets, and dressing rooms, all to no avail. One day, when we went to buy a new couch for the den, I went missing. My parents enlisted the security guards, who finally found me in the warehouse, knocking on the back of a wardrobe. On the way home, I laid my head against the car window and scanned the fields and forest for Centaurs and Fauns and Dwarfs. A few years went by. School. College and a degree in English literature. Some entry-level jobs in film and television -- some good, some bad. A long, hard haul up the ladder. Then one day I found myself in what I now call "the right place at the right time." I joined a company called Walden Media, where my job was to find movie projects that fit the company's mandate. The heads of the company, CEO Cary Granat and president Micheal Flaherty, had set up a film studio devoted to making quality films with educational merit. The man who financed our company, Philip Anschutz, was a self-made billionaire from Denver and a man with a mission: he wanted to make quality movies that would inspire viewers to make the world a better place. An excellent mission by all accounts. I'd made a list of all my favorite books from school reading lists. Though I periodically edited the list, one book always remained in the number-one spot: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . Fortunately, I found that I had an ally at the company in Micheal Flaherty, who also shared my love for this property since childhood. In fact, when Micheal and Cary had first approached Phil Anschutz with the idea to invest in their new company the year before, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the most important property they described when they presented him with a vision of the types of films they hoped to create. In my previous job, I'd learned that another Hollywood studio had purchased an option to make the film. Still, I'm a firm believer in positive thinking. Sometimes you literally have to will a movie into existence. So I called someone I knew at that studio, who had no idea that they even owned the rights to Narnia. Not a great sign that they had any intention of making the movie. I did a little more investigating and found out that there had been plans to update the story, setting it in modern-day Los Angeles after an earthquake rather than in London during the Blitz. The Turkish Delight that I'd found so exotic and intriguing as a child threatened to go out the window in favor of hot dogs and cheeseburgers. I made a vow then and there: this story had to be done right, and that meant being faithful to the book. A little more research taught me that it was the C. S. Lewis Company (in effect, Lewis's estate) to whom we should make our pitch. We knew they believed, as did we at Walden Media, that the movie needed to remain faithful to the book. I'd also learned it's not uncommon for movie rights to revert after a certain period of time if there's no intention of making the movie. Since the studio I'd spoken with didn't even know they owned the book, it seemed likely that the rights would revert one day. Our pitch to the C. S. Lewis Company had to be inspired, sincere, and responsible. But I knew I loved this book more than anything, and was confident that Walden Media could get it made the right way. That was the essence of my pitch. I tracked down the C. S. Lewis Company and sent them a well-intentioned letter that expressed Walden Media's belief in the power of the property and requested an introductory meeting the next time they found themselves in New York. I got an immediate response from Melvin Adams, the organization's managing director, who said he came to New York periodically to meet with their publisher, Harper Collins. As luck would have it, he was going to be in New York in a month, and so we scheduled a breakfast meeting at his hotel. The day before the meeting, I was printing out my notes, and as I walked by the conference room I bumped into a man strolling down the hallway with Walden Media's Cary Granat and Mike Flaherty. "Perry, I'd like you to meet Phil Anschutz," Micheal said. "Perry is pursuing a very important property for us." Phil shook my hand and asked how things were going. It wasn't a perfunctory question. He was genuinely interested. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe The Official Illustrated Movie Companion . Copyright © by Perry Moore. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Official Illustrated Movie Companion by Perry Moore, C. S. Lewis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.