FilmDrunk readers, we’re usually pretty factual around here, so I hope you’ll enjoy this break from reading the news. It’s time to read some exquisite literature I have written for you. Please enjoy semi-erotic fan fiction about my two favorite Hollywood hunks, Keanu Reeves and Matthew McConaughey. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be super horned up! Trust me, you’ll want to read this to the end.
It doesn’t get repeated often enough, but Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight S & M fan fiction written under the name “Snowqueens Icedragon.” (It’s unclear whether there was an apostrophe). Then, like an existentialist’s most masochistic boner fantasy about the animal nature of mankind, it spread through society like a venereal disease, eventually coming to encompass 
“Well, there is going to be a lot of sex in the film,” [screenwriter Kelly Marcel - pictured] says breezily. “It will be rated NC-17 [18 here]. It’s going to be raunchy.” While they are not toning it down — “We are 100% going there” — some of the sex scenes have had to be edited out in order to get some plot in. “We did go through and decide which are our favourites and which are not,” she concedes. “Most of them are in there, but I can’t say more than that.” By “we”, she means herself and EL James.
Marcel has just returned to her house and dogs in Twickenham, after spending 10 days hanging out with the author in LA, poring over Fifty Shades in James’s hotel room, “with me going, ‘I just love Christian Grey, I feel…’ ” she sighs theatrically, “‘very deeply for him.’ ”
Did she then point at her vagina? I hope she then pointed at her vagina. “But why did you say ‘very deeply’ twice?” “I didn’t.
Discussing the finer points of Grey’s performance became second nature, so much so that at one point, when they were discussing the “contract” in the book (what Anna will and won’t agree to sexually), the maid came in “and we just carried on talking, ‘Fisting or no fisting?’ And suddenly she stopped dead. The poor maid. It was hilarious.” [TheSundayTimes]
Poor maids, they don’t know nothin’ about sex without Arnold Schwarzenegger there to demonstrate. Anyway, the script isn’t finished, no one has been cast yet, and the interview never follows up on whether the movie will include fisting like the book apparently does. But I’m guessing yes. I mean, it is a love story.
The copyright owner of EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, and Universal, the studio producing the film adaptation, are suing the producers of Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation. The sticking point here being the “a XXX adaptation” part, as opposed to the more lawsuit-resistant “a XXX parody.” Meanwhile, let’s not forget that Fifty Shades of Grey itself started out as a porn adaptation of Twilight, which is where this banner image came from:
“Snowqueens Icedragon” was E.L. James’ original pen name. (Hey, writers, stop it with the phony initials-for-names).
The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction originally titled “Master of the Universe” and published episodically on fan-fiction websites under the pen name “Snowqueen’s Icedragon”. The piece featured characters named after Stephenie Meyer’s characters in Twilight, Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. After comments concerning the sexual nature of the material, James removed the story from the fan-fiction websites and published it on her own website, FiftyShades.com. Later she rewrote Master of the Universe as an original piece, with the principal characters renamed Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele and removed it from her website prior to publication.
So, a porn adaptation suing a porn adaptation, basically. This would be meta if it weren’t so asinine.
Smash Pictures and James Lane (“Jim Powers”) evidently thought [Fifty Shades of Grey was screaming to be made into porn]. The makers of Fifty Shades of Grey: a XXX Adaptation are now being taken to court over an what the plaintiffs call a “willful attempt to capitalize on the reputation of the book.”
Last summer, L.A. Weekly reviewed the potential porn film of the book franchise, saying, “While parodies are the only way adult film studios can make any money these days, making a ‘Fifty Shades’ version is truly the only way to put the three erotic novels on film in their BDSM glory without MPAA censorship and film industry finger-wagging.”
Want to bet?
In that same article, Smash exec Stuart Wall gave the publication a quote, saying, “Since they are going to make a mainstream [film] of the books, too, dabbling in the adult world we’re choosing to go with a XXX adaption which will stay very true to the book and its S&M-themed romance.”
Here in America, we don’t need the coronation of a king or the birth of Jesus to hold a holiday, just a handful of dudes looking to earn some green. Black Friday, the holiday that comes a day after Thanksgiving that we celebrate with rednecks pulling guns on each other over bargain-priced flatscreens, eventually begat Cyber Monday (that’s today!), another consumer-product based holiday, this time for those of us who’d rather buy our sale-priced electronics online. As a man who once bought sweat pants off Amazon, and who’d avoid the mall even if I was with my dying mother and her dialysis machine was there, Cyber Monday is much closer to my heart.
Even the relative technophobes among us love to online shop, and in honor of Cyber Monday, we choose to celebrate the most famous of them, Newsroom creator, social media skeptic, and all-around Hollywood titan, Aaron Sorkin. Through his hacked, seldom-used now defunct Twitter account, FilmDrunk was able to exclusively uncover Sorkin’s Amazon history, and it turns out, in addition to being a prolific, politically-minded writer of acclaimed film and television, Aaron Sorkin is also the author behind a number of snappily-written Amazon product reviews. It makes so much sense when you think about it. Thus, we celebrate Cyber Monday by sharing with you a cross-section of Aaron Sorkin’s recently-uncovered Amazon product reviews. (*cough* parody, please don’t sue us! *cough, cough*) Enjoy!
Feed your cat, ladies.
I don’t even know where to start with this, but here we go. Erika Leonard, AKA E.L. James AKA Snowqueen Icedragon, is one of the smartest people on the planet. With what writing and storytelling experience that she had, she created an empire by piggybacking on Stephanie Meyer’s success by writing erotic fan fiction for lonely women on Twilight message boards, using the names Edward Cullen and Bella Swan in her story, Master of the Universe.
Then a funny thing happened – she realized that Twilight fans will buy anything and she turned her ripped off stories into the original book, 50 Shades of Grey. Now a best-selling excuse for guys to go play golf, Grey is, of course, being adapted into a film, because women already paid $20 for a book so why wouldn’t they spend $12 to see Christian Grey beat Anastasia Steele with a whip? Let’s start the rumor mill, shall we?
A fun rumor went around Hollywood this past weekend: Angelina Jolie, people were saying, had been approached to direct the movie version of the steamy romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey.
… sources said there may have been an informal conversation but that nothing was real, and reps for the actress-turned-filmmaker say there haven’t been any talks with studio Focus Features (Focus also denied the rumor). (Via THR)
Tell you what – if Angelina Jolie agrees to direct 50 Shades of Grey, I will not only read the entire 3-book series, but I will also start my own erotic fan fiction website called “Fitty Shades of C-Tates”. And as excited as that may make some of you – *stares at Jacktion!* – ain’t gonna happen.
But Focus could hire a sock puppet to direct this thing and it won’t matter because 50 Shades is the hottest thing on the planet. How hot? It has made the sex toy and hardware industries blow the f*ck up.
