Frank BEDDOR -- a successful Hollywood producer with an oddball book idea he was burning to write -- thought he knew how this game was played.
"I was really excited because my agent said, 'I can put you in the room,' " Beddor recalled from a room of his own, papered with whimsical graphics, in his Wilshire Boulevard production office. "And I took the Hollywood approach: I would get into the room and pitch them. I thought it was gonna be great. You know how in Hollywood you want to go to the studio head, go over all those layers?"
Beddor, 48, has the energy and zealous confidence you'd expect in a former actor, world-champion freestyle skier and stuntman, as well as the kind of bland, blue-eyed handsomeness that Greg Kinnear has spent much of his career undercutting. He managed to sell the idea for "There's Something About Mary," which he produced, in a Sundance ski lift.
But his charms weren't, in the end, enough: New York publishers listened politely and handed his projects to their editors, who were resentful at being passed over. "An editor wants to discover someone. Not only that, I was from Hollywood -- and I was a producer! I mean, I couldn't have had more strikes against me. They decided it was garbage, I'm sure, before they even read it."
It's all guesswork, of course, why he was rejected. But whatever the reason, he ended up getting shut down more than a dozen times. Undaunted, he did what Robert Frost and Jimi Hendrix before him did after struggling for attention in the States: He went to England, where the book found a publisher and became a critical and popular sensation.
That battle won, seven years later, Beddor is about halfway into the design of a fantasy-fiction empire called "The Looking Glass Wars." The series, which extends and inverts the work of Lewis Carroll, includes the eponymous initial volume, published in the U.K. in 2004 and in the States, where it became a bestseller, in 2006; a second novel in a projected trilogy called "Seeing Redd"; the graphic novel "Hatter M."; and a scrapbook called "Princess Alyss of Wonderland." (The scrapbook, in pink, looks as girl-targeted as the ultraviolent, dark-shades-of-blue graphic novel is testosterone-drenched.)
These last two offer alternate ways to get into the series, as will an online game called the "Card Soldier Wars," which came out this month, and a CD soundtrack.
