Dewey Gram

On Friday, Tom Cruise's latest film, "The Last Samurai," will be released in theaters. The requisite massive marketing blitz for this period piece about a Civil War general who learns the ways of the Samurai warriors of Japan has already been underway for months. Part of that blitz was supposed to include "The Last Samurai" novelization -- the book based on the movie -- which was to have hit shelves in late November. No longer.

On Friday, Tom Cruise's latest film, "The Last Samurai," will be released in theaters. The requisite massive marketing blitz for this period piece about a Civil War general who learns the ways of the Samurai warriors of Japan has already been underway for months. Part of that blitz was supposed to include "The Last Samurai" novelization -- the book based on the movie -- which was to have hit shelves in late November. No longer.

"Babe's Country Cookbook" by Dewey Gram (GT Publishing, $19.95), published to coincide with the release of the movie "Babe in the City," claims to offer recipes from the Hoggett family's British country kitchen. It also claims to be all-vegetarian. Which raises the unsettling question of why the Hoggetts kept all those ducks, sheep, cows and--yes--pigs around in the first place.

Nice article on film novelizer Dewey Gram ("A Writer Who's Adapted," Dec. 4). I've done 28 film and TV novelizations, including "Star Wars" and the first three "Alien" films. I consider myself a novelist and my novelizations to be collaborations with other writers. Apparently it's OK to receive kudos and even an Oscar for adapting a novel into a screenplay, but worth little more than contempt for doing the reverse, when doing the reverse (screenplay to novel) is actually much more difficult.