To celebrate a new release, by small press New Directions, Fancher attended an event at the SoHo bookstore McNally Jackson on Wednesday, alongside author Rivka Galchen, who wrote the introduction for the new edition, and Christine Smallwood, a critic who reviewed the book recently for Harper’s Magazine. Author Begins Storybook Life.” Despite the frisson of attention, the book fell out of print in the early 1990s, though it continued to spread quietly by word of mouth. The Los Angeles Times headline at the time: “Obscure U.S. Critics and writers like John Updike and Ursula Le Guin took notice of Ingalls, an American woman living abroad. First published in 1982, it gained notoriety in 1986 when Britain’s Book Marketing Council featured it near the top of its list of the best American novels since World War II. Though Fancher’s screenplay obtained notoriety of its own-a friend of Fancher’s mentioned that it is occasionally taught in a screenwriting class at the Columbia School of the Arts- the book has achieved legendary status.

“They’re always looking for a way not to make a movie.” “Most movies aren’t made, and you never find out why,” Fancher said now. Even with a director attached, and a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, then at the peak of his Miramax-era power, the project fell apart. He imagined the lizardman, Larry, as a fearsome and empowered creature, “like Jeff Bridges in Starman or Avatar.” And though usually he found screenwriting hard, on Dorothy and the Lizardman, “I was enjoying myself throughout the process.”ĭorothy and the Lizardman was never made. “The book has a certain mystique to it it’s eerie, it’s odd, and that’s up my alley,” Fancher said, remembering that he had never heard of the book when producers approached him to write the adaptation. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, it was about the love affair between Dorothy, a California housewife, and a 6’7” lizardman, who escapes from a laboratory after murdering his captors and takes refuge in her home. In the early 1990s, Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher went to work on a screenplay that told a very unusual kind of love story.

Mrs caliban