I’m slightly ashamed to admit this, but I always thought “pithy” meant something derogatory. Which means that when I read this LA Times interview with best-selling author Patricia Cornwell – who was speaking about Angelina Jolie taking on the role Cornwell created – I initially thought Cornwell was a H8TER. Turns out, Cornwell was saying that Angelina is a smart, substantive ball-buster, and that’s why Jolie should play Kay Scarpetta in the film adaptation. Angelina signed on to the project last spring - and the film will likely be her next project after she films The Tourist.

Anyway, I found the interview with Cornwell very interesting. I’m going to tell my mom that Jolie got Cornwell’s express approval, because my mom loves the Scarpetta series. Cornwell is basically defending Jolie’s casting not only because of Jolie’s “pithiness” but because Cornwell knows how upset Scarpetta fans were with someone so much younger than the written character playing the part.

Depending on how one counts, it was a meeting either six months or almost 20 years in the making. The major participants? Two pop-culture luminaries. One was Angelina Jolie, the Oscar winner who launched 1,000 paparazzi and carried off with swagger such action flicks as “Wanted” and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.” The other was Patricia Cornwell, one of the world’s most commercial authors.

The topic was Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell’s signature character, the medical examiner in 17 mystery novels. For almost two decades, Hollywood has attempted to bring Scarpetta to the big screen. Various studios have spent more than $10 million in development, and talent as disparate as actresses Demi Moore and Kristin Scott Thomas and directors Joel Schumacher and Antonia Bird have attempted to tackle books in the series. “I think she’s a bit of the runaway bride,” Cornwell says of her literary alter ego’s relationship with Hollywood. “She flirts, but won’t get married.”

But Jolie’s desire to play Scarpetta has revived prospects of a movie franchise that could begin shooting as early as next fall. In a surprise, Fox 2000 has decided to jettison the books in favor of an origins story written directly for the screen. Set in the present day (as opposed to the late 1980s, when the series begins), the film will feature a distinctly younger Scarpetta in the years before she becomes the steely, unassailable expert pathologist she is today.

In a recent phone interview, Cornwell said her meeting with Jolie last spring on the set of “Salt,” the actress’ latest thriller, was crucial to getting the character back on track for a film incarnation. And no, the author doesn’t object to the original screenplay approach. The script has been entrusted to little-known Irish screenwriter Kerry Williamson, who won the plum assignment over a slew of better-known scribes with her vision of a Scarpetta who hasn’t fully come into her own yet.

“There’s almost like this brewing passion in her, and intensity and sexuality that she doesn’t feel comfortable unleashing,” Williamson says. “In the books, she’s further along as a character, at the height of her career. In the screenplay, we bring her back to a time before that, when she’s just charting her course, and trying to break the glass ceiling. She sees what society might consider her female traits — intuition, compassion, instinct — as a weakness in the real world. Yet that is where her power lies. Her evolution is into accepting that.”

“I can understand why the studio doesn’t want to launch her as someone’s who’s my age,” says the 53-year-old Cornwell, who adds that by restarting Scarpetta in 2010, the filmmakers can update all the technology too. Like many authors of her stature, Cornwell has significant approval rights over how Scarpetta is rendered on-screen. Meanwhile, merely hammering out a deal was a long, protracted process.

Cornwell optioned her first book to Hollywood in 1990 for a mere $10,000. Later, she personally tried to persuade Jodie Foster to play Scarpetta. “Poor Jodie. I campaigned heavily for that in 1992,” says Cornwell. “But she didn’t think it was a good idea because of ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ ”

In the late 1990s, Cornwell attempted to write the screenplay herself, holing up with then-director Milcho Manchevski. “It still didn’t work,” she said. In 2000, Sony bought the rights to the series for $5 million, and hired writers such as Robert Rodat (“Saving Private Ryan”) and Stephen Schiff (“Lolita”), but still the movie stalled.

Cornwell says she began to get discouraged. “I used to say it’s the promised land that I’m not allowed to enter. There are very few people who have been No. 1 on the bestseller list and never had a film made of any kind.” Compounding her frustration was the fact that much of Scarpetta’s forensic-scientific expertise, which was startlingly original when the series began, had become a staple of television via “CSI” and its knockoffs.

Then, Cornwell’s other ICM agent, Ron Bernstein, contacted Geyer Kosinski, Jolie’s manager and now a producer on the film with Mark Gordon. Soon after, Fox 2000 and Universal were vying for the project, with Fox 2000 winning. The filmmakers want to make a character-driven thriller, not simply a big-screen procedural. “It’s about what it is to be a woman,” Williamson says. “The anima and animus reversing.”

Cornwell certainly sounds pleased about the recent turn in Hollywood’s quest to bring Scarpetta to the cineplex.

“When Angelina came out of left field last year, I was floored,” she says. And then it took months of protracted negotiations to get the two in a room together. “I think meeting the head of the KGB might have been easier,” Cornwell says. “It was all hush-hush.” Finally, Jolie’s “Salt” trailer, then located on Long Island, was deemed the spot. Cornwell suggested that she herself fly her proposed suitors — Gordon, Kosinski and Fox 2000 executive Carla Hacken — out to the set in her helicopter, an option that got derailed by the weather, so instead they all trekked out from Manhattan in a limo.

“[Angelina] had pithy things to say about what she wanted to do. She was direct and goal-oriented,” says Cornwell, who adds that she was particularly impressed by Jolie’s demeanor. “She waited on everyone, getting them their lunch, while her own staff was seated. She was aware intuitively how other people were feeling and wanted to make them comfortable. It was not typical for people of her stature.”

As Cornwell succinctly notes about dealing with celebrities: “Usually, it’s all about them.”

[From The Los Angeles Times]

Typically, when a beloved book series is being adapted for film, I do think you should try to skew slightly younger than the characters are written, just because if the first film is a hit, it’s going to be another two or three years before another one is made, and an actor doesn’t want to age too dramatically for the sequel. Think of Harrison Ford in the Jack Ryan role – by the time producers wanted to do a fourth Jack Ryan movie, Harrison was much too old to do that crap. Anyway, people are upset about Jolie’s casting all over again, but Cornwell isn’t bothered by the H8TERS.

Here’s a photo of Cornwell:

Angelina with Pax, and filming ‘The Tourist’ in Paris on February 25, 2010, credit: ANG/Fame Pictures.

Patricia Cornwell, 53, is the best selling author of the Kay Scarpetta murder mystery series. It was just announced earlier this year that the series had been optioned for a film by Twentieth Century Fox that will star Angelina Jolie as Scarpetta. It’s still in the screenplay phase and it will be some time before production starts.

Cornwell and her same sex spouse, Harvard neuroscientist Staci Gruber, are currently suing an accounting and investment firm for losing their whopping $40 million personal fortune. The tone of this quoted article, which is from an investment site, is condescending to Cornwell and Gruber. In a way I feel sorry for them for trusting these people who squandered their millions. In another way you do have to wonder why they didn’t question what was happening with their money years ago. It sounds like they handed it over to this firm and implicitly trusted them, only to have it completely squandered away before they noticed:

t’s a mystery Kay Scarpetta, the fictional medical examiner and heroine of the hugely successful mystery novels written by Patricia Cornwell, would love to tackle. However, in a plot twist that Cornwell wouldn’t dare to conjure up, this mystery is real.

Gone missing is the $40 million personal fortune of Cornwell and her spouse, Staci Gruber, a Harvard neuroscientist.

While Scarpetta may pursue every minute clue in an effort to find the culprit, the brainy duo of Cornwell and Gruber seem to be clueless when it comes to keeping track of their finances.

In a complaint filed in the Federal Court in Boston on October 13, the two claim that they are victims of their New York-based accounting and financial advisory firm, Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP, which they hired to provide “traditional and non-traditional advisory services.” Among those “non-traditional” services, the two claim the firm said it “would do everything for its clients including buying and delivering their toilet paper.” At least that would have been value added.

According to the complaint, the financial management firm controlled every aspect of the financial lives of its clients and provided them with no information about their assets, liabilities, expenses or net worth. In the four and a half years in which Anchin ran the couple’s finances, they allegedly lost approximately $40 million, while paying themselves almost $1 million “all without providing bills, or billing detail or back-up.”

Where did the money go?

That’s the remarkable part of this case. The complaint does not specify a single investment that was made by Anchin, Block & Anchin. There are some juicy tidbits about unauthorized expenses laid out in the lawsuit like a $5,000 bat mitvah gift to the daughter of a principal of Anchin “whom Ms. Cornwell has never met” and a “gift” of $11,000 to a business associate “who denies ever receiving the funds.” Anchin did not return calls seeking comment by press time.

[From Daily Finance.com]

This sounds similar to Nicolas Cage’s recent money problems in that it’s all the accountant’s fault. Only in Cage’s case he had multiple multi-million investment properties that he must have signed off on. If this report is accurate, Cornwell and Gruber just believed their money was in safe hands and didn’t realize it was being spent. It seems like the only way to be sure what’s happening to your cash is to watch it closely. If you’re a high net worth individual, as some of these people are called, you can’t just expect someone else to manage it all your money for you without some careful oversight on your part. Cornwell and her partner probably aren’t going to go bust, but it looks like they may have to keep working at a point where they were hoping to retire. That’s sadly happening to a lot of people lately.