The most famous Hollywood urban myth goes like this: a fat, cigar-smoking studio boss is reading the week's box-office figures, and glances quickly at the names responsible for the hits. Excited, he growls into his intercom 'Get me this Jane Austen!' (Or Charles Dickens, or Chaucer, depending on which version of the story you heard).
Like all great myths, people swear blind it's true, even though variants on it date back to the days of Samuel Goldwyn. Some time in the next few weeks, you'll hear the one about the executive who bellowed 'Call Ted Hughes!'
Ted Hughes? The late Poet Laureate's reputation has certainly soared with Tales From Ovid and The Birthday Letters, not to mention his death, and he sells very well for a poet, but surely dense natural allegories aren't causing a frenzy in Burbank? Well, no. But in 1968, Hughes published The Iron Man, a children's book about a terrifying, mysterious metallic giant who rises from the sea and is befriended by a little boy.
Hughes wrote the story for his children after the death of Sylvia Plath, and it has long been considered a classic. Pete Townshend of The Who later turned it into a rather cumbersome musical. And it was Townshend who pitched the book to Warner Brothers.
The film - called The Iron Giant - takes the inevitable liberties with the story: the time and place are now Maine, 1957, and there is a raft of new characters as well as an explicitly Cold War setting. Those might seem like substantial changes, but Hughes approved of the adaptation. Wisely, Townshend's music has been left out. Jennifer Aniston from Friends does the voice for the boy's mother. And the all-important, pre-release buzz has been little short of sensational.
From venerable trade magazine the Hollywood Reporter to Internet scoopers, everyone agrees that, at the very least, The Iron Giant is the best animated movie in years. But the comparisons go much further, stretching to ET and even 2001: A Space Odyssey. 'It feels like a classic even though it's just out of the box,' according to the LA Times.
The only quibbles come from unreconstructed McCarthyites, complaining that the film mocks the big Red scare. If a kids' film can do that, it might be even better than early reviews suggest. It makes sense when you learn that the director is Brad Bird, whose experience comes not from the mighty Disney animation production line but rather the great TV cartoons of recent times: The Simpsons and King of the Hill. That alone promises a greater sophistication of storytelling than any recent animated film, even before you add Hughes to the mix.
Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise to see Hughes's name on one of the potential big summer hits. As the very existence of the 'Get Me Jane Austen' story shows, Hollywood has frequently dipped into highbrow literature. Shakespeare may be particularly in vogue at the moment - with A Midsummer Night's Dream and Titus Andronicus plus teen takes on Hamlet and Othello on their way, but the truth is you're rarely far from a Shakespeare adaptation in the movies: remember Brando in Julius Caesar, Polanski's Macbeth or Mel Gibson in Hamlet? Then there have been Edith Wharton moments, waves of Wilde, Hardy crazes and - unforgettably and unforgivably - Cybill Shepherd as Henry James's Daisy Miller.
Some of the movies' literature habit stems from the logic that a good story is always a good story, so that Romeo and Juliet can translate to New York (West Side Story) or The Tempest to outer space (Forbidden Planet) or you can even have (the forthcoming, and painfully titled) Crime and Punishment in High School. But it's also the case that Hollywood is far from the cultural wasteland of myth. Stories of delirious ignorance are more fun than imagining producers who know precisely what War and Peace is, and have sagely chosen not to try to film it again.
The original great moguls may have bullied and battered Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Chandler, but at least they made damn sure that every major writer in America came out to the West Coast. And since then the studios have been overrun by English lit graduates, always keen to show off their learning - as long as they think they can do it without damaging profits in the process.
Take Julia Phillips, producer of The Sting and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and author of You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again, the notorious memoir of the cocaine-ravaged 1970s film business. Her tales of freebasing madness helped mythologise a time when Hollywood's second Golden Age disappeared in blow-out of drugs and greed. And Phillips personified Hollywood at its worst. But before she was swept up by drugs and Steven Spielberg, Phillips was an Emily Dickinson-obsessed intellectual.
Even in the 1980s, when Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer apparently tried to kill off all films whose plot couldn't be boiled down to a snappy line, Hollywood's lit crowd indulged themselves in the deluge of EM Forster adaptations from England. And as soon as the 1990s arrived, Michael Mann - creator of that ultimate Ferraris-and-pastels show, Miami Vice - hired Merchant-Ivory veteran Daniel Day-Lewis to star in The Last of the Mohicans. (If you think the book is no more than an upmarket Western, you obviously haven't struggled through it).
When Miramax's Harvey Weinstein came along and showed that if you welded ruthless business tactics to a taste for fancy books, you could make films such as The English Patient into hits, there was no shortage of people in Tinseltown willing to pat themselves on the back.
Even as cultural critics were seeing portents of civilisation's grisly doom in Wayne's World, we were getting Sense and Sensibility, Emma and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, - and that's before you even talk about the whole Clueless/Ten Things I Hate About You sub-genre. For a town where people supposedly don't have the attention span to read a cereal packet, there seem to be an awful lot of well-thumbed Penguin Classics around.
Nor do the film stars want to be taken for barbarians. Witness Looking For Richard, Al Pacino's documentary about his quest to 'get' Richard III. You'd think that the star of The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon would have nothing to prove, but Pacino is humble in front of Shakespeare and the Shakespeareans.
It's not just 'thinking stars' like Johnny Depp, either: ask Elizabeth Berkley - star of Showgirls - who her favourite writer is, and she'll say 'Rilke' - and then very carefully spell it out for you, just in case. Sylvester Stallone has been plugging away at an Edgar Allan Poe biopic since 1970, only to be distracted every time another Rocky episode or something like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot comes along.
Then there is Meg Ryan, who should take the time to watch The Iron Giant since she's trying to get Hollywood interested in Sylvia Plath. Or just have a look at who is appearing in London's theatres this week: the movies may have steamrollered all previous cultural forms, but the last people to acknowledge this are the hordes of film stars who announce that they are 'going back to the stage'. Which is where they might encounter the works of Hughes's fellow fashionable Dead White Englishmen.
David Mamet may be one of the most important living playwrights, but he's chosen to revisit Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy, further confirmation that the once reviled Rattigan is a contender again (this is the second Rattigan film of the decade, following Mike Figgis's The Browning Version).
And it's only a short step from Rattigan to Noel Coward. Right now - 100 years on from his birth - there are no less than eight Coward-based films on the way. Even eliminating the wishful thinking entries, the list still produces four probables and certainties, including Relative Values, starring Colin Firth, Stephen Fry and Julie Andrews, which has just started shooting. A version of Hay Fever, with Joanna Lumley and directed by Ealing veteran Charles Crichton is scheduled for next year. But the big one - if it happens - will be Blithe Spirit starring Nicole Kidman and Rupert Everett. That would have PAs all over LA looking for copies of Coward's collected works.
That's if they're not looking for Graham Greene books - inspired by The End of the Affair, starring Ralph Fiennes - or researching Alexander Pushkin, soon to be made movie-world famous by Onegin, which stars - inevitably - Ralph Fiennes.
If he's wise, newly crowned Poet Laureate Andrew Motion will be using the time between Royal Wedding odes to knock together a script - and sending it express delivery to Fiennes.
• 'The Iron Giant' is released in the UK at Christmas.
Cooking the book: some movers from page to big screen
Anniversaries prompt film-makers, with this recent Wilde adaptation anticipating next year's centenary of his death.
A few years ago you couldn't move for Austen adaptations.
Jude
No costume-drama flannel from director Michael Winterbottom in this austere take on Hardy's Jude the Obscure.
Forget the adaptation, this one goes for the scribe himself, with Joseph Fiennes playing a saucy Shakespeare.
