Hungry For Books Hollywood Shows New Eagerness To Lock In Film Rights For Works By Best-Selling Authors

It used to be that a literary agent first sold a book to a publisher and then tried to sell it to the movies. But increasingly the rules of the game are changing.

Hollywood is hungrier than ever these days, and studios, unabashedly competitive in their hunt for new movie material, have become even more zealous in their efforts to snatch up book manuscripts, sometimes even before a publishing contract is in place.

As a result, more best-selling authors are finding themselves in the midst of multimillion-dollar auctions, and even first-time novelists and littleknown authors are getting in on the action. Writers are finding that a good movie deal not only pays off in itself but can raise a publisher’s advance as well.

In the past six months, Ellen Levine, an agent based in Manhattan, has seen price tags soar for two of her manuscripts: “The Horse Whisperer,” an unfinished first novel by the British writer Nicholas Evans, and “Vertical Run,” by Joseph R. Garber.

In the case of “The Horse Whisperer,” Delacorte placed a $250,000 floor bid last fall for the American rights to the book. But before the auction took place, Hollywood Pictures and Robert Redford’s film studio, Wildwood Productions, bought the film rights for $3 million. By the time the publishing auction rolled around in November, New York publishers were ready to prove they had big money, too.

The final advance from Delacorte was $3.15 million, bringing the total income from the American publishing and film rights to $6.15 million.

“Vertical Run” enjoyed a similar, if not so staggering, fate. Garber’s first novel, “Rascal Money,” (Contemporary Books/Ballantine) was virtually unknown. But when Levine offered publishers Garber’s new book, she began getting calls from movie studios, which had been leaked copies of the thriller, about an executive chased through a high-rise office building by his murderous boss and co-workers and who turns office supplies into weapons to defend himself.

Even before a publishing contract was in place, producer Jon Peters and Warner Brothers bought the film rights for $400,000. Bantam then bought the North American publishing rights for $540,000, significantly more than Levine had expected.

“I was going to show it to Hollywood after the book contract was done,” Levine said. “That’s just usually the way you do it. But this worked out beautifully.”

The reason Hollywood is so hot for books can be easily divined by looking at a list of the highestgrossing films of 1994. Three of the top 10 started out as books.

Two of them - “Clear and Present Danger,” by Tom Clancy, and Ann Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” - had lengthy runs on The New York Times best-seller list. But perhaps the most surprising box-office winner of the year, with nearly $300 million in ticket sales, was “Forrest Gump,” adapted from a little-known book by Winston Groom.

If the success of “Clear and Present Danger” and “Interview With the Vampire” reminded Hollywood that best sellers can translate easily into blockbusters, the runaway success of “Gump” reminded it that book Cinderellas can be transformed into box-office beauties.

Movies made from best-selling books can benefit greatly from the fact that an audience has already been cultivated - in other words, the book serves as free advertising for the movie. But in the scramble for “product” in Hollywood, even a notso-popular book, even a book or author no one knows about yet, can be a better route to box-office success than a screenplay these days.

“Books are required to have beginnings, middles and endings, and there is something quite wonderful about having the characters defined,” said one studio executive, who requested anonymity. Screenplays, she added, are often bought on the basis of “concepts” and never get developed successfully as full stories.

And faced with increasing competition for good stories, Hollywood producers are on the hunt.

Publishers Weekly, now has almost 5,000 subscribers in California, many of them studio executives. Eager to get an edge on their competition, a dozen of those subscribers recently agreed to pay $745 a year to have the magazine’s “forecast” section, which reviews books at least three months before they are published, faxed to them immediately instead of waiting for the mail.