Peter Harris is among the vanguard for how publishing companies are operating today, always looking for new ways to develop and sell content. Publishers have always been great storytellers and Hollywood has always needed great storytellers—it’s a match with a long history. Harris and his business unit at Penguin are taking it to the next level.
Publishing companies operate vastly differently today than they did a decade ago. Nearly all of them produce and distribute books electronically; many of them produce apps and other new kinds of products; some of them are even experimenting with new kinds of content creation. Penguin is one of those companies.
With the Penguin Development Group, the book publisher is constantly on the lookout for the opportunity to develop books and book series around current trends—and then pitch those books to Hollywood. Call it the Hollywoodification of book publishing.
Atop the Penguin Development Group is Peter Harris, the group’s director. Harris, 37, has spent all of his career in Hollywood—including his current gig, which is based in Los Angeles. He’s a publishing outsider but it might just take a Hollywood temperament to make the art of finding and developing great book content more like doing the same for movies and television.
Harris came to Penguin from Temple Hill Entertainment, a Hollywood production company responsible for several films, including the Twilight series, which Harris helped produce. Prior to his three years at Temple Hill, Harris spent time at CFP Productions, also in Los Angeles, where he helped produce several other films based on books. Aside from his Hollywood experience, it should be mentioned that Harris is a lover of books.
We spoke with Harris about turning the editorial process upside-down, bringing books to the movies and how the rise of ebooks has affected the relationship between Hollywood and publishing.
Tell me about your job. It’s a role many publishing folks will be unfamiliar with.
I’m the director of the Penguin Development Group [PDG]. The goal in specific is that it’s an in-house team generating original ideas for books and series.
The PDG is also actively pitching books in Hollywood so they can be developed into feature films, video games and online entertainment. We’re working with each and every publisher and editor at Penguin that wants to discuss the projects that they most want to publish.
Do you get involved with these editors and publishers in the acquisition process to let them know whether a book might have legs in Hollywood?
We talk with the editors and the publishers about the books that either aren’t getting submitted or that have a space in the buying culture that isn’t being supplied. Or ideas that they’ve had for stories that they’ve always wanted to facilitate.
So, the answer is no. On incoming manuscripts, I’m not being consulted on any kind of a regular basis.
It’s more like the ideas begin with the publisher or the editor and then from there we look for the perfect author to complete our vision.
That’s very different from how most publishing works. It’s more like how movies and TV shows are sometimes developed.
Penguin is always known for publishing innovation and this project was definitely one of those ideas which was a natural extension.
Can you tell me about some of your projects?
Let’s go over how The Code came about. They [Penguin] asked me to work with the guys up in Penguin Canada. They wanted to try and figure out how to do a hockey thriller. It was trying to figure out is there a way to do Robert B. Parker [a crime writer] for Canadians—commercial, action-driven fiction that has a voice that is male, and self-effacing and truthful.
We have a rumpled, super-duper main character at the forefront. They [Penguin Canada] had an idea of creating a dynamic, male character at the center. We came up with Brad Shade and developed a bible around Brad and all the dynamics of him. We decided that he was a former hockey player turned hockey scout and that he was going to encounter rights and wrongs and in each adventure try to right the wrongs. His dad was a cop and he’s very capable. His hockey career, even though he made it to the NHL, he wasn’t anything except one of the smartest guys on the team. He ends up more of a journeyman player. He was a great teammate to some, including the general manager of the Los Angeles franchise and he [the general manager] lets him become a scout for L.A. up in Canada.
So then you found a writer.
We got a guy named G.B. Joyce, a long-time reporter, to write the book. We were looking for someone who could be funny. Ultimately what he delivers in The Code is that Brad Shade talks about masculinity in a way that’s refreshing.
The sequel, The Black Ace, is going to come out next year.
Then . . . movie?
I attached a producer to The Code, Lloyd Segan, and we sold it to eOne [a production company in Canada]. They do a ton of distribution up there and make a lot of original programming. Rookie Blue and Flashpoint, for example. A couple of their shows have come over to the U.S. They’ve hired a show-runner (Tim Kilby) and they’re going to show it to Canadian networks in a matter of days [this interview was conducted in November 2012]. And we shall see.
So, this is the new way of doing things then?
There’s a long tradition of people having ideas and trying to facilitate them into books. There are so many wonderful editors and publishers at Penguin, they’re bound to have great ideas. This is a way to facilitate these ideas and try to honor that vision as much as possible—after we make it a great book, try to help facilitate it to become a movie and a TV show.
You’ve spent much of your career in more traditional Hollywood jobs. Why book publishing? What’s attractive about it?
I love great stories. One of my earliest memories is writing a time travel story for the Mighty Thor.
What started to happen on the side back in 2005 is what really started to lead me into this direction. I was helping people with their bibles and writers with their proposals and helping them sell them. And that was when there was a little bit of a light bulb, “gosh, I’m helping people facilitate ideas and putting together proposals and we’re selling them to publishers.” Then, The Friday Night Knitting Club came in as a proposal to CFP Productions [where Harris was a creative executive in 2005 and 2006] and we were able to sell it to Penguin. And then it was going to become a book and pitch it as a movie to Universal. We didn’t ultimately make it into a movie but I always remembered that as I continued on.
Then at Temple Hill, the amount of success that we had with Twilight, going to Comic Con and seeing that it was going to be huge—and it was a book and that filled me with such joy that I was just so resoundingly on the side of making books into movies.
How has the rise of digital publishing and ebooks changed your role? How does your role influence the future of digital publishing?
I’m coming from this lab, agnostic in terms of platform. Ebooks are super exciting, but you can’t really tell, and I sometimes feel like in general there’s this assumption of knowledge and the future that I just think maybe overreaches. I think we just don’t know. And I’d like to invoke William Goldman [author of Adventures in the Screen Trade, a seminal work about the entertainment business in Hollywood]. It’s either the first or last chapter where he lets you in on a little secret in Hollywood: nobody knows anything.
I think it’s important to get excited about the future and kids are certainly used to tablet reading on a whole new level. Ebooks, print, movies and TV shows are all valid forms. And the most important is going to be knock-out content: It’s got to be a great story. It’s got to be something that compels people. That has character and theme and some wisdom.
Ebooks are super exciting, but you can’t really tell, and I sometimes feel like in general there’s this assumption of knowledge and the future that I just think maybe overreaches. I think we just don’t know. . . . in Hollywood: nobody knows anything.
Are you working specifically on any ebook projects?
We’re working specifically on our first ebook for Dutton Gilt Edged [a Penguin mysteries digital imprint launched in the summer of 2012]. We want to Gillian Flynn-alize Fifty Shades of Grey [Gillian Flynn is the author of the 2012 hit Gone Girl from Random House]. We’re going to do a sexy thriller.
The idea came from an editor at Dutton.
Do ebooks change the threshold of what might be a good thing to pitch?
No. I think Hollywood is after a transcendent idea and it doesn’t matter if it’s an ebook or if it’s in physical form as long as the story is creating waves. In some instances, some things that feel fresh and new, like an ebook that blasts off in self-publishing, sometimes that can really help the people in Hollywood recognize its potential. Wool is a great example [the self-published hit by Hugh Howey]. He hasn’t gotten a physical publisher in North America as of yet, but RSA Films [Ridley Scott’s production company] has been developing Wool for months now. They’re not waiting on the publishing deal—it all depends on the how good the script is and if a director wants to make it into a movie.
Of course, Hollywood is interested in sales numbers. But what they care most about is a story that moves them. And the success of Fifty Shades has de-ghettoized the idea of self-publishing in Hollywood.
How does Hollywood view the publishing industry? Has digital changed that at all?
Hollywood views publishing as an invaluable resource for stories that date back to Gone With the Wind and How Green Was My Valley. Talk about a tradition. The way that digital has changed it is that there isn’t just one place to look anymore for these great stories and Hollywood wants to be a part of it. Look at Fifty Shades and Wool. Anywhere they can find a story that they think can make a great movie or TV show, they’re ferreting.
What are you reading, and on what platform?
I just took a flight and so I read No Easy Day [by Mark Owen, from Penguin] as a hardcover.