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While my familiarity with the television series is admittedly meager, the consistently Tom Cruise-led Mission: Impossible film entries have played like minor American efforts at aping the formula that made James Bond a success. Generally, they lack the iconic imagery of 007’s finest efforts, while never really being able to hit the same critical appeal […]

You may have noticed a few trailers for OBLIVION, a new Tom Cruise SF film that seems to fuse the themes of I am Legend, Mission Impossible, War of the Worlds and Minority Report into one handy epic. (It also destroys New York, just as all futuristic movies must.) The film comes out in April and in addition to Cruise it stars Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Melissa Leo, Zoe Bell and Andrea Riseborough. The director is TRON: UPRISING's Joseph Kosinski, and he's also the source of this film's tenuous but fascinating "graphic novel" connection.

For your weekend reading pleasure, here are our top stories of the week, including disappearing books, a Wal-Mart library and Tom Cruise playing Lee Child‘s thriller hero, Jack Reacher (video embedded above).

Click here to sign up for GalleyCat’s daily email newsletter, getting all our publishing stories, book deal news, videos, podcasts, interviews, and writing advice in one place.

1. Tom Cruise Plays Jack Reacher in New Trailer
2. Wal-Mart Converted into a Library
3. Free Sites to Promote Your eBook
4. CJ Lyons Sweeps Self-Published Bestseller List with 99-Cent Sale
5. Twitter Cheat Sheet for Writers
6. Book That Disappears As You Read
7. The Lost History of Fifty Shades of Grey
8. 5 Ways to Promote Your Book Right Now
9. J. K. Rowling eBook Will Cost $19.99
10. Jennifer Weiner on Social Media, Blogging & Writing About Controversial Issues

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

For your weekend reading pleasure, here are our top stories of the week, including disappearing books, a Wal-Mart library and Tom Cruise playing Lee Child‘s thriller hero, Jack Reacher (video embedded above).

Click here to sign up for GalleyCat’s daily email newsletter, getting all our publishing stories, book deal news, videos, podcasts, interviews, and writing advice in one place.

1. Tom Cruise Plays Jack Reacher in New Trailer
2. Wal-Mart Converted into a Library
3. Free Sites to Promote Your eBook
4. CJ Lyons Sweeps Self-Published Bestseller List with 99-Cent Sale
5. Twitter Cheat Sheet for Writers
6. Book That Disappears As You Read
7. The Lost History of Fifty Shades of Grey
8. 5 Ways to Promote Your Book Right Now
9. J. K. Rowling eBook Will Cost $19.99
10. Jennifer Weiner on Social Media, Blogging & Writing About Controversial Issues

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today’s entrée is a set of exercises meant to help the writer shift perspective and get those creative muscles flexed and toned.

These small forays into new territory will, hopefully, help you gain in your battle with daily wordsmithing. Are you ready? Here goes.

Circumvent the cliché. While Little Johnny can’t read, does that mean that Little Jill has educational challenges as well? If all of your eggs are in one basket, will they all break when that basket is dropped?

We live with hackneyed and cliché phrases every day. They speak to the simplistic and real metaphors of our lives. That’s the reason they still hang around our necks like a broad-winged bird descended from a pterodactyl.

Take each of the following adages/sayings/clichés and devise three ways of saying the same thing, with the same semantics. Make each new “saying” as fresh as possible.

1. Rolling stones gather no moss.
2. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
3. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

Recast old characters in new roles. Most people can hear a line of dialogue or see one frame of a favorite movie and give you the name of the characters involved. Like favorite books, the stories that flow across a screen at the theaters make a place for themselves in our mental storage lockers, waiting for future review.

The following exercise is meant to help the writer change well-worn paths carved out by characters we know well and as an exploration of possibilities for such characters that wouldn’t otherwise be tackled.

1. Most adults over the age of 35 will probably remember the character name “Maverick” as Tom Cruise’s character from Top Gun. The exercise is to recast this character as a “Cowboy,” complete with name. If it helps, picture TC when you’re putting together an action scene in the old/new west. Only one scene is necessary to write, but if a full story evolves from this exercise, so much the better.
2. C. S. Lewis’s character of Lucy in “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” presents us with a sweet child of remarkable resolve and steel spine when faced with adversity. Yet her complex personality allows for uncommon loyalty, self-doubt, and approval-seeking behavior.

Recast Lucy’s character, complete with name, as an adult. Place her in a           romance where finding her soul mate and an unforeseen future is the goal           of the scene. This will b

Today’s entrée is a set of exercises meant to help the writer shift perspective and get those creative muscles flexed and toned.

These small forays into new territory will, hopefully, help you gain in your battle with daily wordsmithing. Are you ready? Here goes.

Circumvent the cliché. While Little Johnny can’t read, does that mean that Little Jill has educational challenges as well? If all of your eggs are in one basket, will they all break when that basket is dropped?

We live with hackneyed and cliché phrases every day. They speak to the simplistic and real metaphors of our lives. That’s the reason they still hang around our necks like a broad-winged bird descended from a pterodactyl.

Take each of the following adages/sayings/clichés and devise three ways of saying the same thing, with the same semantics. Make each new “saying” as fresh as possible.

1. Rolling stones gather no moss.
2. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
3. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

Recast old characters in new roles. Most people can hear a line of dialogue or see one frame of a favorite movie and give you the name of the characters involved. Like favorite books, the stories that flow across a screen at the theaters make a place for themselves in our mental storage lockers, waiting for future review.

The following exercise is meant to help the writer change well-worn paths carved out by characters we know well and as an exploration of possibilities for such characters that wouldn’t otherwise be tackled.

1. Most adults over the age of 35 will probably remember the character name “Maverick” as Tom Cruise’s character from Top Gun. The exercise is to recast this character as a “Cowboy,” complete with name. If it helps, picture TC when you’re putting together an action scene in the old/new west. Only one scene is necessary to write, but if a full story evolves from this exercise, so much the better.
2. C. S. Lewis’s character of Lucy in “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” presents us with a sweet child of remarkable resolve and steel spine when faced with adversity. Yet her complex personality allows for uncommon loyalty, self-doubt, and approval-seeking behavior.

Recast Lucy’s character, complete with name, as an adult. Place her in a           romance where finding her soul mate and an unforeseen future is the goal           of the scene. This will b

Deadline New York broke the news that Tom Cruise is currently considering the role of thriller hero Jack Reacher in an adaptation of a novel from Lee Child‘s bestselling Reacher series.

Do you think Cruise could handle this hardboiled role? Christopher McQuarrie will direct the film,  One Shot. Follow this link to read an excerpt from the novel.

Here’s more from the article: “I’m told that the author himself is excited about Cruise playing the role, that Cruise personifies the qualities Reacher displays in the books. As for Reacher’s hulking physical size, Child wasn’t locked into an oversized actor (one reason the film took so long to get off the ground), and it was more about establishing an intimidating presence.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Actor George Clooney will star in an adaptation of Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi‘s nonfiction book, The Monster of Florence. Valkyrie screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander will team up to work on the script.

Grand Central Publishing released the nonfiction book in 2008. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Tom Cruise was originally slated to star in the movie–Cruise recruited McQuarrie for the project.

Here’s more about the book: “Preston and Spezi’s book is an investigation into the murderer (or murderers) known as Il Mostro, who killed more than a dozen people from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s without being caught. In the course of their digging, Preston, who had moved with his family to a villa in Florence, and Spezi, an Italian crime journalist, were themselves then investigated by the police.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Leonardo DiCaprio will play a real-life 19th Century serial killer in an upcoming adaptation of Erik Larson‘s book, The Devil in the White City.

Here’s more from the release: “[T]he film follows both the planning and execution of the mass murders, which take place during the city’s most profound moment on the world’s stage.In the film, DiCaprio plays the murder-minded H.H. Holmes, a cavalier charlatan who takes advantage of somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, to develop a lucrative personal cadaver-disposal system.”

Deadline Hollywood has more about the deal, including some back-story about Tom Cruise‘s attempt to mount a production of the book. Although best known for this book, Larson is also the author of a number of nonfiction books, including Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, and Thunderstruck.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Brad with Jeremy Renner (L), Tom Cruise and Paula Patton

As we continue to stalk cover Brad Bird’s travels around the globe, here are some new shots of him in Dubai at a press conference for Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol. Brad will be shooting parts of the film in Dubai at the Burj Khalifa tower, the world’s tallest building. More photos after the jump. Click on each for a bigger version.


(L-R) Producer Jeffrey Chernov, actor Jeremy Renner, director Brad Bird, actor Tom Cruise, actress Paula Patton and producer Bryan Burk

(via)

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'Twilight,' Tom Cruise and lots of bleeping (dominated the MTV Movie Awards last night. Also Sandra Bullock accepted the MTV Generation Award. Understand the PR move, but anyone else feel like this was an odd fit? New York Magazine asks the same... Read the rest of this post

I can't take much credit for this one. This is a celebrity caricature done by my best friend. He loves doing caricatures and has done them at several area art fairs, sporting events and private parties. He asked me to post this here on his behalf.

To see more of his work visit his portfolio site (which I built for him.)

Gene Glazier/BIGHEADS ARTainment(Caricatures)

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TMZ (I know, I know...) is reporting the following:

• "Tom Cruise has been talking with Ben Stiller about starring in an updated version of "The Hardy Boys" at Twentieth Century Fox. Tentatively titled "The Hardy Men" -- a comedy that would be directed by Stiller's director on "A Night At the Museum," Shawn Levy ("The Pink Panther," "Cheaper By the Dozen")."

(I realize that second sentence is not, technically, a sentence, but I'm quoting directly.)

Let's just call this little gossip item "especially for Leila":