Stef Dawson Posts Photo With Suzanne Collins

Stef Dawson (our Annie Cresta) posted a lovely photo of herself with Suzanne Collins to her instagram and whosay today with the caption:

The Beautiful and Incredible Suzanne Collins and I. Forever grateful to her for Annie & touching lives with stories that matter. Love her X

We do too, Stef! We're SO happy that you're our Annie and you totally GET IT!

The bigger question here is: ARE THEY ON SET????

Suzanne Collins and Francis Lawrence Talk to Time Magazine Part 3

With The Hunger Games: Catching Fire opening in theaters on Friday, Nov. 22, TIME book critic Lev Grossman recently sat down for a long and wide-ranging conversation with Hunger Games creator-writer Suzanne Collins and Catching Fire director Francis Lawrence.

This is the third in a five-part series:

The descriptions of combat in the arena are so visceral, so graphic – how did you know how far you could go, in terms of describing violence to a young audience?
Suzanne Collins: I think probably my own experience as a child. I had been exposed to these things very early through history, through my father.  He I think knew the level that was acceptable at different ages to explore a different topic or something with this. That was probably my guideline through all nine of the books.

I think that it’s very uncomfortable for people to talk to children about war. And so they don’t because it’s easier not to. But then you have young people at 18 who are enlisting in the army and they really don’t have the slightest idea what they’re getting into.  I think we put our children at an enormous disadvantage by not educating them in war, by not letting them understand about it from a very early age. It’s not about scaring them. The stories didn’t scare me when I was a child, and in these cases they’re fictionalized. Gregor is set in a fantasy world and The Hunger Games is set far in the future. I don’t get the sense that the young readers are frightened by them. I think they’re intrigued by them and in some ways I think they’re relieved to see the topic discussed.

Francis Lawrence: Yeah, and to see you not hold back.  I think that’s also part of it.  It’s that you don’t hold back; you show the consequences.

SC: It’s something we should be having dialogues about a lot earlier with our children.  It exists, but people get uncomfortable and they don’t know how to talk about it.  There are children soldiers all around the world right now who are 9, 10, carrying arms, forced to be at war and whatnot.  Can our children not even read a fictional story about it?  I think they can.

See Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. More of Part 3 after the jump.

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Suzanne Collins and Francis Lawrence Talk to Time Magazine Part 2

Check out Part 2 of Time's 5 part interview with Catching Fire author Suzanne Collins and the movie's director Francis Lawrence. Read Part 1 HERE.

TIME: Francis, what sold you on Catching Fire? What made you want to make this movie?
Francis Lawrence: The stories in general I loved. The theme and the idea of the consequence of war and what that does to people and how people are affected by war and by violence. I just thought that there’s not many of these YA stories that really come from a real idea and a strong, topical, relatable idea. Then I had the opportunity with Catching Fire to sort of open the world up. Part of what I love to do is creation, and there was a bunch of world creation done in the first one, but there was more opportunity — we were going to see more of the Capitol, more of 12, lots of other districts. There was a brand-new arena that had nothing to do with the first arena. So there was a lot visually for me to sink my teeth into.

Did you feel as though you wanted to keep to the same kind of visual style and visual vocabulary that [Hunger Games director] Gary [Ross] had established?
FL: I think it would have been a little bit of a mistake to entirely throw out an approach to a movie when it’s a franchise. I would never do that to a franchise. But in saying that, I thought there were some opportunities to open up the scope in terms of the costumes and the visual effects and just geography in general. I liked Gary’s naturalistic approach. I have my own version of it, my own style. I don’t shoot the way he does, I choose different kinds of lenses, and part of that is to feel more intimate with characters while still maintaining a sense of place. So I have a different approach, but I kept the same production designer on, because he designed the Capitol, and those aesthetics should carry through. And even the other districts, there should still be aesthetic unity all the way through that I wanted to make sure we maintained.

Read more after the jump.

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Suzanne Collins and Francis Lawrence Talk to Time Magazine Part 1

TIME talks to the writer-creator of The Hunger Games and the director of Catching Fire —  Part 1 in an exclusive five-part series. The interview has been divided into five parts, running Monday through Friday.

Compare Katniss at the beginning of Hunger Games and Katniss at the beginning of this movie. How is she different now?
Francis Lawrence: Well, Katniss is different because she’s been through the games. I think that was one of the things that really interested me most about the material and about this book was that we get to start to see the kind of effects that the games have on people, the effects that violence has on people.

How do you show that change?
FL: Even though she’s in the place she loves in the forest, I think that there’s a look to her, I would call it the thousand-yard stare. She’s still disturbed by things, and can’t get certain thoughts and images out of her head. And pretty quickly she has flashbacks to the games, within minutes of the opening.

Suzanne Collins: She’s got a lot of classic post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. She has nightmares. She has flashbacks. And in the beginning you can see she’s practicing avoidance. She’s completely pushed Peeta to arm’s length, you know? She’s trying to stay away from him. Why? Because everything associated with him except some very early childhood memories are associated with the Games. She’s conflicted to some degree about her relationship with Prim because she couldn’t save Rue. So she’s dealing with all that, and her method of dealing with it is to go to the woods and be alone and keep all of that as far away as possible, because there just are so many triggers in her everyday life.

But of course, what happens right at the story is it’s beginning of the Victory Tour, and that means that she’s going to have to go to every district and stand there and look at the families of the dead children. Some of them in some districts, like District 1, she killed both tributes. She killed both Marvel and Glimmer. So it’s this nightmare waiting to happen. And then just to make it extra awful, Snow visits her with the threat, so she’s something of a wreck at the beginning.

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'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' Marketing Campaign - Suzanne Collins Approves!

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire made the cover of the October 29th issue of Variety. The issue has loads of new photos and an article on how The Hunger Games changed Lionsgate, Jennifer Lawrence, and what the future brings for the franchise and the studio. Check out that article and photos HERE. Variety has another really interesting article about Lionsgate CMO Tim Palen and the innovative marketing campaign he's spearheading for Catching Fire. Oh, and the coolest thing about it? Suzanne Collins approves.

From Variety.com

Just as The Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins introduced a dystopian world that entranced millions of readers and moviegoers, so Lionsgate’s marketing chief Tim Palen has brought that universe to life in an elaborately detailed campaign for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire that goes beyond traditional movie posters, billboards, trailers and websites to establish a unique realm of its own.

Palen’s innovative ideas — not the least of which was setting the book’s iconic mockingjay logo ablaze — helped propel the first of four planned Hunger Games movies to nearly $700 million in global ticket sales. He’s now taken the marketing narrative and imagery to a new level in hopes of broadening the audience for the upcoming Nov. 22 release beyond teens and tweens to the faith and family crowd, Hispanics, African-Americans, fashionistas, even seniors.

For Palen, whose soft-spoken, understated demeanor defies a fierce, tattooed marketing warrior with a meticulously plotted battle plan, Catching Fire has unleashed the 51-year-old’s creative ingenuity, and he’s seized the opportunity to tell a bigger, more color-saturated story through provocative visuals, bringing a complimentary world to life that has connected with Collins’ rabid fan base.

“This was dramatically different from anything we did on the first movie,” Palen says. “It was brave of the filmmakers to agree we should be that bold.”

During the year-long campaign that launched last November, Palen went so far as to create a faux online fashion magazine, dubbed Capitol Couture, modeled after luxury publications like DuJour, Gotham and Ocean Drive, built around the ultra-rich and style-obsessed capitol city of Panem, the fictional nation in the bestselling author’s trilogy of young adult novels. The mag features manufactured articles curated by freelance journalist Monica Corcoran Harel, and photos of the film’s characters that reveal their elaborate look, shot by Palen himself.

With Palen crafting the images and message, Hunger Games is well protected. He’s as much of a fan of the franchise as the teens and tweens who made the original film a hit, and passed the books on to their friends and family. Collins has a loyal friend in the marketing topper.

“I’m thrilled with the work Tim Palen and his marketing team have done on the film,” Collins told Variety via email. “It’s appropriately disturbing and thought-provoking how the campaign promotes ‘Catching Fire’ while simultaneously promoting the Capitol’s punitive forms of entertainment. The stunning image of Katniss in her wedding dress that we use to sell tickets is just the kind of thing the Capitol would use to rev up its audience for the Quarter Quell (the name of the games in Catching Fire). That dualistic approach is very much in keeping with the books.”

Pretty much every element of the sequel’s campaign is bolder than its predecessor. Where the first installment relied on a more subdued look to capture Collins’ bleak, oppressed world, Palen and the author felt this was his chance to brighten things up.

“This is the book and the movie of color,” he says, having consulted closely with Collins before designing the campaign. “This is the moment where we can actually have some fun and explore some opportunities that we might not get to have later,” he added, referring to the final book in the Hunger Games series, which Lionsgate is splitting into two movies, Mockingjay — Part 1 and Part 2.

Read on about Palens's inspiration for some of the photo shoots and SO much more at Variety.com

Suzanne Collins #3 On Forbes Top Earning Authors of 2013 List

Forbes just listed Suzanne Collins at #3 on their list of top earning authors of 2013 - and the year's not over yet. Collins earned an estimated $55 million in the last year. 

Photo by Graylock/ABACAUSA.COM/NewscomFrom Forbes:

Writing thrillers or romances for adults is good; even better is writing fantasy fiction for young adults that spills over into the adult market. The biggest franchises of the past decade have employed this formula, most recently Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy. Collins’ earnings of $55 million — good for No. 3 on our list — also showed the power of a hit film adaptation, which can launch a book from the earthly best-seller list into the stratosphere

The blockbuster release of the first Hunger Games film, starring Jennifer Lawrence, helped launch Collins from the ranks of up-and-comers to the Olympian heights of J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer. A former children's television writer, she's also the author of the five-book series The Underland Chronicles. 

Happy Birthday Suzanne Collins!

Happy Birthday to the wonderful Suzanne Collins! Her amazing Hunger Games trilogy has changed our lives, and we are inspired each and every day by the world she created in Panem. 

"I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents."
                                                                                          - Suzanne Collins

Jennifer Lawrence & Suzanne Collins Make the Forbes Celebrity 100 List

Forbes just published their annual Celebrity 100, a list of the 100 most powerful celebrities based on entertainment earnings and media visibility, and both Jennifer Lawrence and Suzanne Collins made this year's list. 

#49 Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence lands on our list for the first time. The actress who ranks 49th with $26 million. It’s hard to think of an actress who had a better year than Lawrence. She started 2012 with The Hunger Games which grossed $690 million at the global box office making it one of the highest-grossing movies of the year. Lawrence was paid less than $1 million upfront for her work on the film but she made up for that with a much fatter paycheck to revisit the role of Katniss Everdeen for the sequel, Catching Fire.  As Katniss, Lawrence has shown that action heroes don't always have to be played by men for a film to turn a profit.

Then she won her first Oscar as Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook (it was the 22-year-old’s second nomination). The smaller movie turned a nice profit off its own bringing in $236 million on a $20 million budget. Lawrence has a slew of blockbusters and art films on deck for the next year including X-Men: Days of Future Past and American Hustle from Silver Linings director David O. Russell and co-starring Silver Linings star Bradley Cooper.

#87 Suzanne Collins

With the March 2012 release of the first movie based on Collins' The Hunger Games series, her books found new life. Last year the trilogy sold 27.7 million copies, according to Publisher's Weekly, 8.8 million of those books sold were expensive hard backs. With three more movies from her dystopian trilogy set for release, Collins should keep raking in the money for the next several years.

More at Forbes.com