“With, ‘No one will read this book because it’s a retelling of a classic,’ or, ‘You’ll only get the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ fans.’įinally, a British editor heard his pitch and liked how he told the story.
“There were a lot of no, no, no’s,” he says. He tried pitching it like a movie – finding the highest-ranking executives he could at publishing houses – and while those pitches often got good responses, finding an editor to take it on proved fruitless. Getting the books published, though, was a different story. “I loved showing up Monday in my office and having a piece of art,” Beddor says. “‘What would the Valley of Mushrooms look like?’ It just started in this organic way and it was a really fun way to collaborate. “And I was thinking, ‘What would these soldiers look like?'”Ĭhiang sent him sketches, which Beddor loved. “There were these card soldiers that transformed into these sort of metallic soldiers,” Beddor says.
To help him visualize it, he took another page from his Hollywood background and hired visual effects artist Doug Chiang, an Oscar winner for “Death Becomes Her,” to more or less storyboard the tale as he wrote it. He spent several years thinking of the alternative world of Wonderland: how it was structured, how it was governed, and especially, what it and its residents would look like. “But as I became really attached to it, I just kept thinking a movie would not do it justice.” “At the time, I’d just come out of a hit movie, and I thought maybe this would make a great movie,” Beddor says of how the books began. “The story this guy told me was the jumping off spot for my story,” says Beddor, who used that inspiration as to create not just the Looking Glass Trilogy – the last of which is published this month – but an ongoing graphic novel series called Hatter M, too.īeddor will talk about the books and all their offshoot projects – including two movies he’s now developing – when he appears at the Orange County Children’s Book Festival at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa at 11:15 a.m. “And it had this art that reminded me of the work of Lewis Carroll and ‘Alice In Wonderland.'”Ī tip led him to an antiquities dealer, a fellow named Buffington, who pulled out an old box that contained more of that dark and enticing deck, and told him, as he turned the cards, the story of the real Wonderland depicted on each one. “At the end of the exhibit was an incomplete deck of cards,” Beddor says of that moment. He’d produced the hit comedy, “There’s Something About Mary,” and was in London for the British premiere, when one day he found himself wandering through an exhibit of ancient playing cards at the British Museum, or so the story goes. The story of how Frank Beddor came to write the Looking Glass Wars trilogy begins like a movie – only appropriate, given that before the books Beddor had mostly worked in Hollywood.
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