quote:

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.

quote:

Hello!

This is a blanket email to all of our customers. I've been trying to call as
many of you as possible, in order to personally update you on the status of
both the LAST UNICORN audiobook and the limited edition TWO HEARTS
hardcover. But while a noble idea -- and a lot of fun, getting to chat with
you -- there just isn't enough time to call ALL of you AND keep the
manufacturing on track.

So I'm writing. I hope that will be sufficient.

As some of you have already found out, through my calls, we ran into major
delays with the vendors doing our manufacturing.

Some of those delays have to do with our being a small company doing
business with the same manufacturers used by the major media businesses. The
good part of that is it means we'll get great quality. The bad part is that
when Disney or Warner Brothers or some similar company calls the
manufacturer to say they need 50,000 extra copies of something, right away,
it isn't the other big companies that end up getting shuffled to make it
work -- just little companies like ours. This is immensely frustrating, but
there isn't anything we can do about it except work hard and eventually get
so big we have more clout.

Some of the delays have been purely technical -- graphic designs that look
great on the computer screen don't always look good on the printed mockup,
and making sure audio and graphic files are configured to the manufacturer's
preferred formats is a complex process with lots of back and forth for
correction.

And some of the delays are just plain irksome. At the beginning of this
process our preferred bindery for TWO HEARTS completely abandoned all book
printing that wasn't full color, forcing us to pick another company. And
*that* company threw us a curve a few weeks ago by suddenly announcing that
the cloth we chose for the cover wasn't available after all. They were happy
to offer several alternatives...but the ones that didn't change the budget
looked and felt bad, and the ones that were good would have added $3-4 PER
BOOK to our manufacturing costs. Since we are giving TWO HEARTS away for
free, and there are going to be 3000 copies, we couldn't afford having the
budget suddenly leap by $9-12,000 dollars. So we've had to shift gears and
go with yet a different bindery in order to get the quality we wanted at a
price the budget would support.

So please accept my apologies and the apologies of everyone involved with
Conlan. We're working our tails off to get everything back on track and out
the door, and we hope you can be patient with us while we solve all the
problems and make things work.

The irony in this, of course, is that the high-tech stuff we thought would
be difficult, back when we started, has been fairly easy to debug. It's the
old-technology stuff like printing boxes and books and inserts that has been
the big headache. Astonishing!

As for the current schedule, barring further surprises...

...we expect the MP3-On-CD audiobook edition to start shipping in 3-4
weeks (though we're pushing hard to make that sooner).

...we expect the 8-CD audiobook edition to start shipping in 6-7 weeks.

...and we expect TWO HEARTS to start shipping in 7-8 weeks (here, too,
we are pushing to speed things up if possible).

For those of you who ordered signed Peter S. Beagle books like THE LAST
UNICORN, TAMSIN, UNICORN SONATA, etc., Peter is now back from an author's
tour of Slovenia and will be signing all the stacked-up orders at the
beginning of next week.

That's the news. Thanks for your patience, your understanding, and above all
your support of Peter's work. We're doing this for him.


Connor Cochran
Publisher, Conlan Press

quote:

Then why do the leaves never fall here? or the snow? Why is it always spring here? I tell you there is one unicorn left in the world, and as long as it lives in this forest we'll find no game to hunt here. Farewell my noble beast, for you are the last

*******


~You're in the Moulin Rouge babe! Your next month's rent depends on it!~

~We'd be so lost...if we weren't 'us'"~

quote:

Originally posted by Lady Jasmine:

Anyone heard anything new about the supposed live action version?

quote:

It wouldn't be a RAVEN without an update on the announced live-action version of The Last Unicorn. This time the structure is inevitably a bit like one of those good news/bad news jokes, however.

The Good News: Continent Films, the company which has held an option on the property for the last five years, recently paid the Big Movie Money needed to exercise the buyout clause on their deal with Granada Media, the English company which owns the rights to the 1982 animated movie. This buyout fee was $250,000, so their action shows serious commitment.

The Bad News: The announced budget is a third what Peter believes it should be, and he hates their plan to create his unicorn by filming a trained horse (or horses) and modifying the picture with CGI later. If that's how things are going to be, he'd rather they not make the film at all.

The Good News: Continent says they are bringing a new producer on board who is a Hollywood heavyweight, someone with a background in this kind of movie, someone who can get things done and get the budget increased.

The Bad News: Peter has heard this kind of rah-ah before, and it has never led anywhere. It may not lead anywhere this time either.

The Good News: IF the name being mentioned is for real, and IF the deal goes through, it would radically change the situation for the better.

So let's all cross our fingers. In the meantime, it turns out that Peter's 1978 film contract for The Last Unicorn granted him all media rights in any sequels that he writes. Now that "Two Hearts" is coming out, and a full sequel novel is in the works, Peter is free to try and start up his own direct cinematic sequel to The Last Unicorn if he can find an interested producer or studio. That search has begun.

quote:

Originally posted by Lady Jasmine:
Myself I saw the movie first...and I've actually yet to read the book, though it's on my list of "must read when I have time"..still, I can't really see a sequel doing it justice. to me the magic of the story has always been that the continuation is in the readers imagination. We know the unicorn lives, it is up to us to figure out how..to sort of, discover her inside each of us...

The movie frightened me somewhat as a child, but I was entranced by it none-the-less. Now that I watch it when I'm older, it seems more poignent, more...serious somehow. There are parts of it that, unabashedly, make me cry my eyes out..

Definitely one of my all time favourites. It caught me a)with the title song and b) with the very opening scene

quote:

Then why do the leaves never fall here? or the snow? Why is it always spring here? I tell you there is one unicorn left in the world, and as long as it lives in this forest we'll find no game to hunt here. Farewell my noble beast, for you are the last

Gave me the shivers...

quote:

Where have you been? Damn you, where have you been?

I am here now.

And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?

__________________________________
Never do anything you wouldn't want to explain to the paramedics.

quote:

I can feel this body dying all around me.

quote:

I am afraid of this mortal body. More afraid than I was of the red bull.

quote:

Soon there will be a human woman in that body, and no unicorn left at all

*******


~You're in the Moulin Rouge babe! Your next month's rent depends on it!~

~We'd be so lost...if we weren't 'us'"~

quote:

THIS IS NOT RIGHT

In the last two years, London-based Granada Media (a multibillion-dollar entertainment and news conglomerate) has sold over five hundred thousand DVDs and videotapes of THE LAST UNICORN. They've also made cable broadcast deals for it in several different countries, and they sold the live action remake rights for a quarter of a million dollars.

The film is based on Peter S. Beagle's famous book. He also wrote the screenplay. The film is as good as it is because he put everything he had into it.

And you know what? Granada Media refuses to pay Peter what they owe him. They've made millions on his creativity. They owe him hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they won't pay up.


THIS IS NOT RIGHT
In 1978, Peter wrote the screenplay for the animated LORD OF THE RINGS. It took draft after draft written under ferocious deadline pressure to make everything work. For all this effort, producer Saul Zaentz paid Peter a "consulting fee" of only $5,000.

The animated movie failed at the box office, but the power of Peter's script worked its magic on a young Peter Jackson, inspiring him to go read Tolkien's books. Where that led...well, we all know where that led.

But we don't all know that Saul Zaentz has gotten nearly two hundred million dollars out of his Tolkien rights since THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING was released. And we don't all know that the Saul Zaentz Company has so far refused to share any of that with Peter S. Beagle, not even as a goodwill gesture in respect for what his work made possible.

Adding insult to injury, when asked to do the right thing they claim they've never profited from owning the Tolkien rights.


THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT RIGHT
On top of everything else, there are serious family matters going on. Rebecca Soyer Beagle, Peter's 100 year-old mother, is facing major medical bills and assisted living costs because her appointed trustee stole everything she had and left nothing to support her in her final years. Peter had to spend seven months and the last of his savings waging a legal battle to take over his mother's care. Only now that he's won, he has almost nothing left to take care of her with.