We just saw Fahrenheit 9/11. (At the Grand Lake Theater -- there's currently a photo of that theater's marquee on the front page of www.michaelmoore.com!) It's a great film, profoundly artful, horrifying, funny, and necessary. Very few facts in the film came as a surprise to me -- perhaps because I don't rely solely on mainstream American news outlets for my information about the war or politics -- but I think it is likely to surprise a great many Americans. I won't go into detail, but I will say that I don't think there's much in the film that should strike any reasonable person as controversial. Moore's central thesis is that a wealthy elite benefits the most from war without personally paying any of the considerable costs of a war, and that this truism is overwhelmingly accurate in the case of the war in Iraq. The warmongering opportunism of the elite is not something new in the history of the world, but it's something people evidently need to be reminded about. One of the people Moore interviews notes that the current Conservative warmongering isn't some vast conspiracy for world domination -- it is, instead, simply a number of wealthy people trying to make even more money, and seizing an opportunity to do so in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Perhaps the movie will help more people realize that.

I'm working on my new book, the Bridges novel, and it's going well. I have a good opening (having thrown out my first attempt at an opening, and, indeed, my initial choice of viewpoint!), and I wrote about 2,000 words on it yesterday. It's a dark, strange, personal, melancholic book, but will also have plenty of action, weirdness, frisson, mortal danger, and moral danger. I'm pleased with it so far, and the shape of the book is becoming ever more clear to me, the contours and angles rising up from out of the fog.

We saw Ginger Snaps 2 last night, and it's even better than the first one. The plot is more complex, there are more surprises, great tension, menace, and fine acting. The world needs more good Canadian horror movies. It's the best horror movie I've seen since The Ring (though it's so different that it might be a mistake to compare the two). Worth seeing if you like smart, twisty horror.

I have a film agent now. His assistant saw an announcement about Rangergirl being sold, thought it sounded interesting, and told him about it. He asked my agent for a copy to read, liked it, and offered to represent me. We'll talk about ideas next month, and he'll start trying to get people interested in buying film rights later this year.

You know, a few years ago I would have thought getting a film agent was prefatory to the sky opening and money falling down on my head. Now, alas, I know better, and am not getting my hopes up. But he's a good agent, and represents some big writers, so who knows? He wouldn't have taken me on if he didn't think there was money to be made.

This did bring up an important question, though -- how much control would I want over film projects? What's more important to me, control, or money?

It wasn't a difficult decision. I'm a novelist, not a movie-maker. If someone wants to make a movie from one of my books, good! But let them deal with the difficulties of adaptation. I may, at some point, become interested in writing screenplays, but for the foreseeable future, I want to concentrate on writing novels. I've read too many horror stories about authors coming to grief in the course of trying to shepherd their books to the screen in a form they could be proud of. Even if one of my books were transformed into a bad movie, it wouldn't diminish the quality of my original work. Of course, I should be so lucky as to have even a bad movie made of one of my books...