Elle Fanning to star in adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s How To Talk To Girls At Parties

For a guy who has been writing for several decades, Neil Gaiman sure has been blowing up lately. His Sandman comic is finally being made into a movie, he wrote a video game, he dressed up as a badger, and his American Gods novel is finally being made into a TV show. With success like that, Hollywood has no choice but to give him the Stephen King treatment and start digging through everything he’s ever written in search of something, anything, to make into a movie. Comic books? Bring ‘em on! Episodes of Doctor Who? OK, sure! Grocery lists? Hell yes!

As revealed by The Hollywood Reporter, Gaiman’s short story How To Talk To Girls At Parties is the next Gaiman-penned something to become a movie, and it’s going to star Maleficent’s Elle Fanning as a girl at a party. Hedwig And The Angry Inch’s John Cameron Mitchell—also known as David Pressler-Goings from Girls—will direct.

Gaiman’s original version of How To Talk To Girls—which was nominated for a Hugo Award—is about two teenage boys living in 1970s London who go to a party and meet some mysterious girls who turn out to be aliens, but it sounds like the movie will turn it into one of those “crazy night out” movies were some kids go on a wacky coming-of-age adventure and learn some kind of lesson about being a grown up. Fanning also starred in Super 8, which this sounds similar to, except this alien is a teenage girl instead of whatever that alien was.

The full text of How To Talk To Girls can be read at Gaiman’s official site, so now nobody has an excuse not to act all snooty about how different the movie is once it comes out.