Frank Beddor Biography
Frank Beddor had already had a couple of intense careers, a professional
skier (two-time freestyle world champion) and filmmaker (producer of the 1998
hit There’s Something About Mary) before deciding to become an author (of the
New York Times best sellers The Looking Glass Wars, Seeing Redd, and Arch Enemy of the Looking Glass Wars trilogy).
After the global success of There’s Something About Mary, he formed Automatic
Pictures, over which he still presides, to develop creative properties. “After
‘Mary’ I put a bunch of projects into development,” he says. “At the same time,
though, I was coming to realize that, as a producer, you’re a facilitator for
the creative team, but what I really wanted to be was a creator. Of course it’s
great to have a hit; it’s great to make money, but the work I was doing was not
satisfying me.”
Beddor spent five years writing The Looking Glass Wars, the shocking literary
exposé that revealed how Lewis Carroll, author of “Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland,” had willfully misrepresented the story of seven-year-old Alyss
Heart, betraying the exiled princess of Wonderland by turning her painful
history into a fairytale, when, in fact, it is a dark and dangerous depiction of
familial treachery, thwarted love, and the despotic domination of imagination.
The Looking Glass Warswas rejected by every major publisher in the U.S. When
it was released in 2004 by the U.K. publisher Egmont Books, however, it became a
sensation (file the outrage of Lewis Carroll purists under “There’s no such
thing as bad publicity”). The first book of the trilogy was issued Stateside in
2006 by Penguin (which had passed on the project four times before its triumph
in the U.K.). The second volume, Seeing Redd,was released simultaneously in
the U.S. and U.K. in late 2007.
The first volume was discovered by a devoted legion of readers who span the age
spectrum. Beddor says he’s largely measured the success of The Looking Glass
Wars by the intensity and curiosity of the fans who reach out to him with
comments and questions. Their input led to the creation of Hatter M, a series
of graphic novellas depicting the journey of Alyss’ faithful bodyguard, Hatter
Madigan, who, for 13 years, searched for his lost princess after becoming
separated from her in The Pool of Tears, the portal from Wonderland to our
world.
In addition to the Hatter M series, LGW extends to a companion album of
original songs; a card game; an online and forthcoming offline multiplayer
role-playing video game; an apparel line; a proposed theatrical musical; and
even a teaser trailer, the latter representing the first time a state-of-the-art
special-effects trailer has been created to promote a book. All of these
projects fall under the aegis of Automatic Pictures, for which Beddor has also
written screenplays for The Looking Glass Wars, Seeing Redd
and the Hatter M parallel comic mini-series.
This biography was last updated on 08/02/2011.
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