MADELINE IN HOLLYWOOD

Spotlight

There isn't much to Madeline's face. Two dots (for eyes) and a dash (for a mouth), and sometimes a nose, but usually not. And there's nothing—let's be frank—deeply special about her, not Pippi Longstocking's superhuman strength or Laura Ingalls' stoic seeing. It doesn't matter—Madeline is eternal anyway. If Marcel Proust gave us memory in a madeleine, Ludwig Bemelmans gave us eau de childhood in his Madeline.

Born—or, rather, first published—in 1939, reprinted ever since "in rain or shine," Madeline has gone well beyond Bemelmans' six books and into the realm of toothbrush cups and CD-ROMs. In fact, next summer Madeline goes Hollywood. At this very moment director Daisy Mayer and the TriStar crew are on location in Paris, shooting a movie based on the first four Madeline books and set in the 1950s. "The books are like storyboards," exclaims Mayer. Of course, she says, "it can't all be static wide shots of girls walking around Paris. Our goal is to consistently evoke the book in one shot in every scene. Madeline falling off the bridge—that's an action sequence. We're shooting the dog jumping into the Seine with six cameras, like Jean-Claude Van Damme!"

As for Madeline herself, the search covered three continents and finally zeroed in on a nine-year-old girl in a British primary school (but was the school covered with vines?!). "HattyJones popped so strongly in the auditions in England that we couldn't forget her," says Mayer. "She actually hasn't acted before, but she has star charisma. She has strength and naivete—quite a difficult combination. She also meets our height requirement, which was difficult."

LAURA JACOBS

For as you probably recall, "they left the house ... in two straight lines ... the smallest one was Madeline."