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The publishing industry's biggest annual gathering wrapped up here Sunday with a bid to establish book fairs as prime hunting ground for Hollywood agents scouting material for the next blockbuster.
With "The Devil Wears Prada" and the "Bridget Jones", "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter" franchises as just a handful of hits based on bestsellers, the Frankfurt Book Fair is now jostling to get in the game.
"We are offering a special place for publishing houses and film studios to get together," Anna-Katharina Werdnik, the head of the book fair's film and television division, told AFP.
Werdnik said the five-day fair is increasingly becoming a place where producers can get in on the ground floor of a promising enterprise by spotting works that are only just on their way to bookstores.
While the Frankfurt Book Fair has long been known as a crucial networking opportunity for authors and publishers, bringing filmmakers into the mix has the potential to raise the stakes for all parties.
"We want to bring together two worlds that do not know each other very well yet," Werdnik said. "We knew there was demand on both sides."
Werdnik said her Film and TV Forum had seen a 30-percent increase in traffic this year and that the potential for growth was enormous.
"But we need big names, big producers for the Forum to develop. Cinema loves glamour and so do publishers," she said.
Two well-known directors, Atom Egoyan of Canada and French filmmaker Luc Besson ("La Femme Nikita", "The Big Blue"), made their way to the German business capital this week.
Egoyan accepted the fair's prize for the best film adaptation of a book for his thriller "Where the Truth Lies" starring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, while Besson arrived to promote his animated feature "Arthur and the Invisibles", which he made based on a four-volume saga he wrote himself.
Besson said it was encouraging to see cinema playing a bigger role at the 58-year-old fair.
"Books and films can help each other -- they are not enemies," he said.
Werdnik said each camp had become acutely aware that good books can and ought to be exploited for all their potential.
She cited the example of "Perfume", the German bestseller by Patrick Sueskind which has been translated into 45 languages and sold more than 150 million copies since it was published in 1985.
The novel, a murder mystery set in 18th century, recently enjoyed a revival thanks to a big budget film, which was also screened during the fair as a prime example of how the two formats can feed off each other in the marketplace.
Films have been featured at the Frankfurt Book Fair since 2001 but the event took the focus one step forward with a "Berlinale Day" launched two years ago in cooperation with the Berlin International Film Festival held in February.
The coordinator of the film day, Tolke Palm, said she aimed to see more rights deals for exciting projects inked in Frankfurt.
To set the mood, she screens pictures seen at the Berlinale that were based on books, such as Italy's "Romanzo Criminale" and "The Night Listener", a US production taken from the pages of an Armistead Maupin novel.
The 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair drew more than 7,000 exhibitors from 113 countries and spotlighted India as its guest country.
It opened its doors to industry professionals on Wednesday and invited the general public over the weekend before closing on Sunday.
dlc/shn
AFPEntertainment-lifestyle-Germany-film
AFP 081215 GMT 10 06
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