Arthur Milnes
Northern News Services

NNSL (Aug 28/98) - Yellowknife's Diane Brookes has gone Hollywood.

A Santa Barbara, California film and television production company has acquired the motion picture rights to her children's book "The Man in the Moon," which came out this spring.

Tri-Laurel Productions will be paying Brookes a minimum of $250,000 for the rights. They plan on producing a $10 million animated feature based on the book.

"It's an incredible thing to have happened to me," Brookes said this week when asked to describe how she felt when she received the news. "I'm just Diane -- I live up in the Arctic and tell stories to kids."

Brookes is quick to point out her book is completely Yellowknife- produced. It is now available across Canada through mega-bookstore Chapters and will soon be going into the USA.

"I think we've proved we have talented writers (and) illustrators here," she said.

Her company, Raven Rock Publishing, is based here. "The Man in the Moon" was illustrated by Ann Timmins, another Yellowknife resident.

Work on the movie could begin in the next six months, Tri-Laurel's Tom Cole said from California Wednesday.

He said he noticed Brookes' work while attending a Canadian Bookseller's Association trade show this year in Chicago. Flipping through it, he was hooked, he said.

"It was a platform," he said.

As for Brookes, who has lived in the North for 13 years -- "With no plans on leaving," she says, -- she has five further books coming out this fall.

Her first book came out in 1990 and she's obviously never looked back, creating Raven Rock Publishing along the way.