From books to bright lights: How Miami’s favorite bookstore owner got into the movie biz

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40 Years of Books & Books

How Mitchell Kaplan’s dream survived Amazon, e-books and the pandemic — and made the literary world pay attention to Miami.

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40 years of Books & Books: How a beloved bookstore put Miami on the literary map

From books to bright lights: How Miami’s favorite bookstore owner got into the movie biz

Want to understand Miami? Read these 10 books, says Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books

Books & Books celebrates its 40th year anniversary in Miami

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It was a dark, cold night in Dublin, and Mitchell Kaplan was lying low on a movie set.

Miami’s famous bookseller huddled in the dark, watching the crew of “The Man Who Invented Christmas” shoot a scene in a graveyard and marveling at the perfection of Christopher Plummer as Ebenezer Scrooge.

“It was the middle of the night, and I found this kind of hidden spot,” Kaplan says now, “and I’m sitting there in this surreal, lit space watching this amazing actor, and I’m thinking, ‘How did I get here? How did this happen?’ “

Here’s how it happened: In 2012, the man who put Miami on the literary map joined forces with film industry veteran Paula Mazur to form The Mazur Kaplan Company, which adapts books for film and TV. So far, the company has released four feature films, with many more projects in the works.

The process that launched Kaplan’s second career started with — what else? — a book. An editor gave him the manuscript of the World War II romance “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” and asked: “How are we going to make this a bestseller?”

After he read and loved the novel, Kaplan had another question: How can I make a movie out of this?

He contacted his sister Marcy Ross, a television producer who has worked with such shows as “Grace and Frankie” and “Reacher.” Ross introduced him to her friend Mazur, who had just produced the film “Nim’s Island” with Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler and Abigail Breslin. When Mazur read “Guernsey,” she told Kaplan she knew how to get “Guernsey” made.

Movies tend to have long gestation periods. “Guernsey” was published in 2008 but didn’t make it to the screen until 2018. By Mazur’s estimation, the film went through four studios, seven leading ladies, three writers and four directors before its release.

“At a certain point,” she jokes, “I thought Mitchell was going to say, ‘Who needs this? Books are hard enough.’ ”

But Mazur Kaplan persevered, and Mazur was pleased with how well Kaplan adapted to the new medium.

“Mitchell has a great sense of narrative,” she said. “The first time I gave him a script, I thought, ‘I wonder if he even knows how to read a script format.’ It’s not a book. It’s really different. But he gave fantastic notes.”

Author Annie Barrows, who co-wrote “Guernsey” with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, agrees with Mazur’s assessment. She believes her aunt, who worked on the book for 25 years but died before it was published, would have loved the film, which starred Lily James (“Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again”) and Michiel Huisman (“Game of Thrones,” “The Flight Attendant”).

“I trusted Paula and Mitch to make it honorable,” she said. “Mitch brings a literary sensibility after being a leader in the literary community. He understands — and Paula does too — what complexity of story means. He knows what works.”

Because of “Guernsey” delays, Mazur Kaplan’s first release was “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” adapted from Les Standiford’s nonfiction work about how Charles Dickens came to write “A Christmas Carol.” The company went on to produce Jennifer Niven’s young adult drama “All the Bright Places,” which starred Elle Fanning, and Larry Watson’s “Let Him Go,” a searing, intimate thriller about a couple, played by Kevin Costner and Diane Lane, who try to liberate their young grandson from their dangerous in-laws.

Watson, who visited Alberta, Canada, during the filming, said that several crew members confided that Mazur Kaplan made the set an exceptional place to work.

“I felt that any time I had a conversation with anyone about the movie, they cared about it,” he says. “Bookstore owner to movie producer is pretty rare in our world. If there’s a better friend to writers than Mitchell Kaplan, I don’t know who that would be.”

There are frustrations in the movie business, of course. Financing is a struggle, and so is finding the right director and screenwriter. Working with talented colleagues is energizing, Kaplan says, but there are aggravations.

“The flip side is you’re dealing with a lot of people, and you can’t make choices on your own, and that’s frustrating,” Kaplan says. “If you’re a writer all you need is a computer, and you can write, but making a film is costly. You need to have someone buy into your vision.”

Selling a shared vision, Mazur says, is what the partnership is all about.

“We do bet on our taste in terms of what projects we choose, which is a risky proposition,” she says. “If we choose right, they will come, and by ‘they’ I mean great writers, great directors, money, all the things you need to make a movie, as opposed to trying to thread the needle of what an audience or studio might want.”

Mazur Kaplan is hoping to start filming “The Silent Wife” with Nicole Kidman soon. On deck for development are Tim Johnston’s thriller “The Current,” the dystopian novel “The Hierarchies” and Nicholas Griffin’s “The Year of Dangerous Days,” about Miami in 1980.

Mazur, who calls Kaplan the company’s “secret sauce,” says his relationships with writers are invaluable to the process.

“I think authors trust him in this very profound way,” she says. “They feel like they’ll be in good hands, and he’ll make sure the integrity and intention of the author are honored.”

Among Mazur Kaplan’s many projects is “The Reformatory,” the upcoming novel by horror writer Tananarive Due, a former student of Kaplan’s at Southridge High. The book, about a 12-year-old boy encountering supernatural (and other) horrors at a Florida reform school, is inspired by a great-uncle of Due’s, who died at the notorious Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, in the 1930s.

Due, who once presented Kaplan with a novel she’d written at age 15 for critique, trusts the company with a story that hits so close to home.

“They fell in love with the manuscript, so there’s a connection to the core story,” she says. “They have the same reverence for the characters that I saw in Mitchell when I was 15. I appreciate the irony of such an early reader who helped give me confidence when I was a kid now being an ally in a new frontier.”

Mazur Kaplan is also adapting Brad Meltzer’s “The Lincoln Conspiracy,” about an assassination attempt on the 16th president, which Netflix has optioned. Meltzer, who has worked in television with such studios as Universal, Fox and Warner Brothers, says working with Kaplan, whom he has known for 25 years, is a dream.

“Who would you rather work with — a Hollywood sweet talker or the sweetest man alive?” he asks. “Mitchell is one of the few people in Hollywood who actually has read the books. That’s the reason he has a career in Hollywood. He reads the books.”

This story was originally published May 11, 2022 at 6:00 AM.