tabularojo asked: If The Graveyard Book were adapted to film would you adamantly fight against the studio if they wanted to cast a white woman as Scarlett?
Studios don’t actually cast people. On the whole, directors and casting directors, working with producers, cast people.
I’d point out to the director (as I already have) early in the process that he should make sure that Scarlett was dark-skinned. When, somewhere up the line, we get closer to a point where anyone is cast (I’ve not even seen a script yet) I’ll make sure that no-one’s forgotten that conversation. I doubt it will be a problem: there are many talented young actresses of colour out there, and I cannot imagine that the producers, director, or people at Disney would want to whitewash the film.
But… I’ve sold the film rights, and the writer of the book the film was based on doesn’t get to make casting decisions. A phrase like “adamantly fighting the studio” is meaningless — Anne Rice “adamantly fought” Warners over casting Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire when in her head Lestat looked like Rutger Hauer, and I don’t think it got her anything but grief. As a writer of a book, you have nothing to fight with, other than the ability to grumble loudly if you dislike what they are doing — grumble privately, and eventually grumble publicly. As an excellent example of the latter, here’s Ursula K. LeGuin explaining what was wrong with the Earthsea TV Series: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/12/a_whitewashed_earthsea.html
The big decision I DO get on these things is whether to sell the film rights or not. When a film company wanted to give me a lot of money to film Anansi Boys, and wanted to make everyone white, I just said no and didn’t sell them the book. When (as is looking very probably right now) a film or TV series of Anansi Boys is made, the race of each of the characters is going to be the same as the book. (Or, I suspect, as close to it as we can get, in Daisy’s case.)
So to answer your question, I don’t think it will happen. But yes, I’d oppose it in every way I could, if it did.