Revealed: The heroine of Pixar’s new release, Wall-E, was born from an iPod.

In Pixar Films’ upcoming animation epic, “Wall-E,” the title character is a cute but clunky robot whose centuries of solitude on an abandoned Earth is broken by the arrival of a svelte, futuristic robot named Eve – who is so white, gleaming, and well, pod-like, that she looks like she was born in Apple’s design room. It turns out that she was – sort of: Eve marks the first design collaboration within Steve Jobs’ culture-shaping Apple-Pixar-Disney axis. (Jobs sold Pixar to Disney and is Disney’s largest shareholder as well as the CEO of Apple.)

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology – no expense spared – and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character – think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.

But it may be the first time a character was based on a true corporate sibling. A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple’s behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar’s converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a “lovefest” with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. “Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”

Among her other attributes, Eve has expressive blue eyes that look inspired by an old Lite Brite game, a head and arms that seem unattached to her body, hovering and flying abilities and an onboard weapons defense system. Asked whether the robot is meant to be a preview of Apple’s product line circa 2,700 – when the film is set – Stanton says: “I kind of leave it to interpretation.” Still, don’t be surprised to see Eve bots working the counters this summer at an Apple Store near you.

Brad Meltzer’s “The Book of Lies”

Fans of Brad Meltzer’s work have gotten used to the cycle – he’ll work on a novel for a year or two, and then come back to comics for a project, then another novel, and then some more comics. With his new novel, The Book of Lies, coming out on September 2, 2008, Meltzer is getting the chance to merge his two worlds.Lies will focus on two murders – that of Abel in Chapter 4 of the Book of Genesis, and also on the murder of Mitchell Siegel, father of the young Jerry Siegel – one of the two boys who created Superman.

“The pitch goes like this,” Meltzer says. “In chapter 4 of Genesis, Cain kills Abel. It is arguably the world’s most famous murder, but the Bible is silent about one key detail – the weapon which Cain used to kill his brother. And that weapon is lost to this day.

“In 1932, a man named Mitchell Siegel is shot in the chest and killed. While mourning the death of his father, his young son comes up with the idea for a bulletproof man that he nicknames Superman. The murder weapon from that murder is also lost to this day. So the question is, what do these two murders, thousands of years apart possibly have to do with each other? The answer you will see is in The Book of Lies, which comes out in September.”

The roots of the new novel’s story obviously reach into Meltzer’s lifetime love of comics, but they took on new life relatively recently, thanks to a Sarasota, FL book signing.

“I was at a signing in the middle of Florida, and, as I do at every signing, I was waxing on about my love of comics, and this sweet old woman raises her hand and says, “I know Jerry Siegel,” and I think to myself when you’re sitting in hot, Sarasota, Florida, there is no way that any woman who is at a bookstore and raises her hand and says that is going to tell me more about Jerry Siegel than I know about him myself.”

Meltzer was surprised to find out he was wrong. Very wrong.“The lovely woman tells me that Jerry was her first cousin, she knows the whole family, she grew up in the house with the family, and my mouth dropped open. I cornered her after that, got her phone number, and everything started. I always wear my love for them on my sleeve, and will talk about them to anyone who will listen, and just happened to be in front of the right person. So for the past two years, I’ve been researching the murder of Mitchell Siegel and I won’t say much more about it, but needless to say, it has become an obsession for me.”

As a result of his work, Metlzer’s come to a conclusion about the murder of Jerry Siegel’s father: “People don’t know the story,” the writer says. “They really don’t. That’s the most amazing part – here’s arguably one of the greatest heroes ever created, and we don’t know why we got him.”

Of course, the research included several trips to Cleveland, where Mitchell and his family lived.

 

“I knew what I was doing when I went into the house, and I knew what role the attic was going to play when we went there,” Meltzer recalls of a research trip to the house, “But when I saw the shape that it was in – new wheels started spinning in my head. So one of the things that we’re going to do is try and save this house. This is an American landmark. It deserves better than what its received. This is something that I take very seriously – they went in and saved the house where the founders of Google came up with it. That pales in comparison to this.”

 

Stephen King’s “Bag of Bones” filming in northern Michigan

Stephen King: Filming soon at a northern Michigan location near youJust a month after Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed the new film incentive law aimed at luring Hollywood to Michigan, a movie production company is scouting locations here for the next Stephen King movie.

Rick Hert, executive director of the West Michigan Tourist Association, confirmed Tuesday that he is assisting the State Film Office in finding a remote “time kissed” cabin on a lake, surrounded by tall trees, for King’s characteristic mayhem to be filmed. Hert put the word out to area realtors and the Leelanau Chamber of Commerce and was deluged with replies.

“We had just an outpouring of location offers,” Hert said. “I sent four locations that we think are strong, one that is very strong, back to the State Film Office and now we’re just waiting to hear back from the production company.”

Todd Stachnik said he submitted his family’s Leelanau County cottage as a possible location because, “it would bring great publicity to the place and would help our community at large,” but hasn’t heard back.

The production does still have a hush-hush quality about it. When asked whether or not the leading location was in Grand Traverse, Leelanau, or Benzie County, Hert would only say, “Perhaps.”

Hert would say that the King work that was being made into a movie is his 1998 novel, “Bag of Bones.” The plot centers around a novelist with writer’s block who moves into his summer house, oddly named “Sara Laughs,” and is besieged by ghosts.