It's been over 30 years since Katherine Paterson, a former missionary and wife of a pastor, put pen to paper to write Bridge to Terabithia. Yet even though her beloved Newberry award-winning novel seems tailor-made for the big screen, it has only recently been adapted to film. With the movie finally hitting theaters today, audiences will be able to determine whether it was worth the wait.

What is already clear is that readers who cherish the story of friendship between two young outsiders (Paterson wrote it after her own 8-year-old son, David, lost his best friend to a tragic accident) won't be unpleasantly surprised by any deviation from the original.

David Paterson, now a 40-year-old husband and father, adapted the book into a screenplay in 1990 and has been trying to get the movie made ever since. The problem was, at the time, there wasn't a production company in Hollywood willing to respect his mother's vision. Today, as fans of The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlotte's Web discovered, there is.

During our telephone interview from Washington D.C. where he is promoting the film, Paterson's frustration with mainline Hollywood is obvious from the outset. Presented with a serious piece of art—albeit art for children—that explores how people deal with death, studio executives first wanted to know if they could give it a happy ending. Needless to say, Paterson wasn't about to take them up on their offer. "I wanted to do it the right way, not Hollywood's way, and that's rare so I was willing to wait," he says.

While cynical entertainment reporters (ahem) might be tempted to write these sentiments off as so much PR-coached marketing, Paterson's subsequent comments wipe away any indication that he's worried about ingratiating himself to movie industry types.

"They don't respect readers and they don't respect children—they don't respect their intelligence or their imagination," comments Paterson of the film industry's heaviest hitters. Asked what the movie business does respect, he can't help but laugh, "Well, they have huge respect for children's money and their parents' money."

Like many screenwriters before him, he discovered the truth about the movie business the hard way, by sitting in meeting after meeting with executives who wanted to dumb down Terabithia for the sake of capturing a wider audience. Continued...