While editing my “John Carter” obituary a few weeks ago, I removed a large paragraph dealing with the trend of giving young white male filmmakers with barely a feature credit to their name the keys to $100 million-$300 million franchise films while seasoned pro women and/or minorities remain noticeably absent from the “wish list” (yes, I was glad to see F. Gary Gray on the Marvel wish-list for “Captain America 2″). And while I wouldn’t consider “The Hunger Games” a “female film,” it would be a great opportunity to make a point that female directors can indeed handle the kind of big-scale filmmaking that studios are all too willing to offer to mostly untested male directors as a matter of course. So, perhaps arbitrarily, perhaps to prove a point about how inaccessible the wish list is for female directors, here are nine directors who happen to be women who also belong on the wish list as Lionsgate hunts for a second director. These are in alphabetical order, with the exception of the final entry who would be my top choice.

Kathryn Bigelow

Duh. In fact, she’ll probably make the wish list as a token nod to gender diversity, and all she had to do was become the first female in history to win a best director Oscar. I don’t really have to explain this pick. She’s been directing hard action pictures for 30 years. She’s helmed the likes of “Near Dark” (a dusty vampire thriller that still holds up 25 years later), “Point Break” (which is really better than its camp-fueled reputation), the underrated “Blue Steel,” “Strange Days,” “K19: The Widowmaker,” the two-part guns-ablaze sixth-season finale of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and of course the Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker.” If Lionsgate wants instant critical respectability without breaking a sweat, Bigelow will be at the top of the list, regardless of gender.

Niki Caro

“North Country” is the definition of the kind of movie they just don’t make anymore. As recently as 2005, Warner Bros. gave Caro the reins to an all-star drama detailing a landmark 1984 sexual-discrimination/harassment suit. Lead Charlize Theron and supporting actress Frances McDormand both justifiably received Oscar nominations for the little-seen October 2005 release. The picture is a straight-up social issues drama, filled with character turns from Richard Jenkins, Sean Bean, Sissy Spacek, Woody Harrelson and then-unknowns Amber Heard, Michelle Monaghan and Jeremy Renner. In 2005, it was one of any number of big studio dramas battling it out for Oscar glory. Today, it would be a front-runner purely by virtue of its existence. Caro’s picture personifies the sort of high-quality big-studio adult drama that is all but an endangered species, and she also helmed the dynamite “Whale Rider” back in 2002 as well. If every studio release were at least as good as “North Country,” I imagine most of us wouldn’t feel the need to constantly whine about the state of studio movies these days.

Catherine Hardwicke

Yes, “Red Riding Hood” was an entertaining whiff. I like it even while admitting it’s pretty bad (it’s certainly never boring and Gary Oldman is a hoot). But go back and watch the first “Twilight.” Here’s a dirty secret: It’s actually pretty good. It’s light on its feet, quirky, self-deprecating and utterly aware of its melodramatic nature. Unlike the self-serious sequels, which treat their respective source material like holy tombs (and probably would have cut “vampire baseball” out of fear of irreverence), the first “Twilight “is genuinely fun, willing to change little details and add character beats to keep the film engaging. Kristen Stewart is quite compelling as a more self-aware Bella while Robert Pattinson is allowed to be just a little goofy in the opening act (his biology class freak-out is pretty hilarious). Most important for the purposes of this current franchise, the supporting characters are wonderfully fleshed out and brought to life, giving the film a pulpy lived-in quality that none of the sequels can match (Bella’s friends are actually charming and have their own lives). Point being, if you’re among the many critics who wished that even a few of the supporting characters were a little more fleshed out in the first “Hunger Games” installment, why not bring on someone who knows how to build an aggressively lively supporting cast, one that arguably superceded the stars in at least one film? She wouldn’t be my top choice, but there would be some poetic justice to it nonetheless.

Mary Harron

Has any movie made in the early 2000s, save perhaps ”Requiem for a Dream,” aged as tragically well as ”American Psycho”?  The film got mixed reviews in its day, with many critics unable to look past the grotesque subject matter (and the even more grotesque source material) to notice that the film’s sex and violence were all but beside the point. Christian Bale turns in what will probably be the best performance of his career (certainly Patrick Bateman is as defining a turn as Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle) in a brutal satire of the 1980s “greed is good” corporate mind-set that tragically proves even more topical today as the ghosts of Reagan came back to haunt us in the guise of George W. Bush and corporate giants like Goldman Sachs. Had the film been better received in its time, perhaps Harron wouldn’t have just now helmed a theatrical follow-up, the upcoming ”The Moth Diaries” (she directed an HBO Bettie Page biopic in 2005). Not to repeat a theme (and it won’t be the last time I bring this up), but had “she” been a “he,” Harron probably would have a half-dozen features to her name by this point.

Patty Jenkins

She was supposed to be the mold-breaker. Hired late last year to direct Marvel Comics’ “Thor 2,” Jenkins was supposed to become the first female director to helm a mega-budget comic book tent pole (Lexi Alexander’s “Punisher: War Zone” cost just $30 million). But the rather mysterious “creative differences” excuse sent her packing, replaced by longtime television director Alan Taylor (director of the heartbreaking “Homicide: Life on the Street “series finale and the “Mad Men” pilot), which in turn led to a national grumbling among feminist film pundits and a very pissed-off Natalie Portman. Jenkins’ career is a perfect demonstration of the gender disparity in Hollywood. In an age where Marc Webb is handed the reins to “The Amazing Spider-Man ” after directing one moderately successful low-budget romantic comedy (“500 Days of Summer”), Jenkins has barely worked since directing the Oscar-winning “Monster” nine years ago. She recently won an Emmy for directing the pilot for AMC’s “The Killing,” but that’s pretty much all she’s done since 2003. If you haven’t seen “Monster” in a while, it’s a pretty great movie, and it’s certainly more than just Charlize Theron’s deservedly-Oscar-winning star turn (Christina Ricci is just as good). Call it poetic justice or merely good sense, but Lionsgate would be wise to snap up Jenkins and give her the keys to an even bigger franchise.

Mimi Leder

In the late 1990s, Mimi Leder was on her way to becoming one of the biggest female directors in modern history. But while male directors get whiff after whiff until their eventual “comeback film” (think Scorsese in the 1980s, from “Raging Bull “to “Goodfellas”), Leder was out after just one high-profile miss. Never mind that “The Peacemaker” was a frighteningly ahead-of-its-time action drama (and a painfully underrated one at that), never mind that “Deep Impact” was at the time the highest grossing film in history directed by a woman.  The critical and artistic disaster of “Pay It Forward” pretty much killed everyone involved, ending the film careers of Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment while fatally damaging Kevin Spacey’s prestige. Leder hasn’t directed another theatrical feature since that 2000 disappointment (she helmed the 2009 Morgan Freeman/Antonio Bandaras direct-to-DVD action flick “Thick as Thieves”).  She just started preproduction on a remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which, if it comes to pass, will be her first theatrical release in 12 years. If you want a female director who knows how to craft top-notch action, why not hire Leder?

Lynne Ramsay

In a gender-neutral world, Lynne Ramsay would be on all of the wish lists right now. After all, she made a splash last year with the fantastic “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” coaxing a career-peak performance from Tilda Swinton and crafting a powerful psychological horror drama that defies easy description or even common interpretation. It’s a powerful and gripping picture, her third feature no less. If “Chronicle’s” Josh Trank can end up with a dozen high-profile choices after making one terrific film, then Ramsay deserves her pick of the litter as well. Of course, the fact that Trank made his mark with a superhero deconstruction and was then offered a bunch of comic book superhero films is in itself a sign of Hollywood’s lack of imagination, which is why Debra Granik (who would also be on various wish lists in a just world) won’t be on this list. There is no escaping the several similarities between “Winter’s Bone” and “The Hunger Games” and I’d argue that choosing the helmer of the former is every bit as lazy as choosing Jennifer Lawrence to basically reprise her Oscar-nominated character in the first place. But Ramsay would be an inspired and outside-the-box choice, and arguably someone who can bring suspense and intensity to a franchise that lacked requisite tension the first time around.

Jennifer Yuh

With all the seemingly justified hubbub about Brenda Chapman getting canned from Pixar’s “Brave” last year, no one seemed to notice that Dreamworks (who hired Chapman to direct “The Prince of Egypt” 14 years ago) gave one of its prize franchises to a South Korean female director who promptly knocked it out of the park. I assume you don’t need me to remind you how much I loved “Kung Fu Panda 2.” It was my favorite film of 2011 and a splendid action dramedy that absolutely stands with “Toy Story 2,” “The Dark Knight” and “X2: X-Men United” on the list of all-time great genre sequels from the last 15 years.  The only reason she isn’t my top pick is because I wouldn’t want her taking the “Chasing Fire” gig to stand in the way of her directing “Kung Fu Panda 3.” But she absolutely deserves a spot on every genre wish list from now until she retires.

And my personal pick…

Kasi Lemmons

Yes, it would be groundbreaking/cool/etc. if the reins to today’s biggest new franchise were handed off to an African-American woman. But it would also be just-plain-cool if “Chasing Fire” were handed to the person who happened to direct “Eve’s Bayou” and “Talk to Me.” She directed three features between 1997 and 2007 (the middle one being the not-that-great “The Caveman’s Valentine” in 2001, which still featured a fine star turn from Samuel L. Jackson). But “Eve’s Bayou” is a terrific period drama that features one of Jackson’s best performances, period. ”Talk to Me” is a fine and thoughtful biopic about 1960s Washington, D.C., radio DJ Ralph “Petey” Greene (played by Don Cheadle), which features strong supporting work from Chiwetel Ejiofor (his pool hall conversation with Cheadle is the stuff of acting-class gold), Taraji P. Henson and Martin Sheen (even if Sheen’s best scene ended up on the DVD deleted scenes reel). I don’t pretend to know why she has worked so little in the last 15 years, but her lack of output has always (to me) personified the difficulty that minority and female filmmakers face in terms of having a steady output of movies even after they’ve had one or two successes.  Tokenism and/or affirmative action accusations aide, Lemmons has made two awfully good films and deserves a shot at the big leagues at least as much as the likes of Josh Trank and Marc Webb.

OK, your turn to pick.  Who would you want to see helm the next “Hunger Games” film?  It doesn’t have to be a woman or a minority, but try to be a little creative.

I’m just as tired as the next film-loving feminist of seeing the beauty myth played out ad nauseam on screens big and small. But the story here is neither Lawrence’s size nor even the Hollywood thin imperative, but rather why Lawrence was cast in the first place.

Why, in an industry that routinely casts underweight women in pretty much everything, would “The Hunger Games” team not pluck from its enormous pool of underfed talent? Katniss’ scrawniness is an actual plot point in the book; one of her recurring concerns before the games is putting on weight after a lifetime of being chronically hungry in order to both feel and appear stronger before entering the arena. (As L.V. Anderson at Slate points out, you can be starving and not be rail-thin, but that’s not how Katniss is described in the book.) In any other circumstance I might be mildly encouraged by seeing an actress cast in a major film who didn’t look emaciated: Lawrence is slender by any standard, but still curvier than many of her peers. Yet I can’t quite cheer this one, because Lawrence’s casting says more about the paucity of rich roles for young actresses than it does about any sort of shifting body standards.

“The Hunger Games” inhabits an unusual space: Not only were the books an enormous commercial success, but between the trilogy’s timing with Occupy Wall Street, a growing sense of unease about income disparity in America, and a greater amount of attention paid to feminist critique, the story is a magnet for critical analysis. Whichever actress was cast in that role was guaranteed to be taken seriously, and the producers also knew they had to cast someone who would be able to assume that guarantee with aplomb. They likely chose Lawrence because of her raw talent and her already burgeoning reputation as a Serious Actress, with her Oscar-nominated performance in “Winter’s Bone.” It was a good bet: Peter Travers says she “reveals a physical and emotional grace that’s astonishing”; Melissa Anderson at the Village Voice comments on her “particular gift for exuding iron determination”; and Salon’s own Andrew O’Hehir notes how Lawrence “commands the screen with effortless magnetism.”

But I can’t help wondering if, in casting Lawrence, they took advantage of the chance to cast someone who oh-so-slightly veered away from the strict template of beauty. It was the perfect opportunity to placate the growing number of moviegoers questioning why only anointed beauties were being cast in major films; the still-present adulation of so-called curvy performers like Kate Winslet and Beyoncé, and Melissa McCarthy’s popular and critical embrace after “Bridesmaids,” showed that audiences were hungry for women who didn’t look like they were starved.

As a feminist moviegoer who is rightfully tired of seeing the beauty imperative stamped across every film I see, I’m the prime target for being placated by this gesture. Lawrence’s body, by being a shade heavier than her contemporaries’, becomes a statement: Her body legitimizes the film, and also legitimizes Katniss. It literally adds more weight to the character. “We can’t have an insubstantial person play [Katniss],” director Gary Ross told Entertainment Weekly. He was speaking of the psychic weight Lawrence brought to the role, not her physical weight. But when Hollywood defaults to rail-thin beauties for every role out there, is it any wonder the two become conflated?

Lawrence’s casting isn’t really the problem; it’s the dearth of complex, layered roles for actresses her age, who are more often cast as flimsy love interests with the barest of personality quirks to make her “relatable.” (“500 Days of Summer,” anyone?) Since most roles for that age group are written to be basically interchangeable, it makes sense that possessing another sort of gravitas — a figure that barely bent the rules of Hollywood norms — would be an asset during casting. (We saw much the same with Kate Winslet, another talented actress who, from a very young age, rarely got to do comedy in part because her womanly figure made it easier for casting agents to see her in roles requiring emotional maturity.)

The parade of romantic comedies, “quirky girl” roles, and male-fantasy ciphers (sorry, Lisbeth Salander, I’m looking at you) offers types, not characters. Even actresses once deemed “serious” are too often offered paltry material: Kristen Stewart’s talent shone even in child-actor roles like “Panic Room,” but it is largely wasted on Bella, who could be played by essentially any actress able to stand upright. And when one of the best roles for young actresses is a Muggle, we’re in a sorry state of affairs. If we had meatier roles for women, the search to find the most “substantial” actress to fill the role might not feel as urgent. And perhaps that would have allowed a similarly talented actress who fit Collins’ physical description of Katniss (including the dark hair and “olive skin” that made some question why the role went to a white actress) to inhabit the role.

The meaty roles for women have become concentrated among a handful of actresses. We see this most clearly in niche roles, like sexy-lady-over-60 — I mean, name two who aren’t Helen Mirren. It’s a little more diffuse for midcareer actresses (think Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett) but actresses under 25 are more likely to be cast as a talking cream puff than anything that allows for nuance.

In the end, I do think Lawrence was an excellent choice for the role, and I’m not trying to nitpick her casting or performance; books-to-films are rarely known for their fidelity to the original, and “The Hunger Games” got it right more often than not. Most important, I’m not trying to nitpick her figure, which, in a normal world, would be understood as a tool a talented actress plays to embody a character who, despite her impoverished hunger, never lapses into frailty. More than that, I’d like for her body to be beside the point. But in the climate we currently have for roles for young actresses, that’s an impossibility.

Well, yes. But also: no. “The Hunger Games” series was already hugely popular, long before the movie was even shot. The first book alone has spent well over two years on the USA Today bestseller list. The films will doubtlessly promote the sales of even more books, but isn’t that a bit beside the point? The books made the movie a hit, not the other way around. The real story of this weekend’s record-breaking box office returns for the movie version of “The Hunger Games” is the awesome cultural power of young readers, especially young girls.

Monday morning media coverage credited producers and marketers at Lionsgate for the movie’s success, and by all accounts (I haven’t seen it myself), the film is an effective adaptation of the books. But a good movie and a canny promotional campaign aren’t enough to make hundreds of people camp out in a tent city to await a movie’s premiere. That kind of enthusiasm only comes from a fandom, an organized, well-networked, convivial mass of people who really, really love something and want to talk about it — a lot.

Last week, I wrote about the professionals in the children’s library, bookselling and publishing worlds who helped make “The Hunger Games” a hit even before it was published in 2008. But as smart as those adults are in identifying and promoting books to young readers, they can’t create a fandom, either (although many of them are themselves fans). A fandom is a self-generating, self-reinforcing, snowballing phenomenon.

Before the Internet became part of everyone’s everyday life, a reader who was blown away by a book and dying to talk about it might insist that a friend read it, too. Today, she’ll still urge the book on her friends, but she’ll also go online to find equally obsessed readers who are already discussing it in a forum or blog. Over time, these fellow fans can become friends, perhaps close ones, even if they never meet in the flesh. They recommend new books to each other and circulate news about the favorites that brought them together in the first place.

Fan networks like these, not movie studio promotional campaigns, were what fostered the drumbeat of excitement leading up to the release of “The Hunger Games” movie. Marketers can egg them on by feeding them tidbits like casting news and poster art, but they don’t create the interest in the first place, and they can’t really control it.

For a long time, organized fandom was seen as primarily a guy thing. The two primary types of hardcore fandom — comic books and science fiction — had many female members, of course, but as the term “fan boy” attests, the most visible, vocal and vehement tended to be male. Meanwhile, the primary manifestations of female fandom were the screaming preteen followings of bubble-gum pop bands: avid, yes, but dismissed as the passive, easily manipulated consumers of disposable, prefab culture.

The success of the “Hunger Games” film is the apotheosis of a new kind of young female fandom, one that has its roots in books and owes its flourishing to the Web. The old, predominantly male fandom for comics and science fiction preexisted the Internet and was one of the first subcultures to take advantage of it. The fandom for “The Hunger Games” grew (in part) out of forums and other networks set up by “Twilight” fans, which in turn grew out of the fandom for “Harry Potter.” These fandoms, which flourished during the advent of social media, are certainly not entirely female — any more than science-fiction or comics fandoms are entirely male — but most of the people who establish, maintain and participate in them are young women.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the weekend audience for “The Hunger Games” was 39 percent male, “another sign of a cultural juggernaut.” The most recent “Twilight” film, the Times pointed out, attracted an audience that was only 20 percent male. But “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1″ still brought in $138 million (domestic) on its first weekend, compared to $155 million for “The Hunger Games”; nothing to sneeze at.

Like the Times, you could look at these figures as an indication of how much better a movie franchise can do when it appeals to young men as well as young women — or you could just acknowledge the fact that a movie can now be a big hit without appealing to young men at all. As far as their stories go, “The Hunger Games” doesn’t have much in common with “Twilight” (or, for that matter, with the Harry Potter series), but what all three hugely popular franchises do have in common is their origins in bestselling books whose readership was either primarily female or at most 50/50, and whose most active fans are girls.

That’s a big change from the days when conventional wisdom held that any popular blockbuster had to speak to the movies’ core audience of teenage boys. That was the notion that gave us two decades of superhero pictures. Maybe it was even the thinking behind this season’s most notorious flop, “John Carter.” If I were a movie producer, I’d be hightailing it out of the comic shop and turning to the YA shelves in my local bookstore to look for my next project. That’s where the girls are.

Further reading

The making of a blockbuster: a Salon exclusive on the behind-the-scenes story of the readers and booksellers who launched the Hunger Games franchise

The New York Times on the record-setting ticket sales for the opening weekend of “The Hunger Games”

Obsessive female fandom is having a moment. First it was the “Twilight” books and tie-in vampire-chastity-fantasy films that still have women all over the world daydreaming about being brutalized by bloodsucking aristocrats. Now, just as the first film installment of “The Hunger Games” hits cinemas, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the X-rated fan-fiction novel based around the “Twilight” films, will soon be arriving in bookstores. They’re popular not only because they flip the classic narrative on women, but because they take on three issues key to young women’s lives — sex, class and power.

Although these bestselling series share a great many readers, devotees of one particular series or another will invariably contest that they have nothing in common. True, if you had to objectively measure the fortunes of Katniss Everdeen and Bella Swan, “Twilight’s” milquetoast heroine, there is little overlap.

These are dark, violent, emotionally exhausting books. Packed with more violent body horror and buckets of blood than parents who buy them for their 14-year-olds probably quite appreciate –  certainly grislier than any equivalent series I’ve encountered aimed at young men. “Twilight” contains a scene where Bella literally has to have a cannibalistic vampire baby bitten out of her womb, and by about halfway through “The Hunger Games,” I was getting a little weary of the horrific torture sequences, the visceral fights to the death, the scaldings, stabbings and brutal police beatings, the enemies being gnawed to human jelly by genetically engineered nightmare-hounds, and just wanted to go away and read Cosmo Girl for a while. Actually, that’s a lie — I loved every second.

Both series have male fans, but they’re not specifically catered to, in the way that James Bond films, Bruce Willis films or, indeed, 95 percent of the rest of the output of the film and fiction industries don’t particularly concern themselves with the female gaze. In these series, it is women and girls who have desires, passions and problems, women and girls who act on those desires or are consumed by them, and men who are the objects of desire, even if they show up in the story addicted to the whiff of the heroine’s funky-smelling blood.

Like the Bronte novels, “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” are fairly oozing with repressed eroticism. One can no more write about extramarital sex in a book aimed at modern teenage girls than one could in a Victorian novel, but the implication drips from every page, which possibly explains the enormous volume of smutty fan-fiction on the Internet making the implicit explicit. “Fifty Shades of Grey,” meanwhile, was originally written as “Twilight” fan-fiction, and part of the reason that it is less interesting as a social phenomenon is that its apparatus of censorship does not work in the same way that it does in the teen novels, where the frantic tension of suggestion and repression drives the plot, and readers are encouraged to fill in the gaps with their own feverish imaginings — which they do, in graphic detail, on the Internet.

These stories are also fairly obviously about class. Vampire novels are straightforward tales of class treachery, all about wanting to offer yourself to wealthy social leeches who will, in return, grant you power, beauty, eternal life and pots of money; one somehow never reads about vampires who have to work for a living. “The Hunger Games,” meanwhile, is an occasionally eye-watering narrative arc about economic inequality and social unrest, in which the hero finds herself fighting to survive between the cruel, cartoonish extravagance of an overbearing ultra-capitalist state and the murky machinations of the neo-Stalinist rebels. Sex, class and power: Three things that are on most little girls’ minds far more than polite society likes to contemplate. No wonder these films have them screaming in the streets.

It’s an interesting scenario, I suppose, but how did this happen? Nothing in Collins’ books, or in director Gary Ross’ simultaneously chaotic and desultory film adaptation, even tries to explain that (or seems aware of it as a narrative problem). Somewhere amid the civil war and widespread destruction and rise of a totalitarian state that forms the scanty back story of “The Hunger Games,” the collective knowingness and jadedness and pseudo-sophistication of the Information Revolution society has evaporated. Or at least it has among the subject populations, in the outlying districts annually compelled to supply young combatants to the Hunger Games. Where Collins’ heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, in the movie) grows up, in the Appalachian coal-mining zone called District 12, willowy women in print dresses with flyaway hair live in tumbledown shacks, looking for all the world as if they just stepped out of a Dorothea Lange photo essay from 1937. (Have blue jeans for women and indoor plumbing been abolished, along with consumer society, corporate capitalism and postmodernity in general?)

If that sounds like too much intellectual heavy lifting to apply to a girl-centric action-romance that mashes up a bunch of disparate influences and ingredients, from Greek mythology to Orwell to Stephen King, well, it probably is. My point is that the patchwork of “The Hunger Games” never really holds together or makes any sense, except as an elementary fairy tale about a young girl’s coming of age and an incipient romantic triangle (which is the focus of the film, far more than the book). In Collins’ novel, the first-person narration and Katniss’ intense physical and psychological struggle seize center stage and overwhelm the threadbare situation, at least to some degree. Ross’ movie version — co-written by him, Collins and Billy Ray — is probably adequate to satisfy hardcore fans, but only just. It’s a hash job that offers intriguing moments of social satire and delightful supporting performances, but subsumes much of the book’s page-turning drama to sub-“Twilight” teen romance. Of course it will make a zillion dollars opening weekend, but I’m not convinced this franchise will be as ginormous, in the long run, as Hollywood hopes.

It’s easy to be seduced by something that’s both as clever and as successful as “The Hunger Games,” and to conclude that it must have something to say about violence and the media and changing ideas of femininity and other hot-button topics it appears to address. But as becomes even clearer in the movie version, it really doesn’t. It’s a cannily crafted entertainment that refers to ideas without actually possessing any, beyond an all-purpose populism that could appeal just as easily to a Tea Partyer as to a left-winger. If not more so — the true villain of “The Hunger Games” is the all-powerful state, and the population of Panem’s capital city (in Ross’ movie, and to some extent in the book too) is a decadent, affected and polysexual media elite, whose outrageous peacock fashions suggest the court of Marie Antoinette appearing in a Duran Duran video.

In fact, “The Hunger Games” is precisely the thing it pretends to disapprove of: a pulse-elevating spectacle meant to distract us from the unsatisfying situation of the real world, and to offer a simulated outlet for youthful disaffection and anxiety (in this case, the anxieties of girls and young women in particular). Bread and circuses, only without the bread, and pretending to be anti-circus. I’m not claiming that’s anything new in pop culture, and it certainly isn’t a crime. Furthermore, the shapeless politics of “The Hunger Games” have very little to do with the question of whether it’s any good, although they do illustrate how calculated the whole project is.

About one ingredient there can be little question: “The Hunger Games” announces Jennifer Lawrence’s arrival as an A-list movie star, likely at or near the level of “Twilight’s” Kristen Stewart. I’m not sure that Ross — a longtime Hollywood insider who co-wrote “Big” for Tom Hanks, and wrote and directed “Seabiscuit” — asks Lawrence to do half as much acting as she did in “Winter’s Bone,” but she commands the screen with effortless magnetism, a noble innocent who is gorgeous but not quite sexy, simultaneously a tomboy and a princess. As I saw clearly for the first time, the character is clearly meant to invoke Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt. When her younger sister’s name is drawn, against all odds, at the annual “reaping” for Hunger Games contestants, Katniss steps forward to take her place, beginning her appointment with destiny and her confrontation with the cruelty of the Capitol. She’s leaving behind her friend, hunting partner and maybe-kinda boyfriend Gale, played woodenly, or perhaps beefily, by smoldering male-model type Liam Hemsworth.

As Collins’ readers already know, Katniss must battle to the death against 23 other “tributes” aged 12 to 18 — one boy and one girl from each of the 12 subservient districts — in an arena that appears to be a natural outdoor setting but may not be. Now we know why Ross and the film’s producers didn’t show us any footage of the actual Hunger Games combat in advance: They hadn’t shot any until last week. OK, that’s unfair. Most of the book’s Games encounters are here, in abbreviated form, but Ross and company have streamlined the story and altered several details (some significantly), and the whole thing feels ultra-perfunctory. Almost no actual bloodshed is depicted (in deference to the required PG-13 rating), and during the fight sequences cinematographer Tom Stern relies on a wobbly, nonsensical, quick-cut style that leaves you utterly unsure about who has killed whom, and may have you squeezing your eyes shut to avoid throwing up. The problem really isn’t the lack of explicit violence; far more important, we get no sense of the hunger, thirst, cold, disease and harrowing physical torment undergone by Katniss and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the shy, blond District 12 baker’s son who has long loved her from afar. OK, they get a few superficial nicks and scratches, but they look as well-fed and runway-ready in the second half of the movie as they did at the beginning.

I have many more bones to pick with the Games — the Cornucopia, used by the game designers to lure contestants into a free-for-all? So bogus! — but when you pull back and look at the fripperies around the edges of Ross’ “Hunger Games,” it becomes much more entertaining and nearly worthwhile. Stanley Tucci is amazing as Caesar Flickerman, the host of the Hunger Games broadcast. All of a sudden, this universe without media savvy becomes all about media savvy, all wrapped into this unctuous persona whose sincerity is so fake it becomes real (or the other way around), and whose dazzling smile is at once comforting and terrifying. As he so often can, Woody Harrelson turns Haymitch, a drunken past winner of the Games from Katniss’ district, into a fascinating and mysterious figure, even though the script gives him little to do. Wes Bentley plays a game designer who must frequently consult with Panem’s sinister president (Donald Sutherland, apparently playing Brigham Young), in expository scenes that aren’t in the book but provide helpful background.

I also dug Lenny Kravitz, playing a stylist named Cinna who grooms Katniss for the Games — the only person she meets in the decadent Capitol who has a shred of genuineness or integrity — and becomes her confidant. In his sly, androgynous sexiness, Kravitz has way more chemistry and connection with Lawrence than do Hemsworth or Hutcherson, playing the two lunkheads supposedly smitten with Katniss. I’d way rather watch a love story about Katniss and Cinna than the lightweight Twi-triangle inflicted on us by Ross, who has (with Collins’ permission, evidently) stripped his heroine of almost all her Artemis-like uncertainty about boys and romance. (In the book, you couldn’t be quite sure Katniss wasn’t a lesbian, at least at first.)

But we’re not getting Katniss and Cinna, of course, and we don’t get anything that feels remotely like an ending in this clunky, clumsy adaptation; the story reaches a certain point and the curtain simply drops. Wait another year and spend another $12, and you’ll get another chapter. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but that just seems mean (and neither the Harry Potter nor the “Twilight” series were quite this blatant about it). I realize it will probably work, or work well enough. “The Hunger Games” has some cool moments here and there, and is never entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven’t screwed it up badly enough to kill it, although they’ve tried. Go ahead and put that on your poster.

The Hunger Games franchise, with Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role, aims for a spot in a select but very sweet pantheon: movie adaptations of bestselling children’s book series that have become box office juggernauts. The Harry Potter movies set the pattern, and the Twilight films proved that it could be replicated. So far, the Hunger Games’ chances look good; according to a poll conducted by MTV’s Nextmovie.com, the film version of Collins’ dystopian young adult novel is even more eagerly anticipated than “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2.”

Being made into a movie can do a lot for a book. But consider the boost a book this popular can give to the movie. The Harry Potter and Twilight series delivered up obsessively devoted audiences who speculated about casting for years before the films were released, who debated and pored over every still, poster, teaser, trailer — in short, every shred of news about the forthcoming cinematic realization of their favorite characters and stories. They loved those books as only kids can, with an intensity that makes for sprawling fan sites and mobbed midnight release parties at your ordinarily sleepy neighborhood bookstore.

The Hunger Games is that kind of series, if for a more serious-minded, science-fiction-loving breed of teen. And then there are the adult fans. The actress Kristen Bell (star of the cult-TV series “Veronica Mars”) recently told the Huffington Post that “The Hunger Games” is “all I think about.” Bell threw an elaborate Hunger Games-themed party for her 30th birthday: “All my friends dressed as the characters and I dressed as Katniss [Everdeen, the books' heroine].”

As of this writing, the first book in the Hunger Games series has been parked on the USA Today bestseller list for 132 weeks; the second, “Catching Fire,” for 131. There are more than 24 million copies of all three books in print. Unlike the Harry Potter series, which was aimed (originally) at middle-grade readers, this is a young-adult epic with a particularly dark premise: In a future version of America called Panem, 12 districts subjugated by a central authority must each send a pair of their children to compete in a gladiatorial contest from which only one will emerge alive. In marked contrast to the swoony vampire romance of the Twilight series, the many harrowing action sequences in “The Hunger Games” make the books equally appealing to boys and girls.

It’s indicative of the balkanization of the reading world that if you don’t have teenage children, you may not have heard of “The Hunger Games” until quite recently, despite the fact that for several years the book’s success has rivaled that of “The Help” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Although both Harry Potter and Twilight have demonstrated that there’s a sizable adult readership for some children’s books, the genre is still (mostly) reviewed in separate publications, shelved in its own section of the library and often sold in separate stores. In fact, children’s book publishing operates quite differently from its adult counterpart. And in many respects, that’s a good thing.

With the right title, a kid’s publisher can deploy something the world of adult publishing can only dream about: a large, well-oiled and highly networked group of professional and semi-professional taste makers who can make that book a hit even before it’s published. This is what happened with “The Hunger Games,” which landed on the New York Times Bestseller List — there are separate ones for kids’ books — the week it was released. In the post-Harry Potter and Twilight world, breakout children’s series like “The Hunger Games” automatically attract the interest of big-budget Hollywood film producers. That means that the mostly invisible legion of experts who hiked “The Hunger Games” onto the bestseller list will be determining some of the blockbusters you’ll see in your local multiplex a couple of years down the road.

Cue the obligatory bad-mouthing of publishing and its antiquated ways. But before you get into that, it’s essential to grasp the central, maddening paradox that confronts all book marketers, from venerable New York publishing houses to tiny independent presses: The only thing that reliably sells books is word of mouth, preferably a personal recommendation from a trusted friend. The one successful mass-market book-promoting phenomenon of our time, the Oprah Book Club, was just that — an endorsement from someone with the very rare gift of convincing millions of people that they know her really well.

Advertising and reviews and flogging on Facebook or Twitter don’t help much unless the author already has a large following. A book demands more time and energy from its consumers than a movie or a song, and readers increasingly require a chorus of endorsements before they’re willing to try something new. (Think about it: We all have friends who occasionally steer us wrong, but if several of them are raving about the same book, it looks like a much safer bet.) When you can’t persuade someone to read your book until somebody else has read and endorsed it, you’re in limbo — like the proverbial job-seeker who can’t get hired without experience and can’t get experience without a job.

Many of the most arcane practices of the publishing industry are methods for working around this dilemma. It begins even before a book goes to press. Those unfamiliar with publishing’s peculiar customs may wonder at the mystique surrounding “in-house enthusiasm,” a key factor in the success of any book, whether it’s for adults or for children. In an ideal world, publishers would be enthusiastic about every single book they publish, right? But all too often the manuscript doesn’t fulfill the promise of the proposal, or the novel that one editor adores leaves everyone else cold. The ability of a book to generate interest in random staff members is a publisher’s first sign that it has legs. This is the beginning of the long and elaborate winnowing process that separates the also-rans from the hits, much of which happens even before store clerks take the books out of the carton.

“The Hunger Games” started out with an advantage. Scholastic Books, Collins’ publisher, had done well with Collins’ previous series, the Underland Chronicles, five books for middle-grade (8-to-12-year-old) readers about a boy who discovers a gritty fantasy world under the streets of New York. With that in mind, Scholastic bought “The Hunger Games” on the strength of a four-page proposal covering all three books of the projected YA (young adult) trilogy. In the summer of 2007, Collins submitted a draft of the first book to three editors, including Scholastic’s executive editorial director, David Levithan, and Kate Egan, a freelancer who has worked on all of Collins’ books.

Levithan and Egan were among the first readers to be sucked into the irresistible tractor-beam of Collins’ narrative. The book begins with the 74th annual Hunger Games lottery in the hardscrabble mining region of District 12. The heroine, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, is skilled with bow and arrow; her family survives on her poaching. In the lottery, Katniss’ beloved little sister is selected as a tribute (a death sentence for someone so young), and Katniss volunteers to go to the games in her stead. She’s whisked away to the decadent Capitol, where she undergoes training — and a rather fabulous makeover — alongside her fellow District 12 tribute, Peeta, the baker’s son. All of this builds up to the Games themselves, conducted in a fenced-off wilderness preserve in which the tributes battle for food, supplies and weapons while invisible cameras broadcast their every move.

“The Hunger Games” is a novel that takes to heart Billy Wilder’s famous dictum for screenwriters: “Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.” Before she turned to books, Collins, who has a background in theater, wrote children’s television shows for Nickelodeon. “I think that writing for episodic television, knowing that you have to have that rising and falling tension, and end that episode at a particular place, has served her very well,” said her agent, Rosemary Stimola. Karen Springen, a former Newsweek reporter and one of the first journalists to extoll “The Hunger Games,” puts it this way: “She knew how to do cliffhangers to get you to come back after the commercial break. Each chapter is a cliffhanger, and each book is a cliffhanger.”

Scholastic employees began eagerly passing the manuscript around the office. It was the first stirring of what would become a tidal wave of word of mouth. “When you have the kind of book,” said Rachel Coun, executive director of marketing, “where assistants from other departments, even though it’s not their job, come asking for the galleys because they’ve heard it’s really great, you know you have something.” “We made a lot of copies,” said Levithan. “Coming out of the fall sales conference, everyone knew that the best way to generate excitement about ‘The Hunger Games’ was to get people to read ‘The Hunger Games.’” That isn’t as easy as it sounds; over 20,000 new children’s books are published annually, and the people Scholastic needed to reach — people outside the company — are drowning in the piles of books arriving from hopeful publishers.

In January, the book’s marketing team decided to send out photocopies of the manuscript instead of the nicely bound proofs that are typically submitted to industry professionals before the finished version of a book comes off the presses. “We didn’t want to wait until we had advance readers copies,” said Levithan. “We wanted key booksellers and key librarians to read it as soon as possible.” Just as significant as the timing, a choice like this is part of an informal semaphore system between publishers and the all-important first readers of any new children’s book. A Xeroxed, plastic-comb-bound manuscript conveys both urgency and the conviction that here’s a title that doesn’t need attractive packaging to make an impression. “It signals that this is something they think is special,” said Andrew Medlar, youth materials specialist for the Chicago Public Library. “It’s not something we do very often,” Levithan concurred.

Scholastic sales reps were given a limited number of manuscripts to distribute to their list of “Big Mouths,” children’s publishing lingo for booksellers who have exceptional influence with co-workers and peers. These people run regional associations, organize book fairs and set up school events. Teachers and librarians come to them for hot tips on new kids’ titles.

Carol Chittenden, a classic Big Mouth, is a co-owner of Eight Cousins bookstore in Falmouth, Mass. and founded the New England Children’s Booksellers Advisory Council, which (among other things) maintains a website where members can swap opinions on forthcoming titles. Her cozy children’s bookstore in a small Cape Cod town may seem a long way from Hollywood, but people like Chittenden — who’s been selling kids’ books for 22 years and who instantly recognized “The Hunger Games” as “major” — are the wellsprings of word of mouth, a sort of viral ground zero where phenomena like Hunger Games fandom are born. These people are, after all, the ones who made Harry Potter a household name.

We now come to a precarious crossroads in the fate of any book, that moment when it passes out of the hands of the publisher, who has a vested interest in its success, and under the scrutiny of much tougher judges. Getting Big Mouths like Medlar and Chittenden to read the book in the first place is half the battle. Sales representatives like Nikki Mutch, who gave Chittenden her copy of the manuscript for “The Hunger Games,” are a key conduit between publisher and bookseller, the crucial node where, if all goes well, in-house enthusiasm translates into real-world buzz. The title “sales rep,” with its Willy-Lomanesque connotations of briefcase-toting drudgery, doesn’t convey the persuasive mojo these men and women can wield; their credibility, if they use it wisely, can be immense. “We totally trust her,” said Heather Hebert, manager of Children’s Book World, in Haverford, Pa., of her Scholastic sales rep. “She definitely was the reason why we all read ["The Hunger Games"] immediately. When she says it’s good, it’s good.”

If the excitement back in headquarters manages to get transmitted to the publisher’s sales reps in the field, and the reps in turn transmit it to booksellers, and if the marketing department persuades major children’s librarians to give the book a tumble, then it’s off to a good start. But a book can still stall out if that first line of expert readers isn’t impressed. “The Hunger Games,” however, proceeded to wow the Big Mouths. Rachel Coun and Scholastic’s head of publicity, Tracy van Straaten, began compiling testimonials from booksellers and librarians, many of whom mock-complained of being kept up all night, compulsively reading the manuscript; then they incorporated the quotes into their marketing campaign, reminding the wider network that leaders in their field were loving the book.

That spring, a full six months before “The Hunger Games” was set to publish, the official advance reader’s copies were among some of the most sought-after items at the conferences and conventions where publishers present their titles to booksellers and librarians. In early summer, Publishers Weekly, the industry’s trade publication, ran a story on how Scholastic had twice doubled the book’s print run in response to “early raves, particularly online, where commentary has lit up blogs and listservs.” The book was well on its way to bestseller status even before the cover art — a major conundrum for Scholastic — had been finalized.

To anyone accustomed to the often haphazard methods of adult book marketing, the apparatus marshaled on behalf of kids’ books before and after publication is both awe-inspiring and enviable. This is old-school social networking — conferences, presentations, in-store events, face-to-face recommendations to customers and colleagues (referred to as “hand selling” in the book trade) — rendered even more powerful by new technology. Every children’s bookseller and librarian I contacted for this article belongs to at least one listserv where they constantly evaluate new books with their peers. Months before “The Hunger Games” was published, Kathleen Horning, who works at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center in Madison, Wis., a resource center for librarians, created a forum for the book on GoodReads, a social networking site for book lovers with over 6 million members, so she could chat about it with anyone who’d also gotten their hands on an advance reader’s copy. It was up and thriving by the time the book was published

Most booksellers and librarians want to foster reading, but none are more evangelical than the ones who specialize in kids’ books. Adult books may boast the more prominent bestseller lists and reviews, but there are entire industries and professions — with outposts in every town in America — that have made it their mission to get children to read more books. There are no institutions with the equivalent reach and dedication when it comes to promoting adult reading.

A school librarian like Alli Decker, head librarian at St. Mark’s School in San Rafael,Calif., may not have Oprah’s reach, but she’s got a lot more depth when it comes to putting a book in the hands of one of her students. “In the best-case scenario,” she explained, “I know them from first grade, when they start to read independently, on up. I know who I can challenge and who I can’t. I know who is willing to try something new and who isn’t.” “That’s what [children's] librarians basically want to do,” said Horning: “find books that kids really, really want to read.”

To that end, librarians have perfected the art of the “booktalk,” a term that, in recent years, has morphed into a transitive verb: Horning describes “The Hunger Games” as “a really fun book to booktalk.” A booktalk is a pitch, several minutes long, delivered to fellow librarians, teachers, parents and young library patrons. Librarians are invited to speak at schools and bookstores, or they travel to branches to help fill in the gaps for overworked local librarians. They are, in effect, unofficial traveling salespersons for the books they love, supported by the apparatus of respected, publicly funded institutions. Parents and teachers who are too busy to keep up with new children’s books themselves treat their advice as gospel. Andrew Medlar of the Chicago Public Library not only orders books for 79 branches and booktalks his favorite titles to his staff, he compiles lists of recommendations that are posted to the library’s website and distributed in schools, bookstores and libraries. He also nominates for important prizes.

Its high-concept premise made “The Hunger Games” an ideal candidate for booktalks. “It’s one of the easiest books to interest a child in reading,” Horning explained. Of course, librarians and teachers don’t always love the same books that kids do. Over the years, they’ve tried to steer their patrons away from what has been viewed as low-quality, if popular, series fiction: the Hardy Boys detective stories, the horror series Goosebumps, and glitzy tales of teenage hedonism like the Gossip Girls books.

“The Hunger Games,” by contrast, hits what Chittenden calls “the sweet spot of the market.” The romantic triangle of Katniss, Peeta and Gale (the boy Katniss left behind in District 12), combined with the combat and adventure of the Games themselves, appeals to a wide spectrum of teen and tween readers. Parents, teachers and librarians seize on the social and political commentary in the novel’s depiction of an authoritarian government, an exploited underclass and reality-TV voyeurism pushed to grotesque extremes.

“There were so many ways that high school teachers could use this in their curriculum that we felt that it was important for them to know about it,” said Heather Hebert of Children’s Book World in Haverford, Pa. A classroom assignment will result in multiple sales, which is why many booksellers make a point of sharing advance reader’s copies of promising books with local educators. “We’ll get a few extra ARCs and give them to the teachers,” says Becky Anderson of Anderson’s Bookshop, which has two stores in Illinois. “They’ll start reading that book out loud in class to the kids, just to tease them with the first few chapters.” Then, “we send out a pre-sale form so all the kids can buy it.” It’s a strategy that’s worked like a charm for many a drug dealer.

One high school teacher Anderson works with likes to enlist the whole school in staging elaborate book-inspired events. Within weeks of the publication of “The Hunger Games,” Collins made a personal appearance at the school. She was honored with a veritable pageant. Students marched before the author costumed as the district tributes, the language arts class made posters with quotes from the novel (to illustrate such rhetorical devices as irony) and the art class re-created one of the settings in the Arena. Even the business class participated by budgeting, raising money for and finally commissioning a pendant of Katniss’ emblem, a bird called a mockingjay, to present to Collins at the event.

It’s hard to imagine the first book in any adult series being greeted with a comparable level of grass-roots hoopla: buzzed, booktalked and big-mouthed for months before it appeared on any bookstore display table. When “The Hunger Games” finally reached its intended audience, 12-to-18-year-olds, it proved to be as big a hit as Chittenden and her colleagues had predicted. Kids, it turned out, loved it just as much as all those adults who have made it their life’s work to discover the books kids will love. (Go figure.) From that point, it only got hotter: There is no more fertile petri dish in which to grow world of mouth than a high school. When “Catching Fire” was published the following year, it instantly shot to the No. 1 spot on the USA Today bestseller list.

“The Hunger Games” also arrived at a moment when many adult readers had turned to YA fiction for their own recreational reading. Several booksellers cite a boom in YA blogs as contributing to spreading the word about the series. “The [bloggers] we know,” said Hebert, “who come to our store all the time and to our events, they seem to be women in their mid-20s. They’re not teens, but they don’t have families yet, most of them.” These bloggers network with each other constantly via Twitter and Facebook, and when the “Hunger Games” sequels came out, they were often first in line for the midnight release parties. “They’re great, because they get just as excited as we do,” said Hebert. “And they can actually come at midnight. A lot of our customers are too young to stay up that late.”

Scholastic didn’t just sit back and watch all this transpire. They buttonholed booksellers and librarians at conferences with books in hand, insisting that everyone they knew had to read this advance reader’s copy as soon as possible. They distributed banner ads, countdown clocks and a grainily ominous book trailer. They went through countless iterations of the cover before settling on an iconic mockingjay emblem as an appropriately unisex image for the franchise. But as the American publishers of the ultimate word-of-mouth phenomenon, Harry Potter, they also bow to the power of what van Straaten calls “kismet.” With “The Hunger Games,” “We got it in the hands of the right people. That’s what publishers do,” she said. “You’re leveraging one thing to build the next thing. You need the enthusiasm internally to convince that first layer of gatekeepers. Once you have the kudos of those people, you can get these people, and so on.” “The viral world changes monthly,” said Scholastic’s Coun, “so our marketing has to change along with it. Still, the traditional thing — you read the book and it’s a great book — is what’s going to sell it the most.”

By now you’ve probably noticed that two prominent elements of the book-publishing landscape — Amazon and ebooks — have yet to crop up in this story. While Amazon was as enthusiastic as other booksellers about the publication of “The Hunger Games” (and Collins is a member of the elect Kindle Million Club — a half-dozen authors who have sold more than a million titles in the Kindle format), the e-tailer just doesn’t have the community presence of a bricks-and-mortar children’s bookstore.

High school teachers aren’t checking in with Jeff Bezos to find out what to assign to their classes next fall. Desperate parents don’t ask him for a title that will get their 14-year-old son reading again. Furthermore, teenagers and younger children still list browsing in bookstores and libraries as the primary ways they find out about new books and authors. They’ve been much slower to adopt e-books than older readers. Some observers think this is because e-reader devices are too pricey for kids; others say that kids see print books as a pleasant break from staring at screens all day. YA titles are selling well in various e-book platforms, but no one knows how many of these books are being bought by the growing adult readership for YA.

The possibility of “The Hunger Games” crossing over to adult readers (the Holy Grail for children’s book marketers) got its first big public boost when Stephen King reviewed it for Entertainment Weekly (even if he only gave it a B) a few days after the book came out. Not long after that, Stephenie Meyer, whose “Twilight” also made significant inroads with adult readers, raved about “The Hunger Games” on her blog: “I was so obsessed with this book I had to take it with me out to dinner and hide it under the edge of the table so I wouldn’t have to stop reading,” she wrote. This was major. Meyer doesn’t just have a lot of fans; she has a lot of fans who will read pretty much whatever she tells them to.

How did the Meyer recommendation come about? Van Straaten, like a lot of children’s book publicists, makes a habit of mailing out advance reader’s copies of her own favorite Scholastic titles to her peers. One of the people she sent “The Hunger Games” to was Meyer’s publicist, who loved the book and — even though it’s published by another house — urged it on Meyer. Suggesting that the creator of your company’s flagship property might want to plug a competitor’s new product would be unthinkable in most other industries. But at that moment, neither woman was thinking about business. They were just two readers, spreading the word.