Small Screen Writ Large

Could there be a bigger name in television tie-ins than Stephen King? This season, it may be Ellen Rimbauer. She's the character at the center of Rose Red, a major three-episode ABC miniseries scripted by King and due at the end of January. Hyperion has shipped 200,000 copies of The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer—a "firsthand" account of the bizarre tragedies that unfolded in the turn-of-the-century Rimbauer mansion known as Rose Red—which is written in the spirit of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Look for torrential cross-promotion from ABC, including a "Making of Rose Red" special, set to air in mid-January, which will feature the book.

Ken Burns is also back in January with another American classic on PBS. This time it's Mark Twain, a four-hour documentary featuring Kevin Conway as the voice of Mr. Clemens. And what Twain biopic would be complete without an appearance by Hal Holbrook, who has delighted audiences with his one-man show for decades? Knopf ordered up 100,000 copies of the tie-in, Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography, last November. As usual, Burns will be a promotional gale, having recently kicked off Laura Bush's pro-literacy campaign.

The season's other major highlight is the launch of a national book club tied to ExxonMobil's Masterpiece Theatre, which reaches approximately three million fiercely loyal viewers a week. The first three productions will air this spring: Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate (Vintage) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (Penguin) in February, and James Agee's A Death in the Family (Vintage) in March as part of Masterpiece Theatre's American Collection.

The book club is a grassroots venture initiated and guided by Amy Guertin, program marketing coordinator of Boston's WGBH, which produces the series for PBS. Participating member stations will organize and promote local discussions of the productions and the books on which they're based, recruiting book club members by e-mail or regular mail for meetings in bookstores or at individual stations. For stations serving a large geographical area, the Internet will play an integral part in the program, Guertin explained. There will be customized local Web sites as well as a discussion area on the national site (www.pbs.orgmasterpieceook-club), which will go live by January 28. "Every station has different resources and markets, so we tried to make the reading clubs flexible enough to take whatever shape they choose," she said.

To kick it off, WGBH sent out a starter kit at the end of December that included the three tie-in books and extensive promotional material bound in a handsome box made to look like a book. So far, the response from PBS member stations and publishers has been "vocal and enthusiastic," according to Guertin. "One station asked if they had to limit themselves to just three books. We told them, 'No! Great! Do as many as you want!'" For its part, WGBH currently plans annual spring and fall mailings, which will each include three titles.

WGBH has bought volumes of each book in bulk and is offering 10 free copies of each title to participating stations. If a station recruits more than 10 book club members, it can either buy books in bulk (currently via Forest Incentives) or create a partnership with a local bookseller. The publishers, in turn, have the option to target those booksellers with additional promotional materials to attract more readers (WGBH does not currently have plans to create its own point-of-purchase materials). If it works, it could be win-win for all sides, allowing publishers to move more books and WGBH to attract more viewers, while bringing classics more visibility.

Publishers are bullish on the featured titles. Penguin is printing 25,000 copies of Lucky Jim, tripling its typical annual run for Kingsley Amis's irreverent skewering of British academia. Love in a Cold Climate (Vintage), Nancy Mitford's 1949 semi-autobiographical account of three women searching for love in the years between the wars, wasn't even originally in Vintage's library. But through their longstanding relationship with Masterpiece Theatre, executives at Vintage heard about the upcoming production and decided to publish the book. Meanwhile, the paperback house expects a significant increase over the 11,000 copies it sells annually of James Agee's 1958 Pulitzer winner, A Death in the Family, which uses the impact of a father's death to analyze the country's social fabric.

Another classic airing on A&E is a new adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons (Modern Library), for which Booth Tarkington won the 1918 Pulitzer. Since the tie-in edition's release in September, sales have doubled even before the film's airing, according to Modern Library's Erica Muncy. The impressive cast—including Madeleine Stowe, Bruce Greenwood, Gretchen Mol and Jennifer Tilly—was directed by Like Water for Chocolate's Alfonso Arau.

It's not uncommon for a television production to revive interest in a title. Vintage, which is soon to publish new titles by Beverly Lowry, agreed to issue a trade edition of her previously out-of-print 1992 book Crossed Over, upon hearing of the February CBS movie starring Diane Keaton and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Meanwhile, two new projects based on Ernest Shackleton's calamitous turn-of-the-century voyage across the Antarctic—a Nova documentary and an A&E movie with Kenneth Branagh—should give books such as Alfred Lansing's Endurance (Carroll & Graf), Caroline Alexander's The Endurance (Knopf) and Frank Hurley's South with Endurance (S&S) a bump, though the film isn't officially tied to any of them.

Foremost among the spring 2002 TV tie-ins that found an unlikely road to publication is The Believer (Thunder's Mouth, Mar.), which owes its existence to director/screenwriter Henry Bean's difficult journey as a filmmaker and the debate his film has stirred. In 1965, the New York Times did a story on an anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi skinhead and KKK leader who turned out to be an Orthodox Jew. From that account, which Bean carried around for 25 years, he devised a contemporary story that won last year's Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. But as his intimate and thoughtful introduction to the book explains, nothing about the film or its subject was easy.

When the film was first screened at the Munich Film Festival, a vocal minority said it would encourage neo-Nazis and couldn't be shown to Germans. Then, a prominent American-Jewish group said it was "a recipe for anti-Semitism." But as Avalon senior editorial director Will Balliett put it, "That's like saying Catch-22 is a recipe for blowing up the world." Only the Russians seemed to accept the film, according to Bean, because "inexplicable contradictoriness was their natural heritage."

Despite the Sundance win and a Rolling Stone review that called it "the most potent and provocative film of the year," feature distributors wouldn't touch it. Fortunately, Showtime stepped in (there will be five showings in March). Its interest generated an offer from independent film distributor IDP, which will do a limited release in April. Perhaps the silver lining is that the controversy surrounding the film could generate sales of a powerful book that is an unusual combination of a feature script and several scholarly essays.

Similarly, HBO's production of The Laramie Project (Vintage) by Moises Kaufman could guide readers through a powerful but challenging read. Based on the events surrounding the savage murder of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who has become a symbol for America's struggle against intolerance, it stars Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda, Janeane Garofalo, Laura Linney, Camryn Manheim and Frances Sternhagen. Kaufman eschewed a traditional narrative structure, relying instead on "moments" that explore the multifaceted issues from many different angles at once. "We're such a visual society," said Vintage director of publicity Russell Perreault, "that a production helps us grapple with literary material, particularly when it's as complex as this piece." Vintage went out with 10,000 copies, and momentum seems to be building in the wake of the film's premiere at Sundance.

For those who want to feel smart, The Secret Life of the Brain (Joseph Henry Press & Dana Press) pulls back the curtain on the mysterious seat of consciousness, but in digestible layperson's terms. It offers insight into such timeless conundrums as why some people become alcoholics while others can drink like fish without dependency, and the cerebral physiology behind graceful aging. Parents, meanwhile, will be surprised to learn that during the first year their children start to tune out all language sounds other than what Mom and Dad speak. Perhaps the next series will answer questions about the "terrible twos," when children appear to tune out their parents' language as well.

The book and the series had a symbiotic relationship from the outset. Having sold WNET-New York on creating a follow-up to its 1985 series The Brain, producer David Grubin next approached Brain author Dr. Richard Restak, whose wildly successful 1985 book had spent 10 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list. That package attracted National Academy Press—which oversees Dana Press, the prestigious scientific publishing arm of the Charles Dana Institute—which brought additional credibility to the endeavor. "All of these chapters were sent out to scientists in every field for peer review," explained Ann Merchant, director of marketing for National Academy Press. The hope is that the series will help push more books when it airs this month. The initial hardcover run was 35,000.

Arctic Dance: The Mardy Murie Story by Charles Craighead and Bonnie Kreps (Graphic Arts Center Publishing) also began as a film, a documentary about 1998 Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Margaret Murie, who has been called the mother of the American conservation movement. The filmmakers initially contacted Graphic Arts to use sections from Murie's classic 40-year-old autobiography, Two in the Far North, which is still in print. Later, they went back to the publishers with a trove of photographs they'd dug up for the documentary, and the book was hatched. While the initial print run is modest, the national exposure of the film, Harrison Ford's narration as well as the current Arctic environmental debate could all add up to more sales. Recently, the Alaska Wilderness League purchased 700 copies to distribute to every member of Congress in an effort to save the Arctic Wildlife Preserve. No matter what happens, said Graphic Arts regional manager Sara Juday, "her story deserves to be told."

Other never-before-seen footage will be available on a new HBO series Downloading Sex brought to you by Nerve.com, the sexual literature, arts and politics Web site. While there is no direct tie-in, Nerve regularly publishes books that will be cross-promoted on the show and regular contributors to the magazine will be featured. Meanwhile, Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall is coming out with Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm (Warner Books) in hardcover. While it's not tied to the hit HBO series, advance orders for the book have already pushed it as high as #300 at Amazon.com, suggesting that readers are making more than a platonic link between the two.