The Oscars' Changing Book Fetish
by Steven Zeitchik, PW Newsline -- Publishers Weekly, 1/26/2005
Only two of this year's nominees for best picture at the Academy Award lines builds off a book, a drop from a record four last year. But the titles represent a trend increasingly common among Oscar notables: the midlist title as Hollywood vehicle.
Both of the Best Picture books, the late F.X. Toole's Rope Burns (on which Million Dollar Baby is based) and Rex Pickett's Sideways, had modest sales from their Ecco and SMP releases. Another, J.M. Barrie and The Lost Boys by Andrew Birkin--a research tool for the makers of Finding Neverland but not a formal adaptation-- had even less exposure at Yale UP. And Da Capo had a relatively small release for its Ray Charles autobio Brother Ray.
But the success of the movies underscore how dusted-off titles have become the rage in Hollywood, whose popularizing ability goes well beyond the Lord of the Rings and Lemony Snickets of the world to those titles in the attic. (An analysis of the book-to-movie arc in next week's print mag.)
It's not a new idea--examples from the last decade go from Winston Groom's Forrest Gump books to Election (also directed by Sideways helmer Alexander Payne)--but insiders say it's gaining momentum.
"The story [in the media] is usually all the terrific books are being optioned or none of them are," says Sideways editor Elizabeth Baier. "But this is a more real and normal way of picking material. It isn't just the fad. It's about story editors reading through a lot of books carefully and finding the good ones."
SMP only brought out Sideways as an original paperback several months before the movie and its tie-in edition. It's now sold about 13,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, with about three-quarters of that coming post-film. And now "we're just waiting for all the [Oscar] commercials," says Baier.
Ditto for Yale UP, an unlikely beneficiary of Hollywood rainmaking that has the press' Tina Weiner surprised that its fortunes rest on a panel of L.A. movie insiders. And Ecco's Rope Burns, a release in 2000 that's a collection of short stories from a Southern California corner man, sold fewer than 9000 BookScan copies over its life, just got a new cover--and movie-appropriate title--this month, as the Hollywood buzz began to build.
The nomination of movies based on books, and the promotional fest to come, underscores a typical symbiosis: the book as creative engine, Hollywood as marketing engine. It's one that the book industry will gladly take. It's another way, beyond Oprah, beyond backlist, that can propel less-heralded lists.
"You can't expect this. I read this on a train and never in a million years thought it would even be optioned," says Ecco Press publisher Dan Halpern. "It proves once again that publishers don't have a clue what they're doing. We publish what we believe and if someone else loves it and the someone else is Clint Eastwood, great. More likely it's going to be a reviewer in Des Moines." Then he added, "It proves that the fat midlist is where the narrative lies. I think moviemakers are starting to pick up on that."
