It used to be that when young writers wanted to make good in Hollywood, they went West. Now, they go online.
On Friday, “Julie & Julia” hits theaters, and it is the first major motion picture that started off as a blog.
In 2002, New Yorker Julie Powell began an online diary about cooking her way through Julia Child‘s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” In 2005, it became a book, “Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” In 2007, plans surfaced for a film with Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as her culinary idol.
“My life has gotten more surreal in stair steps,” says Powell, “from the blog to the book to the movie to ‘Oh my God, Nora Ephron‘s directing it! Oh my God, Meryl Streep’s in it!’ So right now I’m at this sort of surreal-is-the-new-normal phase. I’m cool with it.”
While Powell’s is the first blog to hit the big screen, it won’t be the last. She’ll be followed in September by humor writer Tucker Max, whose outlandish tales about his own debauched dates and bar brawls earned his genre the name “fratire.”
Max started collecting his stories online in 2002, and his comically offensive work found an audience that made a best seller out of his book “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.” On Sept. 25, the film version opens, with “Gilmore Girls” actor Matt Czuchry as Max.
“The idea that e-mails I wrote my friends about the dumb things I did when I was drunk would blossom into a best-selling book and movie, no way was that on my mind,” Max says of his start toward screen fame. “But once the site started getting popular, yeah, I thought about it, of course. What writer doesn’t?”
Powell and Max were in their 20s when they started their online writing projects. Max was dissatisfied with his prospects after graduating Duke Law School – some of his early tales cover his impatient experiments with the corporate world. Powell worked a stressful desk job for the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. in the wake of 9/11. She saw her college dream of becoming a novelist slipping away.
“It really was a sort of dark-midnight-of-the-soul panic attack,” she says of her motivation to blog. “I really just didn’t see any hope of salvation or really doing something that was what I wanted to do.”
When her blog attracted notice, agents and book publishers flocked. One of the most triumphant scenes in “Julie & Julia” is when, after a newspaper article lauds her cooking marathon, Powell’s phone rings off the hook. When it came time to make the movie, Powell handed her story off to seasoned screenwriter Ephron.
Max rallied fans behind his book with a cross-country tour of readings, signings and the occasional wild night. When “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” made the best-seller list, he was hailed for filling a void: the male equivalent of highly hawkable chick lit. For the film, which he also produced, he wrote the script with buddy Nils Parker.
The discovery of an author through his or her blog was still a new phenomenon when Powell and Max started writing.
“The idea that a person could put up a blog and get a book deal from it, then have the book become a best seller, create a new genre of literature and sell a million copies – with no other press than the original Web site – was laughable in 2002,” says Max.
But, he adds, blog-to-book deals make good business sense. “Blogs reduce the risk of the book,” says Max. “When something starts as a blog, without spending any money you have an idea of the size of the audience and the reaction to the work.”
Still, Powell was flabbergasted by what she called the “really obscene book deal” that she landed in 2003. Her paycheck was in proportion to her avid readership – but she still felt her success was something of a fluke and joked on her blog, “I am, in fact, officially What’s Wrong With Publishing Today.”
Now the search for authors online is a well-established tool for publishers and agents. (Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody got a book deal out of her blog, though her screenplay “Juno” wasn’t based on either.) Today’s new wave is that the blog material published in those early books is making it to the cinema, where it can earn its authors big bucks. And the next blog-to-screen transition could come from anywhere.
Former Delta flight attendant Ellen Simonetti published her blog as the book “Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight Attendant” after the original got her fired, and is working on a screenplay. Executive producer Sarah Jessica Parker is working up an HBO series based on “Washingtonienne,” a spicy blog-turned-book about the sometimes-for-pay sex life of former congressional staff assistant Jessica Cutler. (Another blog-based series, Showtime’s “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” has already hit the small screen.) The stage version of a blog of fictional vignettes by Andrew Losowky, “The Doorbells of Florence,” recently ran in London for two weeks.
That there is money to be made online lures young writers, who with a few clicks can showcase their work in the Wild West of the Web, a meritocracy where good blogs rise to the top and boring ones languish.
It’s a place where you know if you’re doing well because your readership is measured in hits in real time. Initially surprised by their success, writers such as Powell and Max were fueled by attention. Their continuing to write, they say, had everything to do with fan reactions communicated through e-mail and comment boards on their sites.
Creating for a audience that offers feedback gave both writers confidence. Powell’s mother, initially skeptical about her daughter’s project, ended up writing a “teary and grateful” thank-you to the blog’s commenters. Max, buoyed by fan responses to early screenings of his movie, confesses that he dreams of making more than $200 million at the box office, which would place “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” in the company of R-rated comedies such as “Wedding Crashers” and “The Hangover.”
“Of course, that is ridiculous,” he wrote on IHopeTheyServeBeerInHell.com, where he’s been blogging every detail of the production process, “and, of course, no one else would even listen to me when I would talk about this, they just rolled their eyes and told me we should be realistic and hope to make a movie that did any decent business … but from day one I have believed we could do that and I have always held that number in my heart as my personal goal.”
No matter the ultimate success, getting a big-screen bonus out of something that began on a miniscule budget has transformed the careers of both writers.
“My life is absolutely different,” says Powell, whose second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession,” hits shelves in December. “Even though I am still living with my husband in Long Island City, it’s such a shiny, happy version of what I was living before.”
