Ya see, my partner and I recently re-watched All About Eve, the classic 1950 Bette Davis movie about the young starlet, Eve Harrington, played by Anne Baxter. We own this dvd - quite frankly, every gay man should just be issued a copy upon coming out - and we brought it to some friends' house recently for a viewing. We all had to prepare to see the wonderful on-stage take off of the movie, the Gold Dust Orphan's All About Christmas Eve. This local (in Boston) production is only playing once more, this Saturday, but anything the Orphan's do is worth seeing. They are camp in the best sense, sure to offend and amuse and shock and impress and disgust. I can't say enough good things about this theatre troupe. I had to use the graphic from the play because it sums up a lot about the production
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But back to Eve, the movie. Now stay with me, because if I play this right, it will work on two levels. This would be quite a writing feat for us here at SotB.
As the story of the film begins, Eve, a nobody, manages to get herself backstage to meet the star of the show, Margo Channing, played by a sour, cross, inflated Bette Davis. She's middle-aged and knows it, but keeps starring in this one playwright's plays, even as the main characters stay the same age. Channing's boyfriend is the director, and he's on his way out to California in this, his first scene. Eve says no one comes back once they go out to LA, but he swears he will. It seems Margo never made the move to movies.
What strikes me as so curious is how much the movie plays off the theatre world - you have the playwright and his wife, the emotional director and dramatic star, the treacherous film critic, Addison DeWitt. There is talk of packed houses, papering the theatre, and names in lights. But this movie came out in 1950. Surely it followed a conversation in which people questioned how long theatre would last as movies became the go-to evening entertainment.
To make matters more intriguing, in 2008, the Gold Dust Orphans traipse along and turn the whole thing into a play, and pull in crowds to see it each night, finding such success that they brought it back this year. And it's exciting to see live, as the actors pull out subtle and not-so-subtle moments in the movie and exaggerate to satiric and hilarious extremes. (My favorite is turning the playwright into a closeted Paul Lynde character - it's inspired.) This reminds me of the success Jill and Faith Soloway found when they created The Real Live Brady Bunch in 1990, reinvigorating a tv show into a live performance.
So what does this mean for books?
It just occurs to me that readers can switch between different mediums in their urge to read. I know this isn't shocking, but I was resistant to this point. (I suspect Christopher still is, to some extent.) Last weekend, as my partner and I wandered through B&N (though we didn't buy anything!), I found myself picking up some books and thinking, "this should have just been digital." Do we need writers reflecting on their favorite beaches as a printed book? I picked up the new hardcover I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir, by Mickey Leigh. Did that need to be in hardcover, for $26? Wouldn't that make more sense in paperback and digital editions?
This is all quite simplistic. So many things have to change, and they are changing. While they do, I still maintain we have to watch out. People who get all whipped into a frenzy saying it's time to tear down those walls and get books people want into people's hands are too often the people who can afford to produce their own books, which doesn't help up and coming writers.
Again, I find myself looking to indie publishers and university presses - the line between the two is ever blurring, when you look at the new South End Press, the Dalkey Archive, and the new deal for Curbstone Press. That's one exciting barrier to come down! Universities should support exciting publishing that's not going to generate huge revenue necessarily. We need to pump money into this places and let editors organize lists and generate new projects and new writers with an open mind, but also a sense of collective spirit.
The point is, we can open things up, and we should. Let's explore digital platforms. But screw Amazon and its controls - the Kindle is useless. Sadly, I test-drove the Nook on my way out of B&N and it was a massive fail, with slow, blinking page turns and general clunkiness. But as we all know, people are reading on all kinds of devices.
It's clear that people are going to read books about novelists writing on typewriters on their electronic devices, and perhaps then someone can write a book about the experience of reading that novel on that device and turn it into a memoir that gets published as a $26 hardcover and then turned into a movie, which can then become a hit stage musical. Maybe it's the holiday spirit racing through me, but finally I'm curious to see what all this could mean. Suddenly I want to see the digital succeed for appropriate genres and titles - which is not every title and every genre. But I want it to work in a way that will make indie publishers money, and new writers money. I don't want this to be a gimmick for fat cats, but something innovative and useful and real, something readers actually want rather than something an ad agency tells us we want.
In closing, and only tangentially related, my crush Makenna Goodman from indie great Chelsea Green has a new article up at HuffPost, and you know I already read it. I haven't read the book she mentions, How the Rich are Destroying the Earth by Herve Kempf, but no one should be surprised by my heightened level of interest.
Oh, and one last thing: give money to a charity (including but not limited to a library, literacy organization, or cultural center) this week. It's just the right thing to do!
2 comments:
For those who don't know, Christopher is a bit of an absolutist. It's all or nothing, black or white with him. Theatre is dead? That's just not true. That's like saying trains are dead - no one travels by rail! They do not like they once did because something more convenient came along, but now we're seeing the value in trains and starting to invest in them again, and rail is on a comeback. As for theatre, a lot of people are talking about Fela! on Broadway, the new musical about Nigerian singer Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (http://felaonbroadway.com/goog.php), and the Boston Globe just had an article about the sales for the Boston Ballet's Nutcracker outpacing last year by 10,000 tickets, despite competition from a number of other plays (http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/12/19/nutcracker_boom_means_crunch_time_for_patrons/). The American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge has recently extended both of its current shows due to demand (www.americanrepertorytheater.org/). Theatre simply is not dead.
I agree with Christopher that things that make money survive in this cold, cold world we live in, but that's not the end of the story. This is where non-profits come in, and private/public partnerships. I do not see any good in throwing up our hands in one direction to this cruel capitalist world and then celebrating printed books in the otehr direction, hoping the twain shall never meet. We have to be creative; we have to find ways of preserving printed books because they matter, and they are a thougtfully created, incredibly useful, inspiring product. But they cannot be preserved by stomping our feet everytime someone uses the word "digital."
The fact is that we need to use digital means for preserving books - as we are doing on this very blog, something that would not be possible if innovative folks smarter than me came up with the platform. Did we need blogs? No. But now the ability is here and we're using it.
Whether Christopher likes it or not, some people do prefer digital. Not me, not him, but some people. And then a whole bunch more think they'll like it b/c Jeff Bezos keeps telling them they do and is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy - yes, I agree that that is happening, and it's frustrating. But the digital world is now available and we are all using it in a million different ways, so let's figure out how to use it in a way that gets strong progressive politics out front, that reminds people of their values, and that keeps creative, independent writers and thinkers - and editors! - in business.
There are lessons to be learned outside of the usual record/cd story. Farmers markets, for example, have come back because there was a demand, but they also came back with a lot of work by people changing policies, forming private/public partnerships, and raising money as non-profits. People were pro-active, and that's what we need to be to make any change. The reality is that change is happening, and standing off to the side means we will doubtless lose. Not cool.
And as if to prove my point, new non-profit publisher Concord Free Press here in MA just sent an email today about how supporters have donated over $120,000! http://www.concordfreepress.com/ Here's to being optimistic in 2010...
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