Sometimes marketing is a little oily.
I abhor that every time a movie is made from a book, suddenly the book is re-released with a new cover featuring the actors from the movie. (I don’t hate movies made from books, I just can’t go that far, because I believe that adaptation is an art form in itself and, if done well, can be amazing.)
I’m particularly grumpy about this as it pertains to Julie and Julia, the film based on the book by Julie Powell and My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme.
BOTH books have been re-released with movie-tie-in covers, so that instead of Julia Child on the cover of her own book, now there is a spitting image of Meryl Streep (whom I adore, don’t get me wrong) playing Julia Child. This has to be some sort of postmodern meta-media experiment gone terribly wrong. Or something.
Anyway, this comes to my attention because I was writing a post at my new blog: Jew and Julia: an experiment in Kosher French cooking. I wanted to link to My Life in France and on principle I refuse to link to the movie-tie-in one. It took me some time, but I found the standard copy.
I know that the book stands to sell more copies in tandem with the movie (in all cases, not just Julie and Julia, but something about the whole movie-tie-in hoopla just smacks of horrible corporate calulation. I don’t like to think of books as corporate packaged products, so I suppose this is from whence comes this squicky feeling.
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