The Girl in the Book: The Dark Side of Muse-dom

Unfortunately, Alice Harvey never had the right temperament to be a Joyce Maynard. Instead, her inappropriate relationship with celebrated novelist Milan Daneker only led to psychological hang-ups and complexes. However, it gave him plenty of material for his breakout bestseller. When Harvey is forced to work on Daneker’s latest impenetrable tome, it brings her unresolved issues to the fore in screenwriter-director Marya Cohn’s The Girl in the Book (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Cohn seems to know just enough about book publishing to get things wrong. Take an “ARC” Harvey’s boss tells her, handing her a jacketed hardcover. Wow, those are some ARCs (advanced reading copies), but the book in question is a backlist staple, so why print any kind of ARCs at all? He then assigns her the entire launch campaign for Daneker’s new hardcover. Trust me, houses have entire marketing and publicity departments for that sort of thing—and especially for a Salingeresque bestseller. He then demands she reschedule an appointment with his shrink. Okay, that one—maybe.

Do these publishing details really matter? Rightly or wrongly, I can’t get around them, because obviously. Make your own judgement on that score. Regardless, Harvey is stuck working with the one person she most wants to avoid. We basically get the gist of their awkward awkwardness right from the start, but the creepy details will be steadily parceled out in flashbacks. The dynamics of their relationship (for lack of a better term) are actually quite credible, in part thanks to her problematic literary agent father. We can believe she craves the attention Daneker gives her, even though we suspect his intentions.

It should be duly stipulated Ana Mulvoy-Ten is absolutely terrific as young Harvey. It is absolutely painful to watch the rude disillusionment of her naïve sensibilities. Michael Nyqvist is also remarkably compelling as Daneker. Cohn offers no excuses or mitigation for his behavior. Yet, despite Nyqvist’s charisma, he largely comes across as sad and pathetic rather than a manipulative monster.

Unfortunately, the contemporary scenes with older, self-destructive Harvey are often pretty cringe-worthy, especially when she gets involve with a vapid (but supposedly soulful) political activist who heads up a group called—nausea warning—“People for the People.” Honestly, you will want them to get back together so they won’t get involved with any innocent bystanders. At least, Ali Ahn supplies some effective reality checks as Harvey’s long suffering best friend, Sadie.

TGITB definitely gets at something when it explores the dark and exploitative nature of mentor-muse relationships. Unfortunately, it is watered down with insular Silk Stocking navel gazing and undermined by a superficial understanding of the glorious book business. Frankly, Mike Nichols’ Wolf is probably still the best publishing movie and it also has werewolves. Its merits just aren’t worth its frustrations when The Girl in the Book opens tomorrow (12/11) in New York, at the Village East.

DOC NYC ’15: Love Between the Covers

By now, we all understand how romance readers often feel a strong emotional connection to their favorite authors. Remember when Annie Wilkes hobbled Paul Sheldon in Misery? That was a strong emotional connection. Yet, somehow that iconic scene is never referenced in Laurie Kahn’s Love Between the Covers (trailer here), an introduction to romance fandom that screens during this year’s DOC NYC.

Those who work in publishing might focus on the most extraneous details in Covers, like why are there so many James Rollins paperbacks on the shelves in the opening credits? Perspective is everything. Fans and authors alike routinely complain the genre gets no respect, but if you have ever tried to get any sort of book besides romances into mass merchandisers, you know a high percentage of their book space is devoted to the genre, right off the top.

Regardless, readers have a right to gripe about snotty hipster attitudes (and they do). If you work all day and then go home to take care of some entitled brats, you should feel free to take what pleasures you can from series romances, 50 Shades of Grey, or 120 Days of Sodom. The problem with Covers is it is unabashedly fannish and pretty shallow.

Granted, the authors Kahn profiles are quite charming (which also holds true of every romance novelist I’ve ever met at trade shows). Look, they understood the principles of social media before Mark Zuckerberg. Mary Bly (an English professor and daughter of poet Robert Bly, who writes romance under the name Eloisa James) is a particularly charismatic and eloquent presence. Unfortunately, the film never really gets past the H.E.A. (“happily ever after”) formula and repetitive anecdotes of friendships forged through fandom.

Even if you knew precious little about trade publishing, you will hardly be shocked to learn romance books are the commercial drivers of the industry, largely written and consumed by women. That is about all Covers has for outsiders, but fans will appreciate the screen time granted to popular bestsellers, like Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz. Frankly, that is what the film is all about. Only recommended for the fans it was intended for, Love Between the Covers screens this Thursday (11/19) at the IFC Center, as part of DOC NYC 2015.

Fantasia ’13: The Great Passage

Remember when Microsoft was in the ink-and-paper reference business?  Now the Encarta seems like a relic from a past era.  In contrast, the new dictionary a diligent Japanese publishing team develops might just live up to its hype in Yuya Ishii’s quietly nostalgic The Great Passage (trailer here), which screens tomorrow during the 2013 Fantasia International Film Festival.

In the mid 1990’s, the publishing industry had barely progressed beyond a stylus-and-stone level of technology.  CD-Roms were projected to be the next big thing.  Mitsuya Majimme, a socially awkward former linguistics student, performs poorly as a sales rep, but he finds his niche when he is transferred to his company’s sleepy reference imprint.  Obsessively detail-oriented, he is the perfect editor for the director’s ambitious new dictionary, The Great Passage.

Over the next fifteen years, Majime will compile a definitive dictionary of the Japanese language as it is truly spoken, identifying and defining scores of new words, while refining the definitions of words that have evolved over time.  It is an arduous, time consuming process, involving note-cards more than computers.  Frankly, it is not the sort of investment his publishing conglomerate is inclined to make.  Fortunately, Majime has a high-placed ally in Masashi Nishioka, a former dictionary colleague transferred to the corporate marketing department.  As Majime invests years of his life in the dictionary, he also slowly but surely develops a romantic relationship with Kaguya Hayashi, his landlord’s granddaughter.  An apprentice chef and compulsive knife-sharpener, she is the same but different from Majime in all the right ways.

Based on Shion Miura’s novel, Passage can stake a strong claim to be the great Japanese reference publishing movie we have all been waiting for.  Its operational understanding of the dysfunctional business is almost scary.  Yet, there is something aesthetically pleasing about its affection for language and book people.  It is also refreshing to see a film with a sufficient attention span to follow the in’s and out’s of the fifteen year editorial and production process.  While Passage’s one hundred thirty-three minute running time is not exactly breakneck, the consistently absorbing film never feels slack or padded.  Rather, it pulls viewers along with its own gentle rhythms. 

In a radical change-up from his work in I’m Flash, Ryuhei Matsuda is terrific as Majime.  Without the benefit of a big epiphany moment, he vividly portrays the editor’s subtle but steady personal and professional growth.  Likewise, Aoi Miyazaki is genuinely engaging as the spirited yet only somewhat more outgoing Hayashi.  Yet, it is Shingo Tsurumi and Kaoru Yachigusa who really lower the emotional boom of time’s passage as the reference director and his devoted wife.

Yes, this is definitely the sort of film that will choke viewers up.  Let’s face it, there’s nary a dry eye in the house when that blasted dictionary finally comes out.  However, Ishii never indulgences in cheap manipulation, earning his sentiment the hard way.  At every turn, he opts for small telling scenes over big melodramatic show-pieces.  The cumulative impact is deeply satisfying.  Highly recommended for fans of Japanese cinema and anyone connected to the book business, The Great Passage screens tomorrow (8/2) and Sunday (8/4) at the J.A. De Seve Theatre as part of this year’s Fantasia Festival.

How to Make Book Publishing Interesting with Steidl

If there is a more dysfunctional industry than book publishing, brother, you have my sympathies. Gerhard Steidl’s house is the exception. Specializing in extremely limited high-end photography books, Steidl work is decidedly for the so-called “one percent,” but God bless them. They keep Steidl’s forty-five artisans and workers gainfully employed. His rarified brand of publishing is captured in Gereon Wetzel and Jörg Adolph’s documentary How to Make a Book with Steidl (trailer here), which is currently screening in New York at MoMA.

Steidl has one backlist title you have surely heard of: Günther Grass’s The Tin Drum. He also has extremely lucrative publishing arrangements with Chanel, Lagerfeld, and the German Metal Workers’ Union. They largely underwrite some of the world’s most ambitious art books. There is no standard Steidl template, with each new volume becoming a highly distinctive work of art unto itself.

Like Wetzel’s El Bulli, How to Make simply observes Steidl as he goes about his business. However, the publisher is considerably more talkative than Catalan master chef Ferran Adrià or artist Anselm Kiefer, seen puttering about his studio in Over Your Cities Grass will Grow. We watch him interact with some of the greatest photographic artists working today, including Robert Adams, Robert Frank, Martin Parr, Ed Ruscha, and Joel Sternfeld, who are often surprisingly witty and consistently offer up fascinating tidbits about their lives and work throughout the film.

Serving as the film’s central narrative touchstone, Sternfeld’s upcoming book iDubai will collect i-phone photos taken in an Emirates mall. They present a challenge to Steidl, because of their self-consciously gimmicky nature. Yet, Sternfeld’s sense of composition is still apparent, even when apparently shooting surreptitiously, on the fly.

While El Bulli could definitely drag a bit, the fly-on-the-wall approach works far better in How to Make, because nearly all of Steidl’s conversations are worth listening to. Ironically, it is Grass, the man of letters, who does not bring any memorable soundbites to the table, but perhaps the editing process was unkind to him. In contrast, Sternfeld and Parr are frequently rather droll, while Frank and Adams come across as quite personable and engaging elder statesmen of the art.

Steidl does the nearly impossible. He makes book publishing interesting. Yet, How to Make is really more of a film for photography lovers than book people. That is probably why it works so well. Recommended to all art patrons, How to Make appropriately screens at MoMA through Thursday (12/1).