Jaaamz Jot Spot:
"Blogs to movies: How 'Julie & Julia' blogger Julie Powell wrote her way to Hollywood - and a fortune"
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."
Credit: NY Daily News
Quote of the Day:
"Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give."
-Edward O. Wilson
Today's Horoscope:
Happy birthday, Leo! You are someone who can take control in just about any situation. Being able to make others feel comfortable makes combining business and pleasure your forte. This year, it is possible to draw upon your contacts to make your ideas and concepts more public and accessible to the world - don't hold back!
Featured Event:
Tonight "DJ Big Ben"
@ GREENHOUSE
150 Varick Street NYC
Fashion "Sense":
Retail Rollback: Wave of Store Closures Expected
Call it the Great Retail Rationalization of the Great Recession. And even though the economy already has forced retailers to take a scalpel — or a meat cleaver — to their store portfolios, there’s still plenty of excess to cut. “You need stores that at the end of the day are going to contribute a positive cash flow to the portfolio,” said Esteban Bowles, principal in A.T. Kearney’s retail and consumer products practice. “Many [retailers] are not sophisticated enough in their understanding of true profitability of a store from a cash-flow standpoint.”
Credit: WWD
Jaaamz Joint Throwback:
Artist: Maxwell
Song: "Til The Cops Come Knockin'"
Jaaamz Jokes:
"You Don't Need to Be a Weatherman..."
It was two o'clock in the morning and a husband and wife were asleep, when suddenly the phone rang.
The husband picked up the phone and said, "Hello? ... How the heck do I know? What am I, the weather man?" -- and promptly slammed the phone down.
His wife rolls over and asks, "Who was that?"
The husband replies, I don’t know. Some guy who wanted to know if the coast was clear!
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Song: "Til The Cops Come Knockin'"
Jaaamz Jokes:
"You Don't Need to Be a Weatherman..."
It was two o'clock in the morning and a husband and wife were asleep, when suddenly the phone rang.
The husband picked up the phone and said, "Hello? ... How the heck do I know? What am I, the weather man?" -- and promptly slammed the phone down.
His wife rolls over and asks, "Who was that?"
The husband replies, I don’t know. Some guy who wanted to know if the coast was clear!
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Peace & Love
