BilmBlog500

I haven't had near enough opportunity to see movies at the grandest of the LA movie theatres. It's about the one thing I've envied about Angelenos, that while we in New York have pretty much no place left to see a movie in grand traditional style, LA still had movie palaces showing first run movies. But since I don't live in LA, it's hard to take advantage. So I was really happy in 2008 when the Season 1 premiere for True Blood was held in the Cinerama Dome. But the Chinese? Not yet. The Egyptian? Not yet. Last summer, I had a chance to walk around the outside of the Village and the Bruin, 2 theatres in Westwood that have hosted many premieres, and the Village in particular was wonderful just to walk around. They are also near a really good donut store, a Whole Foods, and it turns out not a long bus ride down Wilshire from Beverly Hills. I have really been looking forward to someday finding the right movie to see. So I got really antsy in recent months when...

Busy times ahead, so I tried to get in two movies tonight before the crunch time hits and really wish I hadn't. AMC Loews Lincoln Square, two movies on two of their biggest screens (#2, The Kings; and #1, the Loews), on Tuesday 30 March. Noah Baumbach did a great film several years ago called The Squid and the Whale. Wonderful performances by Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Laura Linney. Incisive, knowing, brutal. Saw it twice and it held up. He followed that up with the dreary Margot at the Wedding, which got much worse reviews and deservedly so. His new movie Greenberg with Ben Stiller got much better reviews. Not deservedly. Many of the reviews made it sound like the movie was some kind of quintessential LA movie. Not. Any of you see LA Story? Much better. This could have been set anywhere where there are pools, and people who spend lots of money on pets. Which is to say anywhere. Ben Stiller is kind of interesting, there's something going on with his eyes where ...

I just finished catching up on the last two weeks of The Simpsons. This season is shaping up to be a very good one. Earlier in the season , there was "I was one Uday who didn't need a Qusay." This past Sunday, Homer pays a visit to Israel, and the episode is wonderful. There's Homer ordering a falafel with extra cheese, being asked to say that latkes are better than American pancakes in order to enter the country, a teaching opportunity if you watch with your family to tell your children what a tagine is, and more. Some of it, I assure you, is in quite bad taste. The week before that, there was an extended sequence called Koyani-Scratchy, which is classic Simpsons. If you're at all familiar with the movie Koyaanisqatsi it's hilarious on one level, and if you are 14 and can't tell the difference between Glass, Philip and Glass Plus -- well, it is Itchy and Scratchy and works on another level entirely. That episode also has a montage of great kiss s...

So Borders has a big loan coming due this week, as Publishers Weekly pointed out in their e-mail newsletter today. And they also point out, which I'd noticed as well, that they were getting well along without announcing the timing of their earnings report for 2010. Will there be news before the end of the week on all manner of things? There are a couple other things that I have noticed. I think Borders got a little tighter in their initial orders early in the year. Their orders for Peter V. Brett and for the Simon Green books coming out in June are a little lower than I might have expected, while there were some other books earlier in the year on the higher end of expectations. It's kind of like they went back to the very conservative ordering that was in place for several months following the September 2008 Lehman/economy taking thing. That's the kind of thing I don't want to read too much into, because B&N and Borders can both go through phases when the...

After 35 years, At the Movies nee Ebert & Roeper nee Siskel & Ebert nee Sneak Previews has been cancelled and will air its final episode in mid-August. Way back then, my parents and I might often watch together on PBS, which was where the show started. It was a clever idea, to take two critics from rival newspapers in Chicago, and have them hash out the new film releases on air. The opening with Siskel and Ebert picking up their rival papers freshly delivered at a newsstand is a relic of a day when newspapers were a lot more relevant than they are now, and when you still had a lot of two newspaper cities where the whole idea of rival papers resonated. And this is the show that introduced (or at least in a big way) the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down idea to the world. After around ten years Siskel and Ebert decided to make real money doing the show and it moved to syndication under the Disney auspices. Gene Siskel passed away, and after trying out an awful lot of people he was replace...

On Tuesday, I accompanied Peter V. Brett on shelf stock signing of his debut fantasy The Warded Man . It was a good day. Counting every small hobbit cave book location in Penn Station we visited 20 stores. Peter signed over 100 books. We had 100%ish compliance at Borders on putting the book on the FOS (front of store) mass market table except that the copies due in to Columbus Circle may have been cross-shipped to another store. The FOS placement at B&N doesn't start for a couple weeks, but all of their stores had the book out, on a shelving cart, or poised to come out of the back room. We made very good time, better I think than last year when we did this for the hardcover. After we'd done our work for the day, we had a nice celebratory dinner in Brooklyn, and then I decided to visit the Forest Hills B&N since I had a one-day Metrocard pass, and was pleased to see they had sold a copy of the book very quickly. Two sad notes on the day. The Uno Chicago Grill a...

Blog posts may be shorter and less frequent over the next several weeks, because it's a very busy time for both the business and for me. This past weekend, I was off at Lunacon, along with Jabberwocky VP Eddie Schneider and two of our clients, the Author Guest of Honor Tanya Huff and fantasy author Peter V. Brett . There's history to Lunacon, which like most of the major sf conventions in the Northeast has been held for fifty or sixty years, with roots dating back to the dawn of sf fandom. The convention has been held in Westchester in recent years. It has a decent attendance, a decent dealer's room, maybe too many program tracks. It didn't seem this year to have a lot of aspiring authors. Neither Eddie nor I passed out many business cards. Old-fashioned authors can sometimes get lost in the cross-platform Long Island convention I-Con that is upcoming this weekend where the media guests are more central, but that's also a much larger convention that does see...

OK, I'm going to respond to some of the comments on my post of a few days ago where I referenced the Jim Hines survey, and its insights into how people got their starts... First, Maria: When you say "writing a few doesn't hurt," I have to disagree a little. Basically, writing short stories is an art form that overlaps with but is still separate and distinct from writing novels. There are some authors, lots of them in fact, who can do both. But there are authors like Michael Burstein who are much better at writing short fiction that novels. There are clients of mine like Charlaine Harris and Brandon Sanderson who didn't write short fiction until many years into their careers. Simon Green wrote some short fiction, then turned almost exclusively to novels for many years, and it's only in the past two or three years that he's started to come into his own as a short story writer. If a writer doesn't have the knack for writing short fiction and spend...

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, I visited Borders #40 in Bohemia, Long Island. Well, no, that would be crazy. Really, I celebrated St. Patrick's Day by travelling out to Long Island for the Grand Opening of the Whole Foods Market in Lake Grove, NY. Not as crazy, right! And the Borders was on the way. Like, go to a totally different line on the Long Island Rail Road and have a two-mile walk to the Borders but then the Suffolk County bus goes from directly in front of the Borders pretty much right to the Whole Foods along the way, not crazy at all. I took this picture as I approached the Borders because you're looking at a little piece of American corporate history that I don't think you can see too many other places right now. In fact, this may be just about the only place in the country where you can see it. For in the early 1990s, K-Mart decided that the future was in diversification. It acquired Sports Authority, it acquired Office Max, it acquired Borders to pa...

As publishers gain more control over pricing of their e-book product via the new "agency model," how creative will they get in figuring out how to maximize revenue? A real world example: Simon Green's Hawk & Fisher books are available for Kindle in a $9.99 3-in-1 omnibus edition, price is $3.33 per book. An individual Nightside book sells for as little as $5.20, as much as $6.40. The Hawk & Fisher books sell fewer Kindle copies by far than the Nightside books. Which on the one hand, makes sense because the Nightside books are newer and ongoing while the Hawk & Fisher books are backlist items, published a while ago and not ongoing. But on the other hand, the books themselves are very similar, and my instinct is that there's a bigger gap in sales than there should be considering the unit price per book. Is it possible that there are price-sensitive people who are so focused on price that they refuse to buy the Hawk & Fisher omnibus at $9.99, because...

Some little tidbits today. Our client Jim Hines has been surveying authors on how they sold their first novels, and he's put out his first set of results here . There are two main takeaways. First, the odds of your novel being the next Eragon are not very big. Self-publishing your way to a major publishing house is far and away the least likely route to success. This is one of those myth paths that will never go away because we'll always hear about the Eragon story, but we hear about them because they do't happen very often so it's newsworthy-ish the rare times it does happen. Jim also says "totally busted" on the idea that you have to sell short fiction before selling a novel, which I've known and said for 20 years. The split is 50/50 or so on the JABberwocky client list. But this myth will never die. It will be alive and well in some back corner of the room at the meal after my funeral. But I'll say it again: if you want to write a novel, ...

The latest installment of my highly occasional round-up of things on the comic book front, and I'll refer now and again to my last from June 2009. I purchased the first issue of Joe the Barbarian from Vertigo since it cost only $1, and I liked it. One thing about it was that it had one of those not atypical Grant Morrison endings where everything you just read turns out to be a prologue to something entirely different and unexpected. And the problem with that is... well, I'm reading the second issue, and I realize I can't remember anything about the first, because most of the first issue was something kind of entirely different. To me, this is bad in the same way as when you pick up a novel after a week or two away and realize you don't remember anything. I can tell intellectually that this is certainly a creative and different and unique and special something. And I don't have the foggiest idea what's going on. This may work better when it comes out in a ...

When I re-committed to the blog three months ago after a post-less fall 2009, one of the things I said I'd try and do was limit the length of my posts, and on balance I think I've done that. There goes that goal. There's too much going on in Green Zone (see Wednesday evening March 10, 2010 at the Universal Screening Room) to keep it short. The movie can be reviewed as a Bourne-like action movie. Green Zone star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass teamed on Bourne #2 and Bourne #3. And it can be reviewed as a polemic, yet another Iraq polemic after movies of highly variable success from Stop Loss as a very good and underrated one to In the Valley of Elah as a less successful one, or Rendition and De Palma's Redacted (watched one on HBO on Demand, didn't see the other) and etc. etc. And let us not forget Hurt Locker , which was photographed by Green Zone cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who worked with Greengrass previously on United 93. I should probably star...

So a few things to comment upon from Thursday's Wall St. Journal. I'm not going to provide links since so much of their content is behind a pay wall that I may not be able to access the articles, who knows about you. First, Walter Mossberg reviews another entrant in the e-book reader wars, the Irex. He wasn't thrilled with it. I wouldn't be since it doesn't have a note-taking feature. The one aspect of it which really intrigued me was that it's tied in with Newspaper Direct , which offers facsimile editions of tons of newspapers from all over. Talk about love! That's the kind of site where I wonder if I had an iPad to access a facsimile subscription to the Washington Post just how close to heaven that might be. Second, there's a little article about an arrangement in Norway to arrange electronic copying of all of the books in the national library. All of the publishers are signed on, all of the author's groups, if you're a Norwegian author...

I saw Brooklyn's Finest on Monday evening March 8, 2010 at the AMC Empire, Aud. #14. This is not the best reviewed film of the year, to say the least. Not the worst reviewed film either, but Peter Travers in Rolling Stone gave it zero stars. Zero! How bad does a film have to be to get zero stars? Well, in this case, an awful lot worse than it actually is. In fact, I kind of liked Brooklyn's Finest. If nothing else, Peter Travers ought to give it at least a half star just on account of the cinematography. It's by a young Mexican DP named Patrick Murguia, from IMDB this may be his first US film, it's gorgeous to look at it, and this person is a DP to watch. Especially in the final two reels, there's some wonderful work on the NY streets. And this isn't an "if nothing else." Brooklyn's Finest has the same corrupt cop ingredients as any number of other movies, from Serpico to Prince of the City to Pride & Glory to Training Day (also from Bro...

So I haven't done a post on the newspaper business in a while... Two things in Tuesday's NY Times that got me to wanting to climb on the soapbox. First, there's an actual bona fide full-color full-page ad for The Hurt Locker in the arts section. Years ago, right after the Golden Globes you could see the difference between the early edition and late edition NY Times, as all the film studios took out placeholder ads for all of their movies, and then would quickly swap in something more appropriate for the late edition to tout their winners. Same thing after Oscar nominations were announced, or after the Oscars themselves. Film ads in the Times have been steadily declining for years and years now, to the point where it's an actual surprising thing to see studios actually taking ads in size or quantity. And in fact, that rather "wow, what's that doing here" ad for The Hurt Locker today was the only film ad in the NY Times for any of the Oscar-winning movie...

So, three hours and thirty-seven minutes. Not a bad length for an Oscar telecast. I don't think it was a great telecast. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin didn't do badly, but no great moments from them either. And by and large the show didn't seem to be very snappily written in those parts of it where the writing makes a difference. I'd have almost preferred more horribly bad moments in the show, if there weren't going to be any really good ones. Perhaps worst to me might have been to have Tom Hanks come on after the Best Director prize and rush to give out Best Picture. No summarization of the nominees, no real break between that and the Director acceptance speech, Tom and Kathryn almost stumble into one another. Outcome wise, most of the rewards were won by deserved winners. I hate most the years when there's some movie that does a sweep which includes winning smaller awards it doesn't really deserve. Hurt Locker did kind of sweep this year, takin...

This review will have plenty of spoilers, so don't read on if you think you're likely to see Ghost Writer, which I saw Saturday March 6 2009 at Clearview's Chelsea, Aud. #2. This is the newest film from Roman Polanski, the director of Tess and Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby. And the fugitive from justice. Ewan McGregor is a ghost writer, hired to assist a former British Prime Minister played by Pierce Brosnan after the original writer dies, apparently by accidental drowning or suicide in a ferry accident. Off Ewan goes from London to Martha's Vineyard (or an analog thereto) where the manuscript is holed up in the publisher's house with the PM. No surprise if you've seen the coming attraction that it wasn't an accident or a suicide, and of course Ewan McGregor's character will be coming in for the same before two hours are over. I was primed to like the movie from the start. There's a certain puckish charm to Ewan McGregor's performance th...

I am planning to live-blog the Oscars this year, so have a Brillig time of it on Sunday night. I'd like to talk briefly about one more nominated film that I've snared ahead of the telecast, the French film A Prophet, which is a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. I was a few blocks away from the Angelika for Tobias Buckell's NYRSF reading on Tuesday night March 2, so I headed over and saw the 9:10 show on Aud. #3. I've been wary of well-reviewed French movies for close to a quarter century now. The first one I can remember was " Le Grand Chemin ," a 1987 movie about a boy on his summer vacation, which wasn't exactly bad but which seemed awfully low key to me for so much praise, and which I thought would never have been reviewed as favorably were it in English. So here comes The Prophet, a prize winner at Cannes last year, all kinds of good reviews. I'm thinking I should see it, but then in the back of my mind there's the fact that the dire...

B&N says it wants to talk with publishers about doing print/e-book bundles (PW report here ), where a customer buying a printed book brick-and-mortar could then buy the e-book at a reduced price to be discussed with the publisher. It's an interesting idea, not unheard of, and some BlueRay DVDs now come bundled with an old-fashioned DVD as well. At the same time, I'm not falling head over heels in love with the idea, perhaps because I'm not sure if they're exploring the opposite approach as well, where somebody buys the e-book and then gets a discount on the print edition. That's one of those ideas that sounds weird, because you're letting the cheaper product kick in a discount on the more expensive product. Yet it's done, as when Tor sells a $4.99 Mistborn with a coupon for the more expensive hardcover. And it all ends up in the same place at the end, with the same products sold for the same revenue. Or approximately the same, depending on royalty r...

I mentioned last week how fulsome Barnes & Noble was in praising itself in their quarterly earnings conference call. People rarely do things without a reason, and it's occured to me to mention why I think B&N was so unusually self-congratulatory. The Nook is great, we have the best real estate portfolio, the best web site, the best everything... Well, B&N is in the midst of a corporate struggle. They put in a poison pill last year to make it harder for the company to be taken over. A billionaire investor Ronald Burkle with a large chunk of B&N stock wants to have even more , which would trigger the provisions of the poison pill, and B&N has refused to dump the pill to accommodate Burkle. So in the midst of this, the incumbent management at B&N wants to get out the message We Are the Champions, We Are the Champions, We Are the Champions and is signaling to various and sundry listening to the call that if the battle heats up and it comes to a proxy vote ...

There's an announcement today that Reed Business Information is selling off Library Journal and School Library Journal to the company that owns Hornbook and Junior Library Guild. This may not be a good thing for Publishers Weekly, also owned by Reed Business and not part of this transaction. In an earlier round of restructure, PW had been consolidated for certain purposes with LJ and SLJ, as an example a consolidated website situation where one user had access to all sites, and with some management positions consolidated for the three publications. Considering the decline in print advertising for PW over recent years, this ability to put overhead costs over multiple magazines was no doubt very helpful to the PW bottom line. Now, PW has to have its own publisher all to itself, it can't cross-sell internet ads with the other magazines, it'll be more on its own. LJ and SLJ may have held up a tad better with their tighter focus on library markets. PW has always suffered fr...