More Often, Pulp Merging With Fiction

When the editor of one of America’s most prestigious magazines abruptly quit her job last week for a Hollywood mega-deal, some critics groused that the New York literary world--proud and steeped in tradition--had been sullied.

But the encroachment of West Coast movie-making on East Coast publishing is a phenomenon that grows more pronounced each year, and Tina Brown’s much-ballyhooed defection from the New Yorker to Miramax is only one of the most startling examples.

Indeed, the two worlds have been converging in the last two decades, with Hollywood steadily gaining the upper hand. And as the trend continues, it confirms Southern California’s status as the nation’s cultural capital of mass media.

“Hollywood is quite visible in the book world, and what you see now has roots 20 years ago, when many publishing and movie companies were brought together under the same roof,” says Ron Bernstein, a Los Angeles literary agent with the Gersh Agency Inc.

“The book-movie relationship is almost codified now. . . . It’s the idea that there’s a movie in everything and that book companies should be working closely with Hollywood studios.”

This is hard to swallow for many New York literati, who for years have regarded the West Coast as a cultural backwater. They never tire of stories about William Faulkner and other legendary writers, who were lured west by the promise of studio money, only to return with their tail between their legs.

Yet nowadays, the literary world no longer can dismiss Hollywood. It shakes every time the West Coast stirs. One publisher has gone so far as to open an office this summer right on the Los Angeles lot of a major motion picture studio.

Book Sellers Get In Deeper and Deeper

Numbers tell much of the story: While trade book publishing generates $6 billion in annual revenues, the domestic movie and network TV businesses produce an estimated $17 billion annually. It’s not unusual for studios to spend millions of dollars promoting a new film, while publishers are fortunate to spend $40,000 publicizing a book. Hollywood has become a global business, while English-language books can only be leveraged so far.

That alone makes Hollywood a big player in the literary world; publishers have long known that they can make healthy profits from paperback sales if studios turn their books into hits at the box office. It’s an old, symbiotic relationship. But New York’s dependence on Hollywood has become far more complex.

Hungry for new properties, studios tend to look more favorably on books and magazine articles than on screenplays. The belief is that fiction and nonfiction manuscripts are more fully developed, with more believable characters, Bernstein says.

Naturally, this pleases New York publishers. But in catering to Hollywood’s insatiable demand for original material, many believe the literary world is trying to copy some of the movie business’s worst habits--like wasting vast sums of money.

“Publishing is a cottage industry that’s trying to act like a mass media industry,” media critic Ken Auletta says. “And it’s a fool’s errand. Book people want to play on the same level as Hollywood, like Random House paying $5 million to Marlon Brando for his memoirs, but most of these books fail.”

Auletta and others believe much of the pressure to find the next blockbuster comes from the conglomerates that now control America’s TV, movie and literary companies. Walt Disney Co. owns ABC and Hyperion Books; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. controls 20th Century Fox and HarperCollins; Viacom Inc. owns Paramount and Simon & Schuster; Time Warner Inc. controls Warner Books; Bertelsmann AG, the German media giant, owns Bantam-Doubleday-Dell and Random House.

Driven by the bottom line, book companies are chasing a mass audience, just like studios. Yet in doing so, they increasingly play a secondary role in the acquisition of literary properties.

Once, studios came calling on publishers when they wanted to buy the screen rights to successful novels. That’s how popular books like “Gone With the Wind,” “Jaws” and “The Exorcist” were ultimately brought to the silver screen.

Today, however, savvy agents sell options on first novels and nonfiction tales to studios first, creating an industry buzz. Then, they leverage huge advances out of publishers.

While many are still scratching their head over Brown’s decision to quit the helm of such a respected magazine, it was this dynamic that prompted her to start a new periodical with Miramax--and hopefully generate journalism that could become the basis for TV shows and movies. She wouldn’t be the first to profit from Hollywood’s habit of getting the first look at literary material.

Although first-time novelist Nicholas Evans had only written 100 pages of “The Horse Whisperer” in 1994, he sold the screen rights to Disney for $3 million (based on Robert Redford’s interest in directing). Then, riding a wave of publicity, he sold the book to Delacorte for $3.2 million.

Agents play a crucial role in these deals, but they are now threatened by a growing number of literary scouts, who are forever on the lookout for new properties. With Hollywood’s demands for new material growing, the book-to-movie market has become a free-for-all, with unauthorized copies of manuscripts being leaked to interested parties on both coasts.

“It’s a tremendous dynamic, because so many people are competing now with each other,” says Joel Gotler, president of Los Angeles-based Renaissance Literary Agency.

“If I have a good literary property,” he notes, “I personally drive it over to a studio and wait to get a response while I’m there. Then I take the same copy back with me when I leave, so there’s no way it can be leaked to anybody else.”

Proven Track Record Can Pay Off Big

In today’s overheated market, studios are shelling out millions for books by proven best-selling writers like Michael Crichton and John Grisham. The search for new material can also reward first novelists--but with mixed results.

Last summer, the book and movie world bet heavily on Steve Alten’s “Meg,” a rehash of “Jaws.” Disney bought the unfinished manuscript for $1 million, and Alten parlayed that into a $2.1-million, two-book deal with Doubleday.

The book sold just under 100,000 copies, failing to meet the publisher’s expectations, according to Publishers Weekly. Meanwhile, Disney now says the movie is in “inactive development.”

“There’s a lot of hype about books and movies that doesn’t guarantee anything,” Gotler says. “In a great majority of cases, the movies simply don’t get made. But that doesn’t stop publishers from believing they’re going to get a great deal.”

Years ago, book companies felt lucky if they owned paperback rights to a book that became a hit movie. But in today’s world of consolidation, managers are leaving less to chance and focusing more on so-called synergy. With so many book and movie companies now owned by the same corporations, there is pressure on book firms to develop film-related products with sister companies.

Two weeks ago, for example, HarperCollins opened a West Coast office on the lot of Fox Studios, also a Murdoch company. It is the first literary-studio linkup of its kind.

Hollywood Just Not Getting the Message

“The idea is to develop a whole range of book products related to movies, TV, celebrities, music and sports, as well as calendars, desk diaries, poster books, postcard books and audio,” says Jane Friedman, CEO of HarperCollins. A prime example, she notes, is “James Cameron’s Titanic,” a huge bestseller that Friedman calls “perhaps the greatest success in the making-of-a-movie book for all time.”

All the while, Hollywood continues its perennial quest for the next box office smash. Fast-paced yarns, both true and fictional, are hotter than ever, according to Bernstein.

It’s one more reason for Hollywood to target books and magazines, he said, “but best-selling fiction or movies can’t be manufactured. Great stories are not manufacturable, and the entertainment business still hasn’t learned that lesson.”

Yet who cares if you’re a writer who lands a fat movie-book deal? The hunger for success has prompted many novelists to write books purely with an eye to Hollywood consumption, says David Rosenthal, head of Simon & Schuster trade books.

“I can’t tell you how many badly written novels I’ve encountered lately, where writers produce what seem to be novelized versions of lousy, high-concept screenplays. This is awful stuff . . . and it makes us feel like we’re being used.”

The bicoastal wounds run deep.

A few years ago, at a fund-raiser for the writers’ group PEN in New York, Norman Mailer and others were offended that former Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, who had donated $400,000 to the prestigious group, was being toasted as the man of the hour. But to others it made perfect sense; it was just one more example of Los Angeles culture meshing with New York.

“Some people worry about Hollywood pillaging the book world, and they resent that so much attention has shifted to the West Coast,” says Michael Siegel, who heads the literary department at Brillstein-Grey Entertainment in Los Angeles.

“But I think there’s a lot of good that comes out of this relationship. Hollywood is an inadvertent patron of the arts, and it can make a difference in the lives of many writers.”

Besides, he adds, times have changed.

“When Norman Mailer published a book in the 1950s, it was a cultural event. It would be a stretch to say that now. But when ‘Armageddon’ is released, it’s an event.”