Dave Eggers, newspaper publisher?

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-panorama8-2009dec08,0,3360848.story

Dave Eggers, newspaper publisher?
The novelist's grand print experiment -- $16 a copy -- hits S.F. streets and beyond this week. It's a one-shot deal, but he hopes it will remind people of the form's potential and viability.
By David Ulin
December 8, 2009

Reporting from San Francisco - Dave Eggers doesn't look like a newspaper baron. At 39, wearing a baseball cap and hiking boots, the author -- whose most recent project is the screenplay for "Where the Wild Things Are" -- appears more an older brother to the interns who work feverishly in the Mission District offices of McSweeney's, the independent publisher Eggers founded with the proceeds from his bestselling 2000 memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius."

In addition to books and a monthly magazine, McSweeney's publishes a literary journal, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the new issue of which is set to appear here today in a form that confounds every trend in publishing: a 300-plus-page Sunday-style broadsheet newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama, with which Eggers and company mean to celebrate the glory of the form. Featuring news and sports as well as stand-alone food and arts sections, a magazine and a 96-page pullout Book Review, the Panorama is both homage and conversation starter.

"We don't pretend to have the solutions," Eggers says. "We're just asking a few questions. We admit how little we know, but we're trying to luxuriate in print and maybe remind people of everything it can do."

McSweeney's' projects are marked by an intention to break boundaries, and nowhere is this more true than with the quarterly. A 2005 issue was published as a bundle of mail, and other issues have come in a variety of shapes and styles.

The Panorama will be big, its pages 15 by 22 inches, and lavishly laid out, with attention to color and graphics. A two-page spread in the food section illustrates how to make bruschetta, beginning with the butchering of a lamb. The sports section features a gallery of drawings from the World Series, laid out to resemble something from a newspaper of 80 years ago.

The writing represents contemporary literary journalism at its best. Stephen King -- a Red Sox fan who views the New York Yankees with what he describes as "fear and loathing" -- reports from Baseball City, where the World Series takes place in Bloat Stadium, at the intersection of Greed Avenue and Stupid Street. Novelist Andrew Sean Greer goes to Michigan to experience NASCAR firsthand.

"Our hope," Eggers notes, "is that readers will say, 'I forgot all these things that newsprint can do.' I think it's life-affirming when you say, 'Let's just write it at the length it needs to be and not keep shrinking everything.' "

Of course, it's easy to make such an argument when you're not dealing with the issues facing the commercial press. "In 2005," says Alan D. Mutter, who writes the blog Reflections of Newsosaur, "newspapers racked up a record $49 billion in ad sales. This year, they'll be lucky if they can get $28 billion."

Eggers understands these challenges. "All our friends at dailies," he says, "can't experiment the way we can because we don't have anyone to answer to." The Panorama will come out once, with a cover price of $16 in an edition of about 25,000. Although there is a plan to sell the paper on the streets in San Francisco today, national distribution will take place Wednesday via the Internet and bookstores (including Book Soup and Skylight Books in Los Angeles).

Of course, there's more to the project than simply a demonstration of what newspapers once could do. This too is typical McSweeney's. Indeed, the imprint has become a brand, the apotheosis of writerly hip in a world where cachet for literature is sorely lacking. In addition to its publishing efforts, the press works closely with 826 National, a nonprofit literacy organization for kids 6 to 18 that Eggers established in 2002. What connects these endeavors is a sense that writing and publishing should be ambitious.

Among the centerpieces of the Panorama is an investigative piece by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Porterfield, looking into cost overruns in the renovation of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. It's an effort undertaken in conjunction with SF Public Press, a nonprofit Web-based start-up that is looking to fill gaps in local news coverage that have arisen with the contraction of the mainstream press.

Although the San Francisco Chronicle bills itself as "Northern California's largest newspaper," circulation is in decline and staff has been cut; the San Francisco Examiner, meanwhile, is now a free tabloid, distributed six days a week.

"The Panorama is a perfect partner," says Michael Stoll, a former reporter and editor at the Examiner and Philadelphia Inquirer who is now the Public Press' project director and has been a key liaison on the Bay Bridge piece. "They share the same love of the medium but haven't joined the stampede that has given up print for dead."

The Porterfield investigation will encompass more than 10,000 words and half a dozen graphic elements, split between a main piece and several sidebars. It's the kind of thing, Eggers notes, that is hard to do online. This, in turn, suggests a multi-platform approach, in which Twitter or Web updates are used for breaking news and print becomes an outlet for analysis and commentary. "The only thing that doesn't work," Stoll says, "is a single-media strategy."

The McSweeney's effort taps into a larger conversation about the future of long-form journalism in a world where traditional venues are in flux. Last month, the Virginia Quarterly Review, another literary journal, used its website to post an 18,000-word piece in four installments about last year's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. "That's one way of experimenting," says Robert Boynton, director of literary reporting at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

"People constantly underestimate the reading appetite of the American public," Boynton adds, "But there's as big an interest in long-form journalism today as there has ever been, and as we experiment with different delivery systems it will only grow."

That's an optimistic assessment, but it's one Eggers shares. "All of the interns pay for magazines," he says. "They'll read the New Yorker, or they'll read Mother Jones. They'll pay for that, but a lot of them weren't paying for the newspaper anymore. So we started thinking, what if you offered the same sort of depth, analysis, literary value that you get in a magazine? When people sit down, they want to have an experience, and if you surprise them on every page, curate it in such a way that it's constantly surprising and constantly delighting, I think you could keep them."

david.ulin@latimes.com

“WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE” VINYL TOYS

http://www.dangerousminds.net/index.php/site/comments/where_the_wild_things_are_vinyl_toys/

“WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE” VINYL TOYS
Richard Metzger
07.17.2009

First glimpse at the wonderful toys from Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.” These look great. So does the trailer. I can’t wait to see it!

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE..

http://chud.com/articles/articles/13720/1/WHERE-THE-WILD-THINGS-ARE-BEING-COMPLETELY-RESHOT/

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE... BEING COMPLETELY RESHOT?
By Devin Faraci
2-20-8

We're on the verge of losing a movie. Spike Jonze's version of Where the Wild Things Are is a film with an uncertain future as executives behind the scenes at Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures are right now trying to figure out whether or not to essentially reshoot the entire film.

If the entire film gets reshot you will hear that the decision came because of technical issues, specifically the animation of the Wild Things' mouths and facial features. The film uses people in huge Jim Henson Creature Shop suits, and the plan was to shoot the suits and animate the Wild Things' faces later. That has been proving to be more technically difficult than anyone had foreseen, even though test footage had been shot (a leaked clip from the movie that hit the internet this weekend was in fact some of that test footage, according to a statement from Spike Jonze). This is a bad situation, obviously, but one where some footage could be salvaged, meaning that a complete and total reshoot of the film wouldn't be necessary.

Yet I'm hearing that just such a massive reshoot is what is on the table right now. And it's not because of technical issues, unless you want to consider the lead kid actor and the script technical issues. Sources tell me that the suits at Legendary and Warner Bros are not happy with Max Records, the actor playing Max, the mischievous boy who is crowned King of the Wild Things. Worse than that, they don't like the film's tone and want to go back to the script drawing board, possibly losing the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers script when they do it. Apparently the film is too weird and 'too scary,' and the character of Max is being seen as not likable (check out some of the test screening responses that Slashfilm is running).

Where The Wild Things Are screened for a test audience in Pasadena late last year; my friend BC, who watches a horror movie a day, caught the screening and liked what he saw, but I've also been told that the movie is 'subversive,' which is just the sort of thing that drives studio suits up the wall. The film, I keep hearing, is pretty great at this early stage of post-production, but it could very possibly not be a commercial movie. You can imagine the panic at Warner Bros when they realized they'd made a reportedly 75 million dollar kiddie art house film.

Can Warner Bros force Spike back to do the sort of massive reshoots they want? I've been on the phone to Warner Bros and Legendary and have not been able to get official statements about the status of the film, or whether Spike has final cut. A less reliable source has told me that he does in fact have final cut, which means that if he doesn't want to go back and do the reshoots he doesn't have to - but Warner Bros could still fire him and assign the reshoots to someone more compliant. Spike has a crew he likes to work with and they have not yet been told to gear up for additional shooting although they do know that it could be coming.

The scary thing is that this wouldn't be unprecedented for Warner Bros. Just a couple of years ago they scrapped Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel and sent Renny Harlin out to remake the thing using the same sets and some of the same actors. Both versions ended up being terrible, but this studio has shown their willingness to do something just this nutty before.

There has been a glimmer of good news, and it's that Spike issued a statement about the leaked clip. For a little while I contemplated the idea that it had been leaked by Spike as some sort of move against the suits, but what could that move have meant? The fact that Spike is making statements about the clip - and that he's making statements at all about the movie - is a sign that not all is lost.

Everything points to Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are being a unique and fascinating film. It's not a cookie cutter kid movie, and I know that was part of the original appeal to folks at Warner Bros - why the hell else do you bring Jonze on? I didn't make it out to that Pasadena test screening, but now I wish I had so that I could report to you just what sort of a movie Spike has made. The reality, though, is that it doesn't matter since I tend to come down on the side of the great talent in these cases, and there's no question that Spike is a great talent. I don't trust the money people to look at a movie that's different and non-comformist and to understand it. Of course they're afraid of it. You can make movies where you don't take risks, but in this case they've decided to take the risk. They should let it play out and see what happens.

It's important to keep in mind that as of this weekend nothing was decided or set in stone. Hopefully all the behind the scenes stuff will settle soon, Spike will get to release the movie he wants to release and Warner Bros will strongly support the film with marketing and advertising. Meanwhile I'll keep my ear to the ground and let you know what I hear.