IP Picks🔎: Alien Monsters on the Loose in the Old West
âž• Stewardesses soar in the '60s and a pop star meets his end in the '80s
Welcome to The Optionist. Tough week. I know many of you are reeling from the Los Angeles fires. I know I am. I doubt if there’s a single person out here who’s more than one degree removed from someone who has suffered horrible, life-changing losses. Any words meant to offer comfort and support will only sound like hollow platitudes. But I sincerely hope that all of you are navigating this tragedy as best you can, getting the help you need and offering assistance whenever and wherever possible.
Earlier this week, Richard Rushfield shared his memories of growing up in Pacific Palisades when it still felt like a tight-knit, sleepy slice of small-town heaven. It’s worth read. Big cities can feel like cold and lonely places. But oftentimes, unimaginable disasters like this one end up bringing out the best in people. I’m certain that this will be the case with Angelenos in the days to come.
Before we dive into this week’s picks, a couple of quick hits:
Over the holidays, Publishers Marketplace did its annual breakdown of the year in deals. Some interesting takeaways: Adult fiction deals were up about 10 percent. Kids lit deals were down for the second straight year (but a late recovery suggests the category might be rebounding). Translation deals jumped 13 percent, mirroring a recent trend in Hollywood of audiences being more open to non-American stories. (Hey there, Squid Game Season Two!) Meanwhile, six-figure deals were way up, more than 17 percent, breaking a record set in 2021. PM didn’t break down which fiction categories were the hottest right now. But in nonfiction, outside of service books (relationships, how-to, etc.), the biggest gainers were true crime (which American audiences seem to have an unlimited appetite for) and — I’ll be honest this surprised me — history!
Read this fabulous New Yorker piece about a copyright feud between two romantasy authors. It’s a fun, juicy read and it gets into some thorny questions about originality and what can (and can’t) be easily protected by copyright when it comes to works of fiction.
On to this week’s picks. The article I flagged a few weeks back about how female-centered the bestseller list has become has really stuck with me. It’s made me think about whether Hollywood has been neglecting that audience and what kind of material might be getting overlooked in the process. A couple of this week’s picks were born from that. The full lineup:
An Old West horror-thriller about a cowboy fighting extra-dimensional monsters
A true-life satirical comedy about a group of pranksters who author a phony, over-the-top government report as a joke only to find that people think it’s real
A drama about young stewardesses at the dawn of the Jet Age
A thriller about a pair of sisters, a hot ‘80s pop band and a tragedy that’s come back to haunt them
A horror-thriller about a too-good-to-be-true rent deal that involves a dead body, indifferent cops and, oh yeah, sharing a house with a murderer
