IP Picks🔎: Two Genre Takes on Race
âž• A 'Field of Dreams' in Reverse
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
My colleague Elaine Low always manages to teach me something in her stories about the state of the business. And if you haven’t read it yet, her deep dive into what’s selling and what’s not (broken down by major streamers) is well worth your time. Some of it will reinforce what you're probably already encountering in your day-to-day work; some of it will cause you to look at things in a fresh way. Either way, it's great to have this streaming topography laid out in one place, as it nicely illustrates what each of them sees as their particular niche right now.
Meanwhile, here's a fascinating NYT piece I forgot to flag last week about the corners that some large companies like Google and Meta are cutting to build their LLM AI programs. Once again, I'm reminded of how our IP laws can't seem to keep pace with the technological changes fueled by industry leaders who at best are willing to take advantage of the regulatory gray area or at worst just violate at least the norms if not actual existing laws that might apply. It’s the better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission attitude of so many tech giants. (The NYT is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over this very issue.)
The story underscores just how much of the value of these new AI endeavors is built on not paying fair-market value for the data underlying them. The Times explains how Meta considered buying Simon & Schuster so it could exploit the publisher’s huge catalog to build its AI system and then were like, "Nah, why buy it when we can just take it?"
This might seem a bit afield of what’s happening in film and TV, but print is a telling harbinger of what will happen — and is already happening — with photo and video. Do you honestly think companies building AI systems value film any more than print? Please.
Let’s segue over to the classics, shall we? Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is arguably the most important novel in American literature. It’s also one of the most adapted. Now it looks like it’s Percival Everett’s turn. Everett is one of our most distinguished living novelists. After Cord Jefferson won a best adapted screenplay Oscar for his take on Everett's Erasure, the author certainly became more widely known. So his reimagining of the Huck Finn story, James, is a big deal in publishing.
Finn is one of my favorite books, and I loved American Fiction, but I've been on the fence about this project. (I haven't read James yet — it's on my bedside table for pleasure reading.) I wonder about the appetite for another spin on Twain's tale right now (especially in light of book bans and they way it has been injected into the culture wars) or how possible it is to replicate the success of American Fiction. Still, the book is out now, and the reviews have been strong. The rights are still available and meetings are being set up around town by CAA.
Interestingly, it turns out that Everett isn’t the only one who’s been busy coming up with a new take on Twain. (Mini trend alert!) There's also Big Jim and the White Boy, a graphic novel coming in October from writer David F. Walker and illustrator Marcus Kwame Anderson. As the title suggests, it focuses on the formerly enslaved Jim, and the artwork is cool. I know this will never happen, but it made me think that there's an animated version of this classic for grown-ups that could be really neat. (Glass Literary Management repped the book deal.)
In Stephen King news, Carrie turns 50 this year. And the author’s meteoric rise to bestsellerdom following the book’s publication in 1974 remains a doozy of an origin story. Brian De Palma’s 1976 chiller was definitely the first King movie adaptation I saw. I was probably eight or nine when I first caught it on TV, and it scared the shit out of me. (Sidenote: I'm still amazed at how little my parents regulated what I watched. Man, the 80s were different.) Anyway, The Boston Globe has a really fun interview with Maine's most famous resident about the book and the start of his career. (The NYT has a bunch of pieces — stories and podcasts — as well.)
Finally, back in the fall, I flagged Rachel Lance’s The Chamber Divers, which tells the story of how a group of eccentric scientists invented an underwater breathing apparatus that helped the Allies’ D-Day invasion. It was an offbeat story that I thought could make a quirky movie. With the book finally in stores this week, Wired and Smithsonian magazine have excerpts. Check ‘em out.
Onto this week’s picks, which include two novels that use genre plots (one’s a straight thriller, the other is grounded dystopian sci-fi) to explore race in America. Plus, one of my all-time favorite picks (see: Backlist). The lineup:
A thriller about a Black woman caught up in the murder of a pretty white influencer and the social-media storm that engulfs the case
A dystopian novel that takes a classic ‘70s plot line and updates it as a story about the burden of racism in today’s America
A slow-burn mystery following two sisters investigating the cold case disappearance of their cousin from their hardscrabble small town
A backlist gem that’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for sports lovers
A cheeky dark comedy/domestic thriller told from the POV of a very guilty husband
