Booking the Oscars

On Tuesday, January 25, Oscar spoke, and for booksellers the film nominations offer a chance to showcase a number of titles that could benefit from award-related publicity. This year's nominees for Best Picture include two based on specific books.

Best Picture nominees Sideways and Million Dollar Baby are based on the books Sideways by Rex Pickett (St. Martin's Griffin) and Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner by the late F.X. Toole (Ecco), respectively. St. Martin's published Sideways, screenwriter Pickett's first novel, as an original paperback, and the book now carries a tie-in cover. A new edition of Toole's book, published by Ecco Press on January 1, is retitled Million Dollar Baby, and it sports a new jacket reflecting the popularity of the Best Picture nominee.

Books that relate to other Best Picture nominees include J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys by Andrew Birkin (Yale University Press) with the film Finding Neverland and Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story, written with David Ritz (Da Capo), with the film Ray.

Nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay The Motorcycle Diaries is based on the memoirs of Che Guevara and Alberto Granado. Guevara's Motor Cycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (Ocean Press) was released posthumously in 1992. Granado's book, Traveling With Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary, has been translated by Lucia Alvarez de Toledo and published in this country by Newmarket Press. Also available is Back on the Road: A Journey to Latin America by Guevara (Grove) in which he chronicles his second trip through Latin America.

This year, independent publisher Newmarket Press was particularly prescient, having published book tie-ins for six films nominated for a total of 19 Academy Awards. Newmarket's Ray: A Tribute to the Movie, the Music, and the Man and Sideways: The Shooting Script tie into films that have been nominated in six and five Oscar categories, respectively.

Ray: A Tribute to the Movie, the Music, and the Man includes 200 color movie stills, historical images, behind-the-scenes photos, the complete screenplay, and a 16-page illustrated memorial tribute added after Charles' recent death.

Sideways: The Shooting Script, features the complete screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, comments by Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers and the book's author Rex Pickett, a 24-page color photo section, and a suitably loopy study guide by the filmmakers.

To help booksellers promote Sideways: The Shooting Script, Newmarket has provided a PDF of the Sideways "Study Guide," which is downloadable by clicking here.

Newmarket is also offering Book Sense stores a special promotion through the Advance Access program. On January 31, Book Sense stores receiving the Advance Access e-mail can order up to 10 free copies of the Sideways Guide to Wine and Life for promotional use. The Guide includes lists of wines and wineries mentioned in the film, as well as excerpts from the script.

Other Newmarket books about films in major Oscar categories include two nominees for Best Original Screenplay: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script and Hotel Rwanda: Bringing the True Story of an African Hero to Film. Hotel Rwanda is an in-depth companion to the film about the man who saved over 1,200 people from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It covers the filmmaking story and actual events, and includes commentary by the filmmakers, archival materials, the complete screenplay, and historical and movie photos.

Laura Linney has been nominated in the category of Best Supporting Actress for her role in Kinsey, and related to the film, Newmarket offers enriched content as well as the shooting script in Kinsey: Public and Private. The book contains extensive essays, and actual news articles, including New Yorker cartoons, about the controversial sex researcher.

Newmarket Press president and publisher Esther Margolis told BTW that such fact-based movies leave viewers eager to learn more about the subjects. Others, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Spanglish, both available in the Newmarket Shooting Script series, explicate the process of filmmaking by including interviews with the directors and writers and actual scene notes, explaining some of the choices made in creating the film.

"Our format is very distinctive," Margolis said. "We reproduce the films in facsimile form, rather than setting the type our way and [making] other changes, we provide the scripts exactly as required by the industry, and there are many specific regulations. At the core, the format demonstrates how the shooting script is used in the process of filmmaking. It gives people great insight into the film and the filmmakers -- sometimes by seeing what the director changed -- or wanted to change."

Other shooting scripts available in the Newmarket series for 2004 films include In Good Company, and I Heart Huckabees. Newmarket plans to add other award-winning and classic films to the series. --Nomi Schwartz