http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/apr/01/hollywood-publishing-bullock-proposal
Why is it, exactly, that the world of books exerts such an irresistible draw to the world of film? Not literary adaptations – you can see why they’re so popular – but the rather less obvious charms of publishing’s back rooms.
The latest addition to the field is The Proposal, in which Sandra Bullock plays a “high-powered book editor” facing deportation to her native Canada (she looks amazing in her fitted black suit and high heels in the poster, but far more sharply dressed than any book editor I’ve ever met). It’s a romantic comedy, so naturally there’s a fake engagement to be dealt with, and “one comedic fish-out-of-water situation after another”. I’m loath to say it’s unlikely to win critical plaudits, as I’ve only seen the trailer, but I’m going to say it anyway: it looks awful.
The Proposal joins the publishing sub-genre of the movie books world, nestling nicely next to Bridget Jones, who works in publishing PR, book editors Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction and Sarah Michelle Gellar in Suburban Girl (tagline “Sometimes the end is only the beginning”). Not to mention Will Ferrell’s children’s publisher father in Elf.
There’s also the bookshop sub-genre: Hugh Grant’s bumbling bookshop owner in Notting Hill, for example, or Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks’s battle of the independent versus the chain in You’ve Got Mail. The genre also includes the film of 84 Charing Cross Road, and not forgetting Pamela Anderson ever so slightly unlikely casting as a bookshop employee in the 2005 television series Stacked.