More Trends in Blog Marketing

Last week, my friend Anne, the ace publicist at Vertical, offered me a pass for a sneak preview of Dark Water, a film based on a story by Koji Suzuki, the creator of The Ring. Sure, I says, so Wednesday night Mrs. Beatrice and I get ourselves soaked running (separately) from Times Square to the AMC megaplex and push our way through the disorganized throng that passes for a line, only to discover--and I suppose this is an indication of how long it's been since I've been to an advance screening--that "security" is confiscating cell phones at the door. Apparently if I hit my camera phone 24 times a second for the length of the movie, then print out the resulting JPGs, I'd have a flipbook of Dark Water that would bring the film industry to its knees were I to post it online.

So fine: They don't trust me with their movie, and I sure as hell don't trust them with my phone. Mrs. B and I stepped out of line and decided as long as we were in the theater, we might as well go see Rize, an amazing documentary you should make a point of watching. Maybe I'll spend the $10 on Dark Water later on.

But here's where the trend kicks in: yesterday, two different publicists both decide to email me about upcoming movies with literary hooks: the Diane Lane-John Cusack romantic comedy Must Love Dogs, based on a novel by Claire Cook and directed by the creator of Family Ties, followed an hour or so later by A Good Woman, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan that answers the question "Whatever happened to Helen Hunt?" Before I get deluged with more notices, though, I should point out that I'm only mentioning this once to acknowledge the trend--as long as movie studios think they're entitled to tighter security than airports, I'm not especially interested in promoting their screenings. But I hear (and see for myself) very good things about Romancing the Tome, a blog all about books-into-film, so go ahead and bombard them.