One-Page Schoolhouse: January 2010

Paranormal Activity in Hollywood

Remember The Blair Witch Project movie back in 1999? It was made for $110,000 and it earned $141 million.

I read about the film Parnormal Activity last fall, but it wasn't playing around here. It was made by a first-time director/writer, Oren Pei for $11,000 one week in his San Diego home.

I has been kicking around awhile. It was screened in 2007, and in 2008 the Dreamworks Paramount team bought it in order to remake it. But executives decided that the buzz at a research screening of the original was good enough to consider releasing that version. Steven Spielberg like it and suggested a different ending.

Then DreamWorks split from Paramount and the project went on hold. Finally, Paramount decided they would take it on and do a grungy guerrilla-style release (to match its creation, or just to save bucks?).

They had a heavy Web campaign that didn't promote the film as much as it was intended to get people to ask for it to screen in their area.

They had some trailers online of actual viewers jumping, screaming and shaking in their seats at screenings.

Writer and director Oren Peli shot the film in 7 days in 2006 with a crew of three friends.

Peli is a native of Israel who dropped out of school and started his own software company. Three years later, he emigrated to the U.S. and worked on developing animation and video games.

And he bought a suburban tract home, where he says he "quickly learned that you become conscious of every little noise, especially at night. The house, or the ground around it, was settling; things were falling off shelves in the middle of the night. I’m not saying there was a ghost or anything, because the incidents, or whatever you would call them, were happening months apart.”

But, think Poltergeist . (Has it really been 28 years since that came out? Man, I am old.)Even the DVD covers are similar.

So he sets up some video cameras as a way to figure out what was going on - and if he captured something interesting, maybe it could be a film.

The film is available now on DVD on on Netflix. Did you see it? Did it scare you?

http://www.paranormalactivity-movie.com
Paranormal Activity
Paranormal Activity (2-Disc Blu-ray)
Paranormal Activity Limited Collector's Edition
Poltergeist (25th Anniversary Edition)

Bye Bye B. Dalton Bookseller

More sad news for the book world.

B. Dalton Bookseller is turn to the end of its story. After nearly 44 years, it was down to just 50 stores at the end of the year. Its parent company, Barnes & Noble Inc., is shutting down all remaining stores.

Founded by the Dayton department stores in 1966, it underwent phenomenal growth in the 1970s and 1980s, eventually expanding to nearly 800 locations in 1986, when Barnes & Noble bought it.

In the early years, B. Dalton was known for its parquet floors, den-like furnishings and wide aisles -- a look the company said gave it the "open look of a contemporary college study hall or salon of learning."

By 1978, B. Dalton was the second-largest bookseller in the United States, behind Waldenbooks, but posted higher profits. In late 1986, Dayton Hudson (now Target Corp.) announced it was selling the chain to New York-based Barnes & Noble in a deal analysts valued around $250 million. That deal catapulted B&N and expanded its market across the country and turning it into the No. 2 bookseller.

So much corporate intrigue. Maybe that's what killed them.

Waldenbooks (Kmart bought that for $295 million in 1984) is now operated by Borders Group Inc. Borders Group will close all but about 130 mall-based Waldenbooks this month.

The B. Dalton stores have been disappearing from shopping malls by closing 35 to 40 stores a year for the past eight years as leases expired.

Remarkable Creatures

If books are a dead form, why do I find myself buying and reading more of them lately? Antidote to the Net?

Another new one on my To Read list is by Tracy Chevalier who does a good job of making history live for me. She has written books set in medieval France, 18th century London and 17th century Holland.

Her most famous book is Girl with a Pearl Earring - the story of a Dutch teenager who became a maid in the painter Vermeer's household, and became the subject (in the novel) of one of his most famous works, "Girl with a Pearl Earring." (It was also a film - which doesn't hurt sales.)

Her newest novel is called Remarkable Creatures. I don't think saying that it focuses on a 19th century fossil hunter named Mary Anning will make many people jump to read it (I happen to like fossils, but hang in a minute.)

Chevalier first encountered Anning while visiting a small museum:

"I had never heard of her. I learned from the display that she was a working-class girl who had lived in Lyme Regis, which is on the south coast of England, and had been fossil hunting with her father, and one day she and her brother discovered a huge specimen of what turned out to be an icthyosaur, an ancient marine reptile about 200 million years old. [She] had no idea what it was — thought it was a crocodile — and went on to discover another ancient marine reptile called a plesiosaur. She was completely self-taught, never had any formal education, was very poor [and] found these things for a living."

Anning became an important figure in the world of paleontology. Chevalier started the novel after she discovered an incident from Anning's childhood - she struck by lightning as a baby and survived it and lived to tell the tale.