Bloggers and magazines and cable news and, well, just about everybody has been trying to make the recession hip, coining phrases like "fashionistas" and talking up habits like gardening and mending clothes as if they're some crazy new trend and not, you know, what our grandparents did to survive. Now Hollywood has gotten on board too, hiring screenwriters Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse to write an untitled family "event movie" based on columns by W. Hodding Carter about teaching his family to live within their means. Carter, like so many journalists and writers these days, put his life through an experiment for the sake of writing a book about it-- according to THR, he decided that his family could live on $550 a month after mortgage payments, which resulted in turning their front yard into a garden, eating roadkill, harvesting their own maple syrup, and bartering for goods with neighbors. The...
- 9/1/2010
- cinemablend.com
Scribes Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse ("Surf's Up") have been hired to pen a family event movie based on the writings of journalist W. Hodding Carter for 20th Century Fox reports Risky Biz Blog.
Carter wrote about his drastic real-life efforts to scale down his family's spending. The family of six were living far beyond their means in rural Rockport, Maine and experimented with living on $550 per month after mortgage payments.
The result saw them farming their front yard, eating roadkill, skipping holidays and meals out, reusing coffee filters and bartering. Stacey Sher and Michael Shamberg will produce the feature.
Addario and Syracuse are also in the news today for other reasons, namely their previous draft of another film is getting a quick rewrite by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel ("City Slickers," "Forget Paris") reports Deadline.
Entitled "Us & Them", the Andy Fickman-directed comedy has Billy Crystal as a grandpa...
Carter wrote about his drastic real-life efforts to scale down his family's spending. The family of six were living far beyond their means in rural Rockport, Maine and experimented with living on $550 per month after mortgage payments.
The result saw them farming their front yard, eating roadkill, skipping holidays and meals out, reusing coffee filters and bartering. Stacey Sher and Michael Shamberg will produce the feature.
Addario and Syracuse are also in the news today for other reasons, namely their previous draft of another film is getting a quick rewrite by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel ("City Slickers," "Forget Paris") reports Deadline.
Entitled "Us & Them", the Andy Fickman-directed comedy has Billy Crystal as a grandpa...
- 9/1/2010
- by Garth Franklin
- Dark Horizons
Risky Business says that 20th Century Fox has hired writers Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse to pen the screenplay for an untitled movie based on journalist W. Hodding Carter's various writings about his drastic real-life efforts to scale down his family's spending. The site describes the true story as follows: A journalist and author, Carter realized his family of six was living far beyond its means in rural Rockport, Maine, and decided they should try to live on $550 per month after mortgage payments. Among their new domestic policies are farming their front yard, raising chickens, eating roadkill, forgoing vacations and meals out, making their own birthday gifts, plugging trees for maple syrup, reusing coffee filters and bartering with neighbors. Double Feature Films' Stacey...
- 9/1/2010
- Comingsoon.net
Remember when I wrote the other day about one of the new trends in Hollywood being movies about real people who do spectacularly dumb things in real life for one year, write about it, and get paid? The Year of Living Biblically is being made into a movie, as is Eat, Pray, Love, and so was Julie & Julia (in addition to Hodding Carter's Frugal Family, about a family that does the unbelievable: They lives on a budget. For a whole year!)
Well, this one takes the stupidity cake. There's a woman out there; her name is Robyn Okrant, a 35-year-old yoga instructor. She decided, in 2008, to live her entire life based on Oprah Winfrey's show. She bought what Oprah suggested she buy; read books recommended by Oprah; she ate and exercised according to Oprah; and even her sex life was dictated by what she saw on Oprah. I...
Well, this one takes the stupidity cake. There's a woman out there; her name is Robyn Okrant, a 35-year-old yoga instructor. She decided, in 2008, to live her entire life based on Oprah Winfrey's show. She bought what Oprah suggested she buy; read books recommended by Oprah; she ate and exercised according to Oprah; and even her sex life was dictated by what she saw on Oprah. I...
- 5/21/2010
- by Dustin Rowles
If you're a writer living in Maine, as I am, you'd have probably heard of W. Hodding Carter. He's Maine's answer to Aj Jacobs, the man who wrote The Year of Living Biblically and The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. It's journalistic shtick, but it's interesting and often enlightening journalistic shtick. Basically, you do something all out for a year, write about it (preferably, on a blog), sign a lucrative book deal, and sell the rights to a movie studio. Boom! All that suffering was worth it, and you win at life. Elizabeth Gilbert did it with Eat, Pray, Love and Julie Powell did it with Julie & Julia. It's high-concept journalism. Find a compelling gimmick, make a fortune.
W. Hodding Carter -- whose dad was the Assistant Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter -- has made something of a career out of his peripatetic lifestyle.
W. Hodding Carter -- whose dad was the Assistant Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter -- has made something of a career out of his peripatetic lifestyle.
- 5/19/2010
- by Dustin Rowles
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