Marley and he are back.


It's one thing to leave the newspaper business and struggle on through reduced circumstances -- for example, writing a lame blog like this one without compensation. It's quite another to leave the newspaper business and make several million dollars writing about a deceased dog. Perhaps this is why John Grogan, the author of Marley and Me and numerous other books on the same subject, is not universally revered at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where we both used to work. I never met the man and I'm sure he's a great guy, but when you leave the hallowed halls of journalism it's considered bad form to rub journalists' noses in it by becoming a millionaire.

And it's considered really bad form to have a film crew descend on the newsroom (pictured above) where one's former coworkers still toil, making their work a bit more hellish for the day by the addition of 250 movie folk to record a few seconds of Owen Wilson striding purposefully through the newsroom. I never saw the real John Grogan do that, incidentally, but doubtless it's because we worked different shifts.

Most places, the arrival of a film crew would create breathless excitement. At the Inquirer, I'm guessing it will trigger slightly more bitching than a new round of downsizing. The thing is, you're asking people to sit at a different computer, for God's sake, where there is probably a weird trackball instead of a mouse, and a split keyboard and a monitor on a milk crate and a ratty chair adjusted so you're practically sitting on the floor. You're forcing them to box up their inflatable palm trees and Tom Toles cartoons and hip figurines so they won't be crushed underfoot by the Hollywood crowd.

In an era of serial indignities for newspaper people, this is just another one -- but it's all the greater for the fact that the disruption is necessary to create the illusion that a writer of dog books was somehow the Jimmy Breslin of North Broad Street. It's like Fox commandeering the Louvre for a day to make a movie about Thomas Kinkade.

The movie's out in December. But I think this Marley business has gone far enough. My boycott starts now.

Comments

Peter Rozovsky said…
Oh, but it would be dreadfully uncollegial to suggest that this will be an indignity.
==============
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
May 9, 2008 at 3:20 AM
Anonymous said…
heehee. one of my colleagues was complaining vociferously last week that they were going to use her desk in the shot and she'd have to sit somewhere else for a couple of days. So, yeah, Dave -- you hit it right! Moi-meme, I wouldn't mind seeing Owen, though when John G. actually worked here, I think I only saw him once. Talked to him on the phone about infelicities in his columns a lot, but almost never saw him in the newsroom.
May 10, 2008 at 9:05 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine
Read more

That ship has sunk

Image
After a long career in journalism, I'm back in the job market. For a limited time only. All I require are a company car, a five-figure signing bonus and a six-figure salary. If somebody could swing by and clean the house once a week, that would be great too. Until then, guess who's going to be blogging like there's no tomorrow. I've worked at various newspapers for the better part of three decades. I've been a reporter and an editor and there was a time in the mid '90s when I thought I was being very clever by learning HTML. I was thinking: Job security, baby; every newspaper will be on the Internet in a few years. I was right about the last part. But it turns out most people eventually questioned the wisdom of paying for what they could get free. Who knew? Then circulation and ad revenue headed south, and corporate boards figured they could maintain profits by shrinking the product and letting people go. Now circulation and ad revenue are Thelma and Louise: st
Read more

Back to the keyboard -- but it's a new one

Image
After a writing hiatus of quite a few months longer than I intended, I'm back to work on what I will refer to as "the book." I knocked out another 500 words yesterday, and expect to make that the standard day's output. But since I've had these productive impulses before, and since they tend to expire after about a week, I'm employing a few other strategies. First: A new computer! Yep, I have decided that there are too many games on my desktop machine, it's too noisy, and it confines me to one room of the house. So I ordered a new notebook computer from Dell. It's their new 1420 model. Should be here in a couple more weeks -- although you never know with Dell -- and then the only files I'll transfer from my old computer to the new one are my in-progress writing projects. I know what you're thinking: Basically, I'm offering myself a cheap bribe to a commit to a project that will probably take a year -- long after the shiny new computer cease
Read more