November will be Nora Ephron Month at the Happy Place!
I definitely will not be writing about this!
At the risk of engaging in a blatant humblebrag, I have a lot of wonderful ideas that fail spectacularly and do not receive any kind of a following whatsoever. Take, for example, the Simpsons Decade. Many, many years ago, dating back to my days at The Dissolve, I had what I thought was a blockbuster idea for a follow-up to You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.
My fifth book would be an ambitious and exhaustive exploration of 1990s comedy predicated on the notion that we as a culture had reached such a place of peace and prosperity during the Clinton era that the most influential and profound comedy looked inward, embracing post-modernism and self-reflexive meta-commentary rooted in our longstanding national obsession with television.
I posited The Simpsons as the epitome and apex of this trend. Hence the book proposal’s title. I thought that I had cracked the code and come up with a theory that explained more or less the entirety of 1990s comedy, rooted in one of the most popular and long-running television shows in history.
My agent thought it was an idea with tremendous promise as well, as did my editor at Scribner but when we tried to sell it to the people who put out The Big Rewind, My Year of Flops and You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me they rejected it on the grounds that my last three books had lost them money, and it was consequently time to get out of the Nathan Rabin business.
Incidentally I think You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, which has sold over eight thousand copies at this point, eventually made Scribner money but not quickly enough to salvage my career as an author with a major publishing house.
I sold the idea to Rotten Tomatoes, who understandably had absolutely no idea how to package such an academic, abstract conceit and killed the column after about a year or so. They allowed me to continue it on my site, and I similarly had no idea how to package or promote it, so I unceremoniously ended the column a few years back.
2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin was another boffo idea that failed in every conceivable way. I’d hoped that giving readers/patrons a chance to choose a year’s content through polls would generate income, attention and page-views for my perpetually struggling site.
Instead I actually lost something in the area of four to five thousand dollars from writing up sixty or so 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin pieces rather than 60 Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entries and page-views and income have gone down instead of increasing.
But did I quit just because I realized early on that 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin was a massive mistake? No, I did not. I just kept plugging away and now I am delighted to report that the endless disaster that is 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin is nearly over, just a year later than anticipated.
Only two theme months remain: Nora Ephron Month and Unlikely Tearjerker Month. November will be Nora Ephron month here at the Happy Place .
We’ll kick things off on Monday with a First and Last on This is My Life and Julie and Julia, followed by My World of Flops entries on Mixed Nuts and Bewitched and pieces on My Blue Heaven (which I just saw and absolutely adored) and either Cookie or Silkwood.
I wasn’t an Ephron fan when she was chosen by readers for a theme month but since then I’ve come to watch and enjoy This is My Life, Lucky Numbers, which has one of John Travolta’s funniest and most overlooked performances, the aforementioned My Blue Heaven and the Julia Child half of Julie and Julia.
So I am looking forward to delving more deeply into her filmography and also FINALLY bringing 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin to a close so that I can move onto my next big spectacularly unsuccessful idea/failed dream.
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