How Well Does Hollywood Enter the Blogosphere?

Christian Toto reached out to me last week wanting to speak to me as a blogger about Julie & Julia, a movie I am going to take my mum to this week (she is chomping at the bit to see this film). He wanted to ask me how Hollywood has dealt with blogs and bloggers in the past and what we bloggers though of the portrayals.  We chatted and this my excerpt of the article, Hollywood Enters the Blogosphere, which is awesome (how do these folks find me, how awesome is this?)

Chris Abraham, president and COO of the social media marketing firm Abraham Harrison in D.C., points to an even earlier film to showcase the struggles directors have in visualizing the world of computers.

The 1983 film War Games actively relied on computers to tell the story of a teen trying to prevent thermonuclear war.

“They didn’t understand how transparent the Internet was. Every time they tried to convey something, they’d voice over their own typing,“ Abraham says.

By comparison, the using of blogging as a plot point makes the director’s job a little easier.

“Many blogs are a ship’s log of what’s happening it the real world,” Abraham says. “It’s easier to convey a blogger’s story than a writer’s story.”

Abraham, who also blogs, says the very act of blogging can be a personal affair. Many bloggers work alone, late at night or perhaps in a café, which makes capturing them at the keyboard even tougher for a film director.

In a way, it’s not too different than trying to capture a traditional writer’s work on screen. It typically involves a hunched over figure pounding away at a typewriter, occasionally crumpling up a sheet of paper and hurling it toward the nearest garbage can.

He says it’s almost impossible to avoid cliched images like the typewriter In movies like Adaptation.”

Had Julie & Julia been set in 2009, the blog home page itself might have supplied some effective visuals.

Today’s “foodie” blogs are high tech and feature beautiful photographs utilizing narrow depths of field to make the meals pop off the screen, he says.

I didn’t get this paragraph to Mr. Toto in time before the article needed to be files, but here’s what I wrote, for what it’s worth:

The only thing I can really think of is that Sex and the City is the closest thing to an effective portrayal of “blogging,” even though she was writing a column.  Also, David Duchovny is an author/novelist (in Californication) who is relegated to blogging for his ex-girlfriends/baby mamma’s new fiance who runs the company he’s blogging for – -they never show him blogging but they talk about it and there’s talk about it and his fans reference the blog and it is a big to-do, despite the fact that he bloody resents it and considers it without artistic merit.

However, my guru, Mr. Scott Burns, told me that the best portrayal of blogging is on Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, “basically NPH (Neal Patrick Harris) blogs by reciting his post straight to the camera (as if it was the computer screen), it’s great. So, there you go — sounds like the best way to me, too!

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