Cinematical

In April, we reported the story of Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism scandal sinking her potential movie deals. A story in the New York Observer suggests that Kaavya may have fallen in with the wrong crowd to begin with; the company that shares the copyright to her book is called Alloy Entertainment, a book-packaging young-adult media conglomorate. They're the folks behind the wildly popular book and movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, as well as the famous Gossip Girls and Sweet Valley High series. Alloy's editors helped Kaavya flesh out How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life; though I've little sympathy for Kaavya, its interesting that the pernicious inner workings of Alloy are coming to light via a plagiarism scandal.

Apparently most of Alloy's stuff is written by ghostwriters, and ideas are usually developed in-house and then farmed out to multiple writers. Often, as was the case with The Sisterhood fo the Traveling Pants, the author who had the original idea doesn't even get to do the book (they can maybe get a measly bonus). One author who worked with Alloy said "There's no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There's no literary accountability." Maybe Kaavya was taking in the company's multi-author approach too literally.

I can never look at another YA novel without thinking of it as a kind of literary Frankenstein. In fact, maybe it's impossible to think of Alloy's books as literary objects at all; the company's website says they produce "commercial entertainment properties -- often with an eye toward teens, young adults and families -- and partners with the leading publishers, television networks and movie studios to deliver these properties to the world." Yeeesh. What would Judy Blume say?