Hollywood always gets it wrong when it comes to historical facts and the upcoming film about Julia Child is no exception. This flick was born in a blog and the screenwriter (Nora Ephron?) doesn't know a blog from a dog, a log, or a hole in the ground. If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it — while you look at the Blogspot-URL for this beacon in cyberspace in your browser's address-window.
[x NY Fishwrap]
A Blog’s Story Gets A Tweak In "Julie & Julia"
By David F. Gallagher
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O.K., so "Julie & Julia,” a foodie-focused movie due out next month from Sony Pictures, isn’t pretending to be a documentary. But one geeky historical inaccuracy jumped out at me when I saw the trailer last weekend: To publish the blog that is at the center of the plot, the Julie in the title uses a semi-fictionalized blogging service called “Blogspot@salon.com.”
In real life, Julie Powell did use a Salon-branded service to publish The Julie/Julia Project, a blog documenting her effort to cook her way through Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in one year. (The blog became a book, and Nora Ephron’s screen adaptation throws in bits of Ms. Child’s life.) But the Salon service, which started in 2002 and is now largely defunct, had no connection with Blogspot, a blog hosting service connected to Blogger, which is owned by Google. Instead it was the product of a partnership between Salon and UserLand, which makes a blogging software package called Radio. UserLand was founded by Dave Winer, a blogging pioneer who has been known to speak up when he feels his contributions to the field are being overlooked.
This is a minor detail in the context of the film, of course, but then again “Julie & Julia” is the first Hollywood movie to have sprung from a blog, which in some sense makes it part of blogging history. And it’s not often that a blogging service makes a big-screen appearance.
Was the movie’s version of history tweaked because Hollywood has little interest in accuracy when it comes to computers? Or was there some kind of product placement deal? A spokesman for Sony Pictures did not respond to my requests for an explanation.
Update: Kerry Lauerman, new projects editor at Salon, said in an e-mail message that he didn’t know where the branding came from, and that he would look into whether anyone else at Salon was contacted about it. Also, see comments below from Dave Winer and Scott Rosenberg.
Winer Comment — You’re right and the movie is wrong. :-) Salon did partner with UserLand and used a slightly customized version of our Radio UserLand software for their blog hosting service.
Rosenberg Comment — I caught that too! There was no “blogspot@salon.com” — I’m assuming they just doctored this up for some inscrutable reason. The original Salon Blogs program — at blogs.salon.com — that I started in 2002 was mothballed, though a few bloggers continue to use it. It’s where Julie/Julia appeared. I tell just a little of the story of the bloggers in this group in my new book about the story of blogging, Say Everything. The Open Salon site that opened last year inherited the Salon Blogs mantle. Ω
[David Gallagher is a deputy editor for technology news at The Times. He is most interested in blogs, search engines, and all of the other things that make the Web so fun to watch these days.]
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
