Note: We have previously discussed this author in regard to content and themes. That is not the subject of this post; if you wish to discuss her writing, please comment here. The topic of this post is the arrogance of the Hollywood establishment coupled with its superstition about success – not the content of the particular movie/book in question. Thanks!

I recently caught the BBC World Book Club broadcast on satellite radio while travelling. The author who was being interviewed is massively successful with a devoted fan base and the book that was being discussed had been made into a movie, although I had not heard of her, her books, or the movie (apparently I’ve been living under a rock, also known as living my own life). Still the author spoke well and being the BBC, the questions were engaging. The author was Jodi Picoult and the book My Sister’s Keeper. The question that made the interview cross over from filling time while driving through rural Arkansas to making a post on Hathor had to do with the way the movie version of the book changed the ending of a book that was both controversial and, to fans, imperative. The author was asked if she took this experience in a cautionary way and was now going to be more careful what contracts she signed or what she approved for future film versions, and gave, to the uninitiated, a surprising response:

It’s not quite that simple. Most people do not realize how little control an author has when you sign the rights away to Hollywood…Most of the time, if you sell the rights to Hollywood, you have zero control over what happens, you are not consulted, nobody cares what you think. Hollywood believes really strongly that they know better, and that readers do not matter, really. They think that they can tell a better story and that you are only source material.¹

This attitude is easy to see. We have talked about the arrogance of the Hollywood establishment many times on Hathor and we’ve talked about how superstitious belief in whatever the hell they want to believe in keeps eyes closed to obvious facts.

In this case, with this author and this book, the author had a lot of access to powerful people who refused her advice summarily and condescendingly:

And then, one day I got an email from a fan at a casting agency in Hollywood and she said “We just got the script in for My Sister’s Keeper, did you know they changed the ending?” So I called Nick at home and he wouldn’t talk to me. So I went to the movie set in LA and he threw me off the movie set. So I went to go talk to the head of New Line Cinema, and I said “I think you’re making a really big mistake. The target demographic for your film are the millions of people who read this book and they’re waiting for that moment.” And he said, “No no, we know what we are doing.”²

Even with all of that access and influence, she was still persona non grata when her opinion was no longer wanted. So that’s the arrogance. We know better, you are stupid, go away now. Now comes the supersition:

Well, they lost a lot of money on that film. And, the interesting thing, is that I now look like a genius in Hollywood because I predicted this. Even more ironic, is that, because I was able to predict this, I have more control now, than I ever did the first time around, when it comes to saying I need to have the ability to look at the script before it goes into production that is something they never would have given me as an author when I was signing the contract to My Sister’s Keeper.³

What did the Hollywood Establishment learn from this experience? Humility? Listen to authors more? Keep book endings when the intended audience is the fans of the book? Or even stick to your guns if you think you are making a better story? Nope. They learned that this particular person is a genius and a psychic and you should listen to her. That’s probably the same reason why success in Hollywood is so convoluted, and success gives you power. In fact, that’s probably why the whole damn culture is like that – failure in one respect means nothing you have to say is worth listening to, and a big success means you are to be listened to about things that aren’t related, which is a really bad way to run a company or a country.

¹As I could not find a transcript of the interview on the BBC website, I did a transcript myself of the section involving the question about the film, which was about 5 minutes in length. This quotation is from timestamp 35:57-36:05 and 36:30-36:47. The entire interview is available currently at the link provided above and I have the transcript I did on my computer.
²38:02-38:33
³38:33-39:02

I heard about a cool store in Brooklyn on one of my favorite NPR shows recently. The host interviewed the owner of Lee Lee’s Valise, a plus size clothing boutique. Lisa Dolan is a plus size designer, and she is starring in a TLC reality TV show “Big Brooklyn Style”. I loved what Lisa Dolan had to say:

DOLAN: Right. What they do is they have a pattern made, let’s say it goes up to a size 12. They take the same pattern and they just extend it as if we grow and get bigger like that big plastic man you see by the used car lot…That’s not how we get bigger. You need to start a new pattern that accounts for curves. Not just a big boxy item that’s thrown over you, it’s something that actually flatters your figure.

Dolan was awesome and cool. She seemed really comfortable with herself and in her own skin. Although I love the host of the NPR show for her willingness to talk about race and women’s issues and push her guests to answer questions on these issues, she buys into the NPR party line on the “obesity epidemic” and I was disappointed with her on this interview; she really pushed the idea that having a plus sized boutique was somehow wrong or damaging because it might encourage people to feel okay about being plus sized. She asked the question three separate times during the interview, which was only 9 minutes long:

MARTIN: Yeah. I hear what you’re saying. It’s just there’s an argument that the fact that there are more services and businesses out there catering to the plus-sized customer is not necessarily a good thing. And I know that’s a hard thing to…

DOLAN: Listen, I’ve had people walk in off the street say that I was advocating obesity because I had clothes to fit them. That’s wrong. That is just wrong. Clothing is a necessity. Fashion is a necessity for a woman. So put them together and you have Lee Lee’s Valise.

On the one hand, I would never have heard this obviously generous and gracious woman speak about her store and her passion if Michel Martin hadn’t interviewed her (since I don’t watch TLC), but I could have definitely done without the fat shaming. At what point is it okay to suggest that we shouldn’t have decent clothing for people of all body types because we don’t approve of some body types? I would expect that on an MRA forum but not in responsible journalism.

They call it death by a thousand cuts. The assault on reproductive freedom continues, at the state government level, and unfortunately, it is not just about whether a woman should have the freedom to get an abortion.

Indiana has enacted a new law that cuts off federal money to Planned Parenthood in the state, although as we all know, that money does not go to pay for abortions. Instead, it pays for medical exams and treatment for women who can’t pay for these things. If you have ever been prescribed birth control, you know you cannot have the prescription without the exam, and if the exam comes back abnormal the doctor generally still won’t give you the prescription until the abnormal test result is checked out and taken care of – all very expensive if you don’t have insurance.

The Indiana law has an exception for hospitals, so this law is very specifically targeted at Planned Parenthood. That organization challenged the law in court, but U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt allowed the cuts to go into effect immediately, denying the request for a stay.

The new law also bans abortions after 20 weeks, 4 weeks earlier than the previous law. It is thought that Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas are likely to quickly follow Indiana’s lead.

Betty Cockrum, president of Planned Parenthood Indiana, said:

The court’s ruling today means that 9,300 Medicaid patients at our 28 locations have lost services from their preferred provider.

Over 30 anti-abortion laws were enacted just in April.

Abortion banned at or after 20 weeks: Kansas, Idaho, Oklahoma.

Required counseling that included inaccurate information about links between abortion and breast cancer risks: North Dakota.

Required counseling women that abortion ends “the Life of a Whole, Separate, Unique, Living Human Being”: Kansas.

Requires an ultrasound before an abortion: Arizona, North Dakota.

Abortion coverage limited in health care exchanges: Idaho, Virginia, Oklahoma.

Amended legislation to further restrict minors’ abortion access: Kansas, North Dakota.

Amended abortion reporting requirements: Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma

I read a story (read the comments at the salon.com story with caution) recently about a woman who experienced a placental abruption, and was bleeding out at a hospital where the doctor refused to perform an “abortion” although the fetus was either dead or not able to be saved, and the woman was dying. There is some confusion in the comments over whether the problem was no one else knowing how to perform the procedure, or whether ordinary medical procedures used to care for women after natural miscarriages just weren’t applied. In any case, another line of attack is the education of doctors: if they believe it is okay to let women die in an emergency room rather than refuse to hurry the dying of a non viable fetus or remove a dead one, if, as one medical doctor states, medical schools don’t talk about applying the procedures to these situations because they are afraid and the first time the idea occurs is in the emergency, and if the government limits funding for medical schools on the basis of whether they train doctors to perform abortions.

From the woman herself:

You shouldn’t need to know the details of why a woman aborts to trust her to make the best decision for herself.

Preventing Premature Births, How Much Should It Cost?

It cost $30 a month when local pharmacies made it as a gel – and it worked, for the last 8 years. It’s a treatment that helps women carry high-risk pregnancies to term. Now that K-V Pharmaceuticals has gotten it approved as an injectable drug by the FDA and patented it, they want to charge $1,500 per dose, or $6,000 per month. They say that’s ok because a typical 20 week course of Makena, the drug in question, would cost $30,000, while a premature baby would cost on average about $51,000 in the first year, and since after outcries they dropped their price to about $15,000 per 20-week course, that’s a big savings, assuming it works. They also claim government rebates and financial assistance to the needy will help those who can’t afford it get treatment (for something that was already available at a very reasonable price).

They’ve warned pharmacies they would face FDA enforcement if they continued to compound the drug – after pressure from professional medical societies and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the FDA stated it would not attempt to prosecute pharmacies unless there were safety concerns.

Naturally, the company invested money in the product in order to gain FDA approval – nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, according to an email statement to NPR. But according to Senator Brown, they could make billions of dollars in a single year off of their drug if they would price it similarly to the original generic drug, more than enough to pay for their investment and profit from the drug. And George Saade, president of the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, says that there is no measurable medical difference in the medications, only possible logistical benefits in having a product made by a company available everywhere, instead of compounded locally.

In Cutting Budgets, Who Feels the Cuts First?

The mentally ill are both men and women, and according to some statistics, women make up as many as 80% of the workers in health care. So when I heard a story about the cuts in states’ budgets that cause state psychiatric hospitals to be closed, which causes the mentally ill who go to hospitals to be kept in the ER for sometimes days waiting on a bed in a psychiatric hospital – it is troubling.

I once considered going to an ER and voluntarily committing myself for the 72 hour cooldown period. I was conscious enough to know which hospital had a psychiatric ward and to know I would rather spend some time in a less clinical facility. I received a reduced rate at the facility I chose, because they received state funding. Maybe those things would be different now. I would have left if I had had to pay for it all out of pocket – I didn’t have it. And if I had been turned away, sent to the emergency room, I don’t know how that would have affected my eventual recovery, into a stable life today. Years later I count that weekend as a turning point for me.

One ER doctor in the report I heard asked, if this was pneumonia, would we be okay with making them wait 30, 40, 60 hours to get a bed? To get adequate treatment? If we say we treat mental illness with parity, how do we explain this?