Sunday, August 9, 2009

Week #28 Better Biographies - Book

This weeks project is one I just thought up but I'm kind of exited about it. Three separate things inspired it:

1) When I was in New York recently I bought a tiny little hard cover book from a street side book seller about Sarah Michelle Gellar. Despite my deep love for buffy, the mere existence of the book was ludicrous. Also Sarah Michelle Gellar had just about the most boring life story ever.

2) I was reading my book of short film biographies, the biographical dictionary of film, and I came across of the director “George Stevens”. He directed Fred and Ginger in Swing Time, Montgomery Clift in "A Place in the Sun" and the story of christ in the Greatest Story Ever Told. He also shot some of the 16 mm footage of the liberation of Dachau.

3) Recently, with my Cultures of Wonder project and a few others in this blog, I’ve gotten more and more interested in creating fictions and presenting them as part of the real world.

I thought “what about writing fictitious biographies for real people?”. That way we could make Sarah Michelle Gellar as interesting to read about as George Stevens. After all public peoples life stories are usually told with an eye for entertainment, why not just cut out the editorializing and invent the entire thing.

I’d want to do about 20 of them and present them as a book. I’d love to have twenty different writers work on it, one for every celebrity. Maybe I’d even get someone to illustrate it with portraits supposedly commissioned by the celebrities, although that might be too silly.

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