The tremendous popularity of E.L. James’ erotic novel “50 Shades of Grey” — re-released by Random House in April with sales of 16 million copies or so — appears to have inspired a whole new cottage industry.
Last week, Universal Pictures and Focus Features announced that Mike De Luca and Dana Brunetti, the producers of the Oscar-nominated “The Social Network,” won a spirited bidding war in Hollywood to be the producers who will bring the novel to the big screen.
Sirius Radio is hoping to cash in on the suddenly respectable erotica craze with a new nighttime literary show called “Book Radio After Dark,” hosted by San Francisco-based erotica anthologist Susie Bright.
Her one-hour weekly show, which debuted at 3 a.m. today on Sirius channel 80, is expected to dwell on the dark, dirty and playful years of editing the “Best American Erotica” anthologies. It features actors and authors reading from erotic short stories.
“There have been waves of interest in erotica literature over the years, whether it was ‘The Story of O’ or ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ or memoirs like ‘The Happy Hooker’ or ‘The Sensuous Woman,’” said Bright, who got her start in erotica editing the lesbian magazine On Our Backs in San Francisco.
She thinks “Shades” has tapped into an underground interest. “All of a sudden it’s cool for soccer moms to think BDSM is cool,” said Bright.
Last week, Plume, a unit of Penguin, announced it was re-releasing Anne Rice’s erotic Sleeping Beauty trilogy including “The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty’s Punishment” and “Beauty’s Release.”
The books were first released in the 1980s under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, because the publisher did not want the best-selling “Interview with the Vampire” author to be closely linked to the erotica.
In a new preface that Rice penned for the series, she defends erotica for women as a literary form.
“As a feminist, I’m very much supportive of equal rights for women in all walks of life. And that includes for me the right of every woman to write out her sexual fantasies and to read books filled with sexual fantasies that she enjoys.” —Keith J. Kelly
Greene dawn
Greene is really about to be the color of money.
For the past four years, “Twilight” siren Kristen Stewart needed a garlic necklace of her own to avoid the immense amount of press requests and fashion houses longing to pin her face to their hot campaigns.
Now the quiet bloodsucker in the background, Ashley Greene (pictured), is getting top billing.
She’s currently gracing the cover of Cosmopolitan’s “Hot Issue” after landing on the front of Lucky, Women’s Health and a handful of other titles.
“[Stewart] is no longer the poster girl for ‘Twilight.’ The industry has fallen in love with Greene, who is being hunted down by producers for several upcoming roles,” an insider says.
Greene is about to really cash in with three new films including the much-buzzed “CBGB,” on the New York punk scene and the venerable club.
Execs at major fashion houses are drooling over her upcoming fall DKNY Jeans campaign.
“Prada is one of many ready to pony up far more than the standard $20 million payday to land [Greene],” our source said. And all this before the last installment of “Twilight” hits theaters in mid-November.–Joseph Barracato
Furthermore . . .
Let’s be perfectly clear. Uncle Sam can no longer get away with muddled language.
“The Plain Writing Act” ends its first year with a report card on Thursday in which federal agencies passed or flunked the law’s plain-writing tests, says its sponsor, Rep. Bruce Braley (D – Iowa).
Grades from A to F depend, the law says, on whether an agency “appointed a senior official, created an implementation plan, filed a compliance report, created a plain-language page on their website that links from their home page, provided a mechanism for public feedback, educated employees in plain language and used plain language in documents.”
The act mentions nothing about run-on sentences, OTM guesses.—Paul Tharp
Taxman Tim
No, not another tax problem for Tim Geithner !
The US Treasury secretary has weathered his share of embarrassment for not paying three years of federal taxes a while back.
But judging from odd e-mails making their way around the world, Geithner has a new role in an apparent tax scam not of his choosing, in which he’s now the head of the IRS.
Geithner was anointed to the post of top tax man by dumbbell scamsters soliciting other dopes to give their bank-account numbers to help split up $11 million in wayward tax receipts sitting in an account at the IRS’s “Bureau of Consular Affairs in Puyallup, Washington.”
It must be true; the request is signed by the “Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Timothy Geithner.”—Post staff