Word: levithan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...senior year, teens have been stuck for so long in their designated roles - nerd, vamp, rebel hottie - that they feel like indentured servants to them. The most agreeable myth of the movie, directed by Peter Sollett and scripted by Lorene Scafaria, from a novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, is that spending a night in New York City can crack the shell of stereotype to reveal your utterly cool inner life to someone who turns out to be your soul mate. For Nick, that would be Norah Silverberg (Kat Dennings), whose top-girl hauteur masks her discontent with every...
...Levithan is adamant about not comparing The 39 Clues to its famous older sibling. "We don't ever dream about having another Harry Potter," he says. But the series does share some cosmetic similarities with Rowling's. Harry is, like Amy and Dan, an orphan who discovers that his family history makes him part of a secret, powerful world. The Cahill family is divided into four branches, each with its own distinct personality, just as Hogwarts is divided into four distinct houses. But in another sense Levithan is very right: if you look under the hood you'll find that...
...word. The 39 Clues is, like some lab-grown genetically engineered life-form, a series without a real author. J.K. Rowling conceived Harry Potter on a crowded, four-hour-delayed train trip between Manchester and London. The 39 Clues was born about three years ago in a corporate boardroom. Levithan runs a weekly "idea group" at Scholastic - "basically, about a dozen editors get together every week, and we just brainstorm ideas," he explains. Amy and Dan were one of those brainstorms. (Originally the series was called The 79 Clues before Levithan and co. decided to scale it back, probably wisely...
...other words, while it's ostensibly a series of books, The 39 Clues arrives already encased in an exoskeleton of extraliterary material: trading cards, online game, sweepstakes, movie, merchandise. Levithan calls this approach "multi-dimensional publishing." "We are trying to create a new model for publishing and launch it in the biggest way possible," he explains. "Which for us is pretty big." The 39 Clues has been Pokemonetized...
...that in this case more just might possibly be less - that with every extra dimension you pile onto The 39 Clues, it doesn't become more of a rich, immersive experience; instead the book at the heart of its little universe just becomes a little less of a book. Levithan argues that the principle of the thing remains the same, regardless of the media it's packaged in. "The technology changes, but it's all about being in your backyard, being Luke Skywalker and Han Solo," he says. "It's that role-playing; it's about being involved...