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[pasunepipe]

There is a fabulous interview with the one, the only Francine Pascal in the current issue of Bust (the one with Amy Sedaris on the cover).

She is much cooler than I imagined. She is this incredibly rich old lady who, get this, did not write a single one of the books. I mean, I knew there had to have been a whole crew of ghostwriters, but I

Comments

[kent]

Amy Sedaris is super-hot on that cover. Wow.

Elizabeth was reading that article before bed last night and she pointed out that Pascal's brother/uncle/cousin/something wrote a bunch of famous musicals or plays. I can't name any of them now but it was interesting that creativity, sort of, ran in that family.

[pasunepipe]

Yeah, they are like the Royal Tenenbaums or something. I think he wrote Bye Bye Birdie and Hello Dolly?

[zosiablue]

!! She didn't write any of them? Goddamn.

[danisse]

Yeah. How does that work?

[kent]

I can see it happening in an environment where volume and regular publication become very important. That's what happened when Stan Lee launched the Marvel Comics titles in the early 60s. He wrote basic plots and then gave them to the artists to flesh out. Later, he'd add dialogue to fit their pictures. But it was partly done out of necessity -- by doing this, he could write a lot more titles. It's still the "Marvel style" to do this, even though the artists rarely get as much credit for the story as they should (and in some cases, like with Jack Kirby, their co-creation of some characters was denied for a long time).

Of course, Stan Lee was running the company. Did she start a company, or did she pitch to a publisher having already found a ghostwriter for her work? It seems like she would have had to have written something.

[kaytethinks]

She is much cooler than I imagined. She is this incredibly rich old lady who, get this, did not write a single one of the books.

Wow. She's so my new hero.

[rockgeisha]

She's also someone who shares my politics who I'm not ashamed of. !!! That's a rare thing in an era of stop-being-on-my-side.

[afellowwaitress]

Holy COW. I had no idea she was ever actually going to continue those characters. My sisters and I used to jokingly geek out, imagining futures for the SVH crew. I can't wait!