The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary

It's Non-Fiction Monday!  Check out all of today's posts at Rasco from RIF.

Kinney, Jeff. 2010. The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary: How Greg Heffley Went Hollywood. New York: Amulet.

With the success of the wildly popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, it was only a matter of time before Greg Heffley went Hollywood.  What's surprising is that he wasn't animated!  Perhaps it's cheaper to make a live action film these days, or perhaps the talented Jeff Kinney simply didn't have the time to draw an entire movie.  Whatever the case, Greg went to Hollywood (a.k.a Vancouver).

The producers searched for a place that looked like a typical American town. They considered Rhode Island, Michigan, and lots of other places in the United States. So it's weird that they ended up finding the perfect American town in Canada.

In short sections with titles like "A Wimp is Born," "Action!," and "Faking It", Jeff Kinney walks the reader through the complicated process of creating a movie.  Of course, he does it with the humor that readers have come to expect.  In the chapter "Double Trouble" detailing the casting of little brother Manny, Kinney writes,

One of the trickiest roles to cast was Greg's three-year-old little brother, Manny. You may have noticed that in the books, Manny looks sort of like a buck toothed alligator.  Unfortunately, there aren't many kids who look like that in Vancouver - or anywhere else for that matter.
So the casting director looked for the next best thing, which was a cute kid with a memorable face.  After a lot of searching, the perfect Manny was found. Two of them actually. The trouble with three-year-olds is that they don't always do exactly what you want them to do, so it's a good idea to have a backup in case one of them decides not to cooperate.

The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary is the same size and format of the previous books, a printing font on diary-style pages liberally accompanied by hilarious artwork (from The Diary of a Wimpy Kid as well as new drawings created especially for this book).  The difference here is the addition of photographs, costume sketches, movie stills, actors' family photos and more.

This book will appeal to fans of Greg Heffley as well as those interested in the film making industry.  Casting, directing, set design, costumes, acting and editing are explained in a manner that is both informative and funny - a great way to learn.  The WK Movie Diary is a winner!

Diary Of A Wimpy Kid Teaser Trailer

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How the mighty have fallen (and no one knows)

How the mighty have fallen (and in the children's department, no one knows)

Michael Vick, Barry Bonds, A-Rod, Marion Jones, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, ... professional athletes, Olympians, singers, movie stars ... when someone has reached the pinnacle of fame, publishers rush to make their biographies (often poorly written ones) available to children. But what happens when those once-shining stars fall from grace by virtue of their own misdeeds?

That's when adult publishing kicks into high gear and "tell-all" biographies of "the fallen" begin to appear, but in the children's department, there is a different story.

In the children's section of public libraries, biographies of the disgraced sit on the shelves, largely ignored by kids and parents, until at some point, they are discarded. Out-of-date, they no longer circulate and take up valuable shelf space. In school libraries, they're often quickly pulled from the shelves or quietly become "lost."

But children do not live in a vacuum. They know their favorite hero is not "lost." They know that something has happened. Perhaps they even have an idea (possibly even a wrong one) about what has happened. But we don't tell them, at least not in print.

I wonder if children's publishing is missing an opportunity here. Cautionary tales of rags to riches to rags might not be as uplifting as rags to riches and fame, but they are real stories and they are human stories and sometimes, they are stories that children should hear.


If you know of any good books that tell these stories of descent (and in some cases redemption) in a fashion appropriate for children, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.