The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.
What's invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.
No race or civilization of people are just going to say, "Oh, instead of using real meat, let's just mash up a bunch of lymph nodes and put a bunch of weird stuff in it and pack it up in plastic cans and plastic bins, and let's eat that way. That'll be great. " People don't choose that.
I actually had a movie green lit at Disney the same week 'Burlesque' was green lit - a movie for Disney called 'Mash-Up', about a high school marching band.
I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W. G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
But lots of people do parody now. The whole mash-up thing that's so prevalent now was starting in the 80's when I was starting to think about this stuff. I certainly wasn't the first person to do it but now. . . comics mash-ups, all kinds of mash-ups are everywhere.
Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.
I think readers nowadays are happy to have genres blurred. We're seeing that on screen too: The Pirates of the Caribbean mashes up history and fantasy, Cowboys and Aliens mixes the Western and the Science Fiction genres.
Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans is the most valuable non-business book because it discusses how you have to draw upon everyone's creativity. America is a mash-up of cultures and traditions, and great businesses know how to tap the strengths of all their employees, whatever their background may be.
So I get all the references and I totally get the humor and it's really fun. This - it's kind of a mash up of so many different genres and things that kind of, sort of are just part of youth culture right now. Music and action and video games, and it's kind of amazing to see it all piled into one film.
