Five on Friday - The Top Film Industry Stories of the Week - August 2nd
A super duper deep dive
Happy Friday folks, we made it another week. In today’s Five On Friday, we have a super DEEP DIVE on a very exciting debut book auction and how the author utilized Tiktok to pre-build an audience + of course four of the other most timely stories.
My feelings on how time passed this week.
As always please make sure to check out updates on the tok!
Five on Friday
1. The Bidding War of The Unreleased Debut Novel ‘YESTERYEAR’ & The Built in Audience
The recap:
Amazon MGM Studios has won the competitive auction for Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear which just rounded out an 15 AUCTION BID with multiple publishing houses. Anne Hathaway is attached to star and produce. Sources in the publishing community said the film deal landed in the area of $450,000 against $2 million.
Yesteryear tells the story of a social media influencer who has made her career selling a tradwife fantasy lifestyle until she wakes one day to find herself seemingly in the past, where she might be forced to experience the brutal reality of the homespun, old-fashioned life she’s been promoting online.
My takeaways:
‘This is what dreammmms are made of’ as Hilary Duff would say but the reason this is my top story of the week is because the author - Caro Claire Burke ^ right up there ^ has been one of my favorite tiktok creators for the last year. Her videos have me sat and seated for sometimes over 9 minutes at a time. What is she talking about that’s so enthralling and consistently sending her into virality? Trad wives, of course.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the Ballerina Farms Times piece. Since it dropped roughly a week ago, it’s launched countless thinkpieces, Op-eds, and angry Tiktoks in either staunch defense of Hannah Neeleman, the face behind the homesteader lifestyle brand that is Ballerina Farms or in pure confusion at the entire insane but quite profitable facade.
About a year and a half ago, I discovered Ballerina Farms- an adorably tiny blonde running around with her eight helpful and handy kids, the stunning flower arrangements and bread baking videos. The videos were soothing and sweet, they had be wondering ‘why in god’s name I decided to go the corporate girlie, BOSS B route??’ I could do it, I could just live on a farm and take care of the chickens and kids… But upon realizing that cute country barn looking stove behind her in all her cooking videos is worth over $14,000… and that farming is anything but simple, cute and cheap… OH and that she is married to the heir of JetBlue…. I Immediately I fell down the rabbit hole of trying to piece together why this woman was cosplaying as…. well a poor, quaint homesteader.
I found Caro’s page quickly from there - where she dissects not only Ballerina Farms but the Trad Wife lifestyle at large, a trend which seems to be growing on social media.
She discusses the financial opportunities of marketing this lifestyle. Something only attainable truly for the 1% of the 1% of stay-at-home wives who have something the other 99.9% do not… a plethora of disposable income that allows them to market their “humble lives” through aesthetic pleasing 60 second commercials. Highlighting their love of baking homemade cupcakes, playing with the kids in the fields, feeding the horses and cooking meals from scratch. Of course, without paying note to interior designer they hired to make their home look simple but chic, aspirational yet attainable who ran them upwards of $200,000 per room design cost. No mention of the nannies, homeschool teachers and housekeepers running around in chaos behind the scenes to keep the children under control.