Love Between the Covers
A Documentary Film
Written, Produced & Directed by: Laurie Kahn
Blurb
Love stories are universal. Love stories are powerful. And so are the women who write them.
Love Between the Covers is the fascinating story of the vast, funny, and savvy female community that has built a powerhouse industry sharing love stories. Romance fiction is sold in 34 languages on six continents, and the genre grosses more than a billion dollars a year -- outselling mystery, sci-fi, and fantasy combined. Yet the millions of voracious women (and sometimes men) who read, write, and love romance novels have remained oddly invisible. Until now.
Love stories are universal. Love stories are powerful. And so are the women who write them.
Love Between the Covers is the fascinating story of the vast, funny, and savvy female community that has built a powerhouse industry sharing love stories. Romance fiction is sold in 34 languages on six continents, and the genre grosses more than a billion dollars a year -- outselling mystery, sci-fi, and fantasy combined. Yet the millions of voracious women (and sometimes men) who read, write, and love romance novels have remained oddly invisible. Until now.
For
three years, we follow the lives of five very diverse published romance authors
and one unpublished newbie as they build their businesses, find and lose loved
ones, cope with a tsunami of change in publishing, and earn a living doing what
they love—while empowering others to do the same. Romance authors have built a
fandom unlike all others, a global sisterhood where authors know their readers
personally and help them become writers themselves. During the three years
we’ve been shooting Love Between the
Covers, we have witnessed the biggest power shift that has taken place in
the publishing industry over the last 200 years. And it’s the romance authors
who are on the front lines, pioneering new ways to survive and build
communities in this rapidly changing environment.
Project History – Love Between the Covers
By Laurie Kahn, Director
Romance
is the behemoth of the publishing industry; it outsells mystery, sci-fi, and
fantasy combined. Yet no filmmaker has ever taken an honest look at the amazing
global community that romance writers and readers have built.
As a
documentary filmmaker, I want to bring the lives and work of compelling women
to the screen, because any industry dominated by women is typically dismissed
as trivial and “merely domestic.” My
previous films -- A Midwife’s Tale
and Tupperware! – are very different
from one another, but they were both shaped by my desire to look honestly at
communities of women who haven’t been taken seriously (but should be), who
deserve to be heard without being mocked.
I knew
very little about the romance community when I decided to make this film. But the further I got into this subject, the
more convinced I became that the romance community is not only an interesting
sisterhood including more than 100 million women around the globe, but also a
phenomenon to learn from.
No
filmmaker has ever had the access we’ve had. We have been allowed to film
behind-the-scenes strategy and editorial meetings at publishing houses; we’ve
been included in the private lives of our main characters; we’ve captured
public and private moments at conferences where thousands of romance readers
and romance writers are gathered; we’ve been invited to shoot on trips with
authors and their fans in South Carolina, Alaska, and Texas; we’ve been allowed
to film both high-end and low-budget romance cover shoots; and we’ve been
granted an unusually intimate interview with superstar Nora Roberts.
Love Between the Covers is one part of a larger
effort called the Popular Romance Project that I dreamt up five years ago. To pull off this huge project, I found
fabulous partners: The Library of Congress Center for the Book, the Roy
Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and the International Association
for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR).
They’ve all been a pleasure to work with!
The
Popular Romance Project explores the fascinating, often contradictory origins
and influences of popular romance as told in novels, films, comics, advice
books, songs, and internet fan fiction, taking a global perspective—while
looking back across time as far as the ancient Greeks.
In
addition to the film the Popular Romance Project includes:
●
PopularRomanceProject.org
– the interactive, content-rich website launched in 2011 by the Roy Rosenzweig
Center for History and New Media. The
site allows its users to see romance novels in a broad context across time and
place—with a huge archive of Love Between
the Covers interview excerpts, teaching resources, and blogs by romance
authors, scholars and industry insiders.
●
What Is Love?
Romance Fiction in the Digital Age – an international,
multimedia conference of scholars, writers, and readers, hosted by The Library
of Congress Center for the Book, funded by Harlequin and the Nora Roberts
Foundation. The conference took place on February 11, 2015 at the Library of
Congress -- open to the public and free.
It was an exciting, stimulating day for all who were there, and videos
of the panels will be available at the Library of Congress website.
Our
advisory board and colleagues at IASPR have been there to help us every step of
the way. IASPR’s current president, Pamela Regis, was the co-chair of the
conference at the Library of Congress.
Many
institutions and individuals have supported this project: the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Mass Humanities, the Nora Roberts Foundation,
Romance Writers of America, Amazon.com, Harlequin Enterprises, the Tavris Fund
at Brandeis University, our amazing supporters at Kickstarter, and those who’ve
donated through our website, lovebetweenthecovers.com.
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