When I suggested Monday that Jim Gerard might follow up his first two books of 2007—a humor book about Rapture culture and a parody of The Secret—with “a quickie women-in-prison parody featuring thinly veiled versions of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie,” I was just using gut instincts to come up with a fast, easy punchline. So imagine my surprise when I ran into Gary Heidt of the Imprint Agency at a rooftop party last night, and he asked me, “Who told you Jim was working on a celebrity prison book?” Turns out roughly half a dozen publishers are already considering the proposal. After all the Oprah books I’ve managed to get wrong, and the way I was completely blindsided by that book from Diana’s butler, it’s good to get one right, even if I completely stumbled into it!
And, hey, maybe Gerard could get a film deal out of this; after all, Let’s Go to Prison, which just came out on DVD, turns out to have the 1994 Loompanics guidebook You Are Going to Prison buried under the storyline.