Hollywood & Spine Archive: The Un-Shagadelic Truth

This is a pretty funny and extremely unemployed Hollywood & Spine from the vault. I still see these excerpts from time to time - sometimes they're sent to me from people I know - and this is the kind of goofy cultural detritus reporting I wish it was more lucrative to do (because then I would be more gainfully employed!). (originally published 8/16/2020)

We need to talk about Austin.

Yesterday, a Twitter user started to go viral with a humorous screen cap of the novelization to Mike Myers' swingin' spy send-up Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. More than 10,000 accounts smashed that like button on the three-paragraph description of Austin getting a cart stuck in the corridor of Dr. Evil's lair. Paxton Holley, who hosts the great I Read Movies podcast on novelizations, shared it to his fans as well.

There's just one problem: it doesn't exist.

I hate to break it to lovers of book adaptations of movies and people who chuckle at the idea of Myers doing weird accents in multiple roles, but none of the three Austin Powers films were turned into paperbacks. There was a tie-in book for the first film, How to Be An International Man of Mystery, which is selling for an unbelievable $864.56 on Amazon - but that's as literary as the shagadelic secret agent ever got.

So what's going on here? That leads us to another classic Internet problem: the tweeter who gets to promote their Soundcloud as a result of the gag didn't even come up with the joke. That honor goes to Keaton Patti, a writer/comedian in New York who's been a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade touring company and contributed writing to The New Yorker, The Onion and others. (Keaton went viral himself in 2018 for "forc[ing] a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then ask[ing] it to write an Olive Garden commercial of its own.")

That same year, he amused his followers with no less than six excerpts of various Austin Powers novelization scenes. Though you might guess they weren't real the more you look at them, the cadence and mundanity of describing a scene in prose - especially ones laden with visual gags - is not too far removed from reality. (Remember how Doc Brown "spun around and fell backward" out of nowhere after his daring last-minute connection of the wires that sent Marty McFly Back to the Future in that unusual adaptation?)

I reached out to Keaton, who was blissfully unaware of the joke theft, and asked him about how this particular groovy sausage was made. "I can't recall exactly why I made the first one, but I have always found novelizations of movies as just a bizarre and funny concept," he said. "Who are they for? Someone who saw the movie and loved it so much they'd read the exact same story in the form of a book? Or are they for people who refuse to watch movies, but really want to see what this Ace Ventura guy is up to? Or are they literally for nobody and just a way to use up old paper that publishers have laying around?"

"Regardless," he continued, unaware of the resonance of his huge slam on novelizations out of nowhere, "I figured a novelization of a comedy, especially one with so many sight gags as Austin Powers that would be hard to put into words, would be funny."

"Keaton's nonplussed that people think he's quoting from a real book. "It just proves I might possibly be able to have a future career in the, I'm sure, extremely lucrative field of movie novelizations," he said, unwittingly drawing dozens of Hollywood & Spine readers into existential crisis by besmirching the pulpy subgenre's good name.

"I have not checked out [How to Be An International Man of Mystery]," Keaton concluded, "but hell, it has a 4.04 out of 5 on Goodreads (Lolita has a 3.89), so maybe we both have to?" Maybe, indeed - and if anyone wants to make an Austin Powers novelization a reality, just throw Keaton a frickin' bone.