IV EW: "What were they smoking when they made the book trailer?"

[Doug Millison]

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2009/08/10/pynchon-thomas-inherent-vice-trailer/

Thomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice': What were they smoking when they  
made the book trailer?
by Thom Geier
Categories: Book Trailers, Fiction, Thomas Pynchon, thrillers
Last week, Penguin released a YouTube trailer for Inherent Vice,  
Thomas Pynchon’s new noirish mystery about a stoner P.I. in 1970s L.A.  
The result is, well, only groovyish. Low-budget without seeming cheap,  
the nearly three-minute clip presents a fun montage of actor-less  
scenes: well-shot images of driving along the Pacific coast in L.A.  
and the beach, with atmospheric close-ups of a red convertible, a  
black cat creeping along a low beach-side wall, etc. (That’s the  
general rule with book trailers: Unless you can tape a telegenic or  
media-savvy author on a camcorder, like another new Penguin trailer  
with Andrew Weil, it’s best not to hire actual actors.)

The only actor here is the voiceover artist, who seems to be  
channeling Jeff Bridges’ The Dude from The Big Lebowski, with all the  
gravel of a middle-aged pothead. Interestingly, it’s not the voice of  
Ron McLarty, the narrator of the audiobook version of Inherent Vice.  
Even more curious, it seems that none of the text of this trailer is  
from Pynchon’s book. I just scanned the first chapter and I can’t  
detect a single line that corresponds to Pynchon’s actual writing. And  
I’m not just talking about the cutish joke at the end about the  
narrator’s astonishment that the book costs $27.95 — “$27.95? That  
used to be, like, three weeks of groceries, man.” If you’re promoting  
a book by Thomas Pynchon, wouldn’t you want to put Pynchon’s words  
front and center — and not have some jacket-copy writer in the PR  
department summarize the book’s set-up in a voice that’s vaguely like  
Pynchon’s?