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In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.

Love And Other Drugs

A number of years ago, slacker Jamie Reidy dropped out of the military to move back in with his father. Somewhere along the line he got a phone call from Pfizer - evidently they were interested in possibly hiring him as a drug rep. Reidy’s lackluster initial performance as a sales rep found him being promoted and relocated to California, where he continued to falter even after Pfizer’s introduction of the obscenely popular prescription drug Viagra. Reidy quit. Just as inexplicably as he had failed to sell the most popular drug on the planet, his sales had gone through the roof. Somehow, he had managed to quit while he was ahead without even being aware that he had.

Reidy shifted gears some time later and wrote a breezy biography of his life with Pfizer. Hard Sell had promptly become a hit. It wasn’t long before Hollywood was looking to bring it to the big screen. Released over Thanksgiving weekend by Fox, the resulting movie has failed to generate much in ticket sales. Even with big name stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, the film has been steamrolled by Tangled and the latest Harry Potter film. The question is: How does a book about an underachiever who makes it big compare with an underachieving film based on it?

The Book

Hard Sell is only 210 pages long, so it’s hardly a waste of time. In simple, conversational prose, Reidy relates some of the basics of his life as a drug rep for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Much like Viagra, the story of a pharmaceutical drug rep is interesting and novel enough that Reidy doesn’t have to do much to sell it to the reader. And at only 210 pages, it’s an exceedingly easy pill to swallow. But much like Viagra is likely to be for many of its users, the book itself isn’t all that memorable.

Reidy introduces himself quite respectably in the opening pages. He’s a military dropout who didn’t seem to have much going for him. A call from Pfizer was just what he needed to get his father off his back about not having any clear direction of any kind. He interviewed for the position and ended up getting hired through people who had also served in the military - evidently there was some kind of military in-crowd at Pfizer.

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