Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1043753
D I E T L A N D | P E R S P E C T I V E 5 3 During the real world making of Dietland, between the fall of 2017 and spring of 2018 (including scouting for locations to drop bodies), seventeen major executives from the real world of publishing, politics, film, television, theater, the culinary arts and music fell from the sky in disgrace. Dietland was timely if not prescient to say the least. Dietland, based on the novel by Sarai Walker and directed by Marti Noxon, is the story of Plum Kettle (Joy Nash), a plus-size young woman who works as a ghostwriter for a razor-thin ruthless editor named Kitty Montgomery (Julianna Margulies) at a teen magazine called Daisy Chain. Replying to Dear Kitty letters is Plum's day job. Her raison d'être is saving money for gastric bypass surgery which she believes will allow her to begin life anew as her real self—Alicia Kettle. A stalker named Leeta, who introduces her to Calliope House—a healing place for abused and marginalized women, interrupts Plum's singular purpose. The pilot ends with Plum meeting Julia in the basement of Austen Media (Daisy Chain's parent company) in a room called the Beauty Closet. This cathedral-like warehouse of beauty products, Julia tells us, is there "to ensure that every face and every body working in Austen Media is perfect." In the Beauty Closet, we learn Julia has gone rogue on Austen Media calling it "part of the dissatisfaction industrial complex—a hugely profitable machine that gets us to pay them to tell us how broken we are." Julia, we discover later, is in fact, funding Jennifer—a feminist movement that has gone rogue on her and become violent. In the fictional world of Dietland, a feminist terror group by the name of "Jennifer" throws sexual predators from helicopters. A. BEAUTY CLOSET. SET PHOTO. ONE HUNDRED FLOATING DRAWERS WITH FROSTED PLEXI FRONTS HELPED CONCEAL UN- CLEARED PRODUCT AND ACT AS A LIGHT BOX WALL. ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE, BACKLIT LEANING V-SHAPED TRUSSES FINISHED AS SMOOTH CONCRETE EVOKED THE STRUCTURAL DARING OF THE ACTUAL AMERICAN COPPER BUILDINGS.