The Shop Around the Corner
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2020
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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The 1998 romantic comedy You've Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan is about the brutal fight between an independent bookstore, The Shop Around the Corner, and Fox Books, an obvious Barnes & Noble stand-in. On this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the real life conflict that inspired the movie and displaced independent booksellers on the upper west side of Manhattan. This conflict illustrates how, for a brief time, Barnes & Noble was a symbol of predatory capitalism, only to be usurped by the uniting force at the heart of the film: the internet.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There are some movies that I'll always watch, no matter how many times I've seen them before, no matter if I come across them when they're already halfway over. |
| 0:13.5 | To be honest, most of these movies are romantic comedies, and one of them is You've Got Mail. |
| 0:20.9 | Don't you love New York in the fall? |
| 0:23.2 | Makes me want to buy school supplies. |
| 0:25.5 | I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. |
| 0:33.1 | On the other hand, this not knowing has its charms. |
| 0:37.3 | You've Got Mail was directed by Nora Ephron and is lovingly set on Manhattan's Upper West Side. |
| 0:42.1 | It stars Tom Hanks, who you just heard as Joe Fox, and Meg Ryan as Kathleen Kelly. |
| 0:47.9 | Professionally, Joe and Kathleen are enemies. |
| 0:50.7 | He's the brash owner of a powerful expanding a chain store called Fox Books, who is putting Kathleen's small, beloved children's bookstore, the shop around the corner out of business. |
| 1:01.7 | There's only one place to find a children's book in the neighborhood. |
| 1:04.9 | That will not always be the case. |
| 1:07.2 | And it was yours, and it is a charming little bookstore. |
| 1:13.2 | You probably sell, what, $350,000 worth of books in a year? How did you know that? I'm in the book business. I am in the book business. |
| 1:20.6 | Personally, though, they're falling in love by anonymously exchanging heartfelt emails on AOL. |
| 1:26.8 | Do you think we should meet? |
| 1:30.6 | Meet? Oh my God. |
| 1:34.2 | You Got Mail is based on a movie, also called The Shop Around the Corner, that came out in 1940. |
| 1:40.1 | That movie is itself based on a Hungarian play written in 1937. |
| 1:45.3 | But You've Got Mail, which came out in 1998, is decidedly a creation of the late 1990s. |
| 1:52.7 | The movie is set at a very specific moment in time when the internet was just starting to be widely available. |
| 1:58.6 | But it was not yet entirely clear the extent to which it would |
... |
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